Muffin batter en la ventana. I'm definitely not a baker, but there's something about blizzards that calls me to do a little baking. After a bit of partying last night, I suddenly found the urge for some kind of baked something or other. Maybe some biscuits? Or buttermilk rolls? Something hot and ready for butter to go with some bacon and eggs. Bust open my notes and oh, those need at least an hour or more to proof. Forget that. Hmmm, pancakes? Not really. Cinnamon rolls? Can't find the recipe. Croissants? Shah, right! How about something that is quick and easy and doesn't require serious commitment on my part? Muffin batter is pretty simple, and I've got some blueberries on hand. It's a simple recipe of: 8z AP flour, 4z sugar 2tsp baking powder, 1tsp salt 2 large eggs (2z) 8z milk 4z melted butter freshly grated lemon zest lots of blueberries Mix the dry and wet ingredients separately then whisk together until the dry ingredients have become wet. Add the zest and the blueberries, pour into molds and pop into a 350F oven for thirty minutes. Finished blueberry muffins cooling by la ventana. Since I was young and my aunt would bring me freshly baked blueberry muffins from Boston's Jordan Marsh, I was hooked. There's nothing like the zesty and tangy acidity of the blueberry matched with butter and sugar sweetness. Slather more butter on a hot blueberry muffin and it's heavenly. The key is to find really great blueberries that are fresh and in-season. Of course, in the midst of a blizzard in February, there's nary a fresh blueberry field to be found in Maryland and the "fresh" blueberries at Wegman's have probably been flown in from Western Africa or Ecuador. So much for local. Luckily, I've got a stash of local, seasonal blueberries from Reid Orchards that I IQF'd and vac bagged back in the summer at their peak of flavor. As I raided the box freezer, I was alarmed to find that my larder is running dangerously low - so much for winter blueberry muffins at the new Spro in Hampden. After resolving to process and preserve an incredible amount of produce this summer so we don't happen upon this predicament in 2011, I grab a bag of the blueberries, rip it open and go to town liberally spraying the unsuspecting batter with individually quick frozen blueberries. Into the oven they go and thirty minutes later, they're golden and blazingly hot. Drop them onto a cooling tray while I french press a pot of Barefoot Coffee's Amaro Gayo Ethiopia - a coffee that's loved by my staff for its rich and deep berry notes, and a perfect match to the muffins. After five minutes (okay, I can't wait any longer), the muffins are still hot and loaded with buttery goodness. And since I'm drinking coffee with a berry character to bolster the flavor experience, why not bolster that buttery-ness with a little more butter on top? So good! Maybe I'll venture out into the cold wilderness later.

We went for a weekend to Naples in Italy. Or Napoli as the locals call it. According to all the Italians in Naples this is where the best espressos can be found. Forget about Milan or Rome, Naples is the place to be for a caffe!

just done another audioboo I think worthy of its own blog posting Listen! We have a new premium espresso blend and a new espresso blend and a new Colombian (added yesterday) that I did an in my mug on (below).

Not much has changed on The Avenue since I left late Friday night. It's the middle of the Super Bowl Halftime Show and The Who are belting out old rock favorites to an audience of millions. The Indianapolis Colts are up by a couple of points over the New Orleans Saints and I'm out partying with friends and smoking cigars when Sarah calls. "What are you doing? Come down to the pub." Hang out with The Guys (sausage fest) or hang out with girls? I'm not stupid. Off into the blistering cold and to the pub I go! Unlike the county where I live and (sometimes) play, the city is still an absolute mess. I live in a pseudo-rural area of the county and our roads are cleared and passable. Much of Baltimore City is still covered in snow. Unbelievable. Is this really the First World? Major streets, like Charles, St. Paul and Maryland are covered in snow and barely plowed. Hell, they're barely passable, and if I didn't have 4Wheel drive, I'd be stuck. Twenty-four hours after the storm and four lane streets barely have one lane of plowed width. It's terrible. Everywhere I go, cars are buried. Sarah's car is buried at home, so she walked to the pub. Some cars are not only buried, but they're parked next to the curb and there's still eight feet of snow from the edge of where the plow has passed to the car itself. Those people aren't driving away anytime soon. Looks like Spro Hampden isn't opening anytime soon... Friends ask me to move to the city all the time and because of times like these, I can't figure out why. Trash is removed once a week, property taxes are sky high, the murder rate is amongst the most in America, and the snow removal absolutely sucks. I think I'll stay in the country house, thank you. After the pub, we swing by Hampden to see how much snow is still covering the streets. Some of my crew is scheduled to work tomorrow but there's still tons of snow and no signs of plowing. Looks like no work tomorrow for them. On the way home, we retrace my Friday night route. Falls Road is barely passable but suspiciously clears to plowed pavement once we pass Western High School into Roland Park. Hmmm, the traditionally blue collar neighborhood of Hampden is left snow-covered and barren, but the roads of Roland Park (enclave of the rich, fancy and connected) are plowed clean and clear? Kinda reminds me of New Orlean's Ninth Ward... GO SAINTS!

Every year Aida Batlle creates an extremely unusual and outstanding selection of the best peaberries from her three farms Kilimanjaro, Mauritania and Los Alpes. With a mix of Bourbon and Kenia grown across the farms, a peaberry selection processed by the washed method bodes for a exclusive profile of crisp fruits, sweet caramel and intense aromas. We only have three vac packs left of this coffee, and boy do we plan to enjoy it before it goes! Aida’s Grand Reserve is a legendary coffee, and we’re extremely honoured to be able to introduce this to the UK for the first time, especially due to the way we’ve come about roasting it. When Gwilym Davies won the WBC in 2009, Aida very generously wanted to give him this bag of Grand Reserve as a prize. Gwilym equally generously passed it on to us, as he doesn’t roast much from his cart on Whitecross Street! There is no way we could sell this coffee for any sort of profit, so we are passing on the love and good fortune that we’ve been shown and we’re giving all proceeds from the sale of this remarkable and delicious coffee towards the medical bills of our fellow friend Ricardo Espitia, the executive director of the Consejo in El Salvador, who suffered a stroke in January last year. I first met Ricardo almost six years ago, and it was his tireless efforts to promote his country’s lovely coffees that set El Salvador up to become my favourite origin. We were thrilled to have him come visit us at the roastery the summer before he fell ill, as we had just taken delivery of our seasonal El Salvadors for him to taste! Here with the lovely Lorena Pacas from El Borbollon. When I went to El Salvador for the Cup of Excellence last year it was good to see that Ricardo was doing better, but there is still a ways to go until we’ll have the pleasure of seeing him back at work, bringing coffees from El Salvador into the spotlight. We should be clear about this – when we say we’ll donate all proceeds we mean that for every £20 you spend on a bag, we’ll send £20. We’ll cover the cost of roasting, bagging, credit card fees and all the rest. We hope you will take this rare opportunity to not only try one of the most delightful coffees in the world, but to help us let the good will and grace continue to flow through the simple pleasure of a great cup of coffee. Anette

The internet is quite talkative at the moment. The coffee sliver of the internet anyway. Lots of talk about seasonality, which is a good thing. This does beg the question – how long is coffee good for? Green coffee I mean – we’re still arguing about roasted coffee’s shelf life and a great deal more time and money has been spent on that topic in the last 100 years. If anything, and we are getting into the realm of personal opinion here, green coffee is trickier because green coffees don’t age the same way. Each lot is an individual little time bomb. As much as we can look after it as well as we can in storage/in roasteries – we are still working with an individual fuse whose approximate length was determined before the coffee left the producing country. I hate it when people talk in general terms about the entire production of one country. However, in my experience, coffees from Kenya have held up a great deal longer than many Central American coffees. Regardless of packaging method, and stored in the same environment for the same amount of time. I know there is a lot of stuff out there on storing coffee (check Roast Magazine for some good articles), but let’s say this isn’t the main issue. You could argue that they have such pronounced un-coffee like coffee flavours that, while they fade, they continue to be easy to spot. This may be the case, but it is also the absence of baggy flavour which I find interesting. We should probably find a better word than baggy. Mostly because we can no longer blame jute as coffees that are vacpacked can end up tasting as “baggy” as coffees stored in jute. They may take a little longer to get there, but they get there. Cupping some very old pre-ship samples (that have likely never even seen jute in their lives) was a pretty definite moment for me. What I want to know, and this is probably a bit of a list, is the following: - Exactly what creates the jutey/baggy flavour? Is it the breakdown of something, oxidation, some other reaction? I went through Flament’s “Coffee Flavour Chemistry” and came up empty. I will keep looking! I am sure R.J.Clarke knows! - Is it linked to processing? Geoff Watts once told me a little theory he had, which I won’t repeat because a). I was a touch inebriated when he told me so I might get it wrong and b). It is his theory to tell, not mine and c). He may well have changed his mind. It was, however very much linked to the results of processing before being stored in parchment. Please Geoff, if you ever read this, correct me if I am wrong. I know I am being a bit general there. - Are we, as an industry, prepared to vary our window of seasonality depending on the coffee’s capacity for youthfulness? Is this even more confusing to the customer, upon whom we probably thrust a dizzying array of information? - If we can identify the length of fuse on a lot of coffee, should we store it differently? Is there one perfect storage environment for all coffees, or should we customise a bit more? Finally – how much of this stress would be saved if we could just move coffee from origin to roaster a bit quicker? That, however, is another discussion altogether. Related posts:Green Coffee – A Photographic Guide (Please let this page load completely before clicking a picture)... Independent branding of microlots – Aida Batlle and “Los Luchadores” I read as much as I can these days to... 5 Predictions for 2009 I suppose I consider my previous predictions (with your support)... Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin .

Ah, just like home - at home. After a long day of clearing 113 tons of snow, one works up an appetite. And what better way to cap off a day freezing in cold, blustery weather than with comfort food from the warm climes of Hawaii? Enter the Zippy's Chili. I've waxed poetic about the virtues of Zippy's Chili. It's Hawaiian-style chili, which means it bears little resemblance to the chilis of Cincinnati, Maryland or Texas. There's some beans and there's some ground beef, but eveything else is a bit of a puree. But over steamed rice and topped with shedded cheddar and chopped sweet onion, and a healthy dousing of Tabasco, and it's just like being back in Honolulu. For the authentic local experience, one really needs the red-skinned hot dogs from Redondo's but my favorite Sabretts pan fried in butter will do the trick. Smother in chili and oh, life is good.

After nearly killing myself last night after a night of intoxicating indulgence, I decided that I might as well break my back or encourage a heart attack by digging out from the blizzard that dropped 30 inches of snow on my house. Thirty inches. You just don't know what that's like until the snow is mid-thigh deep and higher than the car doors you're trying to open. Insanity. The shoveling begins. After a few quick texts with my JHU Genius, we determined that I had to clear roughly 99,000 gallons of snow from the approximately 6,000 square feet of driveway that were covered in 30 inches of snow. If we presume that one cubic foot equals fifteen pounds by weight, then I had to clear roughly 225,000 pounds or 113 tons of snow. Clearly, that's a lot of snow. Now, calculate that my snow shovel is 24 inches wide and 15 inches deep and I can maybe scoop one cubic foot (by weight) of snow per shovel load, which translates into 15,000 scoops of snow. Crap, that's a lot of shoveling. And too much shoveling for daddy... There's a Subaru in there. Somewhere. Luckily, I've got Tim, the golf pro turned winter snow guy. He's got a Chevy 2500 with a snowplow that's ready to clear the driveway lickety split. Turns out Tim started plowing clients driveways about the same time last night that I started heading home. By his count, he got stuck twelve times over the last sixteen hours. In order to clear a driveway of this size of the magnitude of this much snow, Tim needed to plow the drive four times over the course of the blizzard. Each pass costs me seventy-five dollars for a grand total of three hundred dollars. The Sonoma starts to emerge from its slumber. Three hundred dollars or 15,000 scoops of snow that I must shovel by hand? Which option would you choose? At that rate, each scoop would cost me two cents for that three hundred dollars - and how many days would it take me to scoop that much snow? Let's presume that each scoop of snow took four seconds to scoop and toss into a pile. At that rate, it would take me seventeen hours of shoveling to clear the driveway. And that's non-stop without lunch or dinner. Note to readers: when your vehicle is covered in snow, pull it out onto the county road before sweeping it clean. The government vehicles will then sweep the snow out of the way. Even at my old sound department rate of $45 per hour, that would be worth $750 of my time. Three hundred dollars is a bargain. Thanks Tim, and they're saying there's another snowstorm coming on Tuesday...

It's nearly 1 a.m. - sleep here or risk it? Smart people choose the former... When a massive blizzard and snow thunderstorm hits the city, most sensible people go home and stay home. Some people stick it out until the snow starts before going home. Smart people don't wait until nearly a foot has fallen before making their way home. Instead of being one of those smart people, I decided to hang out, chat and reign victorious at Wii Bowling. As the snow started to accumulate, I was getting beaten at Wii Table Tennis. When the snow was pouring hard and the lightning dancing across the sky, I was drinking too much. At ten o'clock, when the snow had reached about six inches, I was still engaged in lively debate and the much victorious round of Wii Bowling. By the time I started heading home, it was nearly 1 a.m. and there was about ten inches of snow on the ground. Should I go home or sleep at the shop? The weather people were predicting at least two feet of snow, my truck was parked on a snow emergency route and I would have to clear the driveway at home in the morning. No choice other than to drive home. A photo to prove that I was here - in case I didn't make it. I've driven in snow all my life. I'm rarely fazed by it. In fact, I want to get out there and drive in the snow. But tonight was bad. Some of the worst conditions I've ever experienced. The snow was so thick, I wondered if my Sonoma's undercarriage wasn't churning the snow beneath it. The snow tires threatened to lose traction every 100 meters. By the time I reached Cold Spring Lane, I thought this was a bad idea. Smart people would turn around and sleep in their shop. By the time I reached Northern Parkway, I could barely feel the road through the steering wheel. Take Falls Road all the way north, or risk getting on the 83 North freeway? Falls Road was relatively flat but being a narrow, two-lane road through the woods meant a greater chance of skidding off into a snow-covered gully and freezing to death in this Snowpocalypse. Might as well take the freeway. The ramp onto the freeway wasn't too bad, but the transition from the ramp to the freeway felt like a deathtrap. I was certain the truck was no longer riding on the freeway and merely gliding across the deep snow. The freeway itself was thick with snow and I tried to follow the tracks of the intrepid drivers before me. But something was amiss. Why were those headlights growing in my windshield? In a moment, a dark blue Hyundai drove past me to my left, heading south on the northbound fast lane. That was weird. Was there some sort of massive carnage ahead? Was Godzilla around the next turn ready to munch me and my Sonoma? On the southbound side of the freeway, a three vehicle accident occupied the highway. No traffic backup, just confusion. Pretty much my view the whole way home. I've often wondered exactly how people ended up skidding off the freeway. Tonight I nearly found out firsthand. With near zero visibility, one resorts to following the exposed tracks of the unknown vehicle who came before you. This set of tracks can actually meander across the width of the freeway, at times putting you into the emergency lane and dangerously close to the median strip. One false move onto the gravel median and wipeout. Time to freeze a frozen death. I nearly ran straight off the roadway at least four times on the ride home. I passed several vehicles abandoned or that had flown off the pavement and into the: a) concrete median, b) guard rail, or c) into a ditch. Luckily, I wasn't one of them. Smart people stay home in storm such as this one. Really smart people sleep at friends houses or their own shop. Foolish types hang out until the wee hours of the morning then attempt the treacherous road home - even though they know they should have headed home hours earlier so as not to risk their lives. But it was absolutely worth it.

Erm… *ouch!* Good luck with that!