A guide to making coffee at home

I’ve written a few posts on finding good cafes (here, here and here). But sometimes it’s nice to have a coffee at home. Either that or it’s Sunday in Hobart and most of the shops are closed. So here’s some of my tips for having a nice cuppa at home.

1. Get fresh coffee – if you’re not currently using fresh coffee, this will see the greatest improvement to your home enjoyment. None of the other tips here will help if you don’t use fresh coffee. To clarify, you want coffee that was roasted no more than about 30 days ago. You can’t find this at the supermarket. Fresh coffee can be bought from a local roaster, or some cafes. Alternatively, you could roast your own coffee (but you’re probably not that hardcore).
2. Buy a grinder – if you don’t already own one, buy one. Ground coffee is stale about ten minutes after grinding. If you buy freshly roasted coffee but then get the shop to grind if for you you’re missing out. Oh, and don’t use a spice grinder or something with blades – I recommend this grinder if you don’t want to spend a fortune. It’s not a bad idea to spend more on a grinder than an espresso machine.
3. Store your coffee in something air tight – doesn’t really matter whether it’s a fancy one-way valve bag, a tuperware container or just a zip-lock bag, just keep the air out. This will prolong the life of your coffee. Sometimes I forget to take my coffee out of the grinder hopper – it’s not air tight in there.
4. Don’t use boiling water – this rule can be applied to most methods of making coffee. You want to use water roughly in the range of 85-95 degrees celsius. If you’re making plunger, let the kettle cool for a few minutes before using. If you’re making espresso, you probably need to flush your group head to cool the water (i.e. just run a bit of water out before brewing). Percolators just suck because they require the water to boil before it reaches the coffee.
5. Timing – for espresso you’re aiming for about 50-60mL of coffee in about 25-35 seconds (this is for a double shot; for a single shot you want half the volume in the same amount of time). It doesn’t matter whether you’re making an espresso, cappuccino or flat white, you still only want this much coffee. I know, it doesn’t look like much, but just trust me on this one. If your coffee is coming out faster, try grinding the coffee finer or putting more coffee in. There’s much more room for error with plunger or syphon; try starting with a brew time of around 2-3 minutes and experiment from there to see what you like.
6. Get fresh coffee – just to reinforce my earlier point. If you don’t know when it was roasted, it’s probably not worth the risk.

I don’t understand love

I was watching a show on ABC2 the other day called Being Erica. There came a moment in the show when Erica’s boyfriend of three months confessed that he was “in love” with Erica. This then created some awkward moment where Erica failed to respond with the commonly accepted response of “I love you too”. In a subsequent conversation with a friend she discussed how “crazy” it was that this guy was in love with her. In fact, Erica’s friend said, “Who falls in love after 3 months?”

Scenes like this seem quite common in American sitcoms/dramas/romances/trashy TV. One person in a relationship says “I love you” and the other person doesn’t know how to respond because they aren’t sure if they love them back. Now we’re not talking about people who have been going on occasional dates here, but people involved in exclusive sexual relationships.

I don’t get it. I thought it was normal to love someone by the time you’re in an exclusive sexual relationship (I don’t just mean in Christian-land). Heck, three months seems like a pretty good timeframe to start making your mind up about that sort of thing. So I think I’m missing something. Maybe “love” in this context must mean something more. Does “I love you” equate to “I want to marry you”? Is “love” used in a different way in the States to Aus? Or am I the only person who finds this strange?

Enlighten me oh wise ones.

Common Coffeegeek Misconceptions

I wear the label of coffeegeek fairly happily. But us geeks are a misunderstood bunch.

1. You must drink a lot of coffee. No, not really. Sometimes I don’t drink any coffee for a few days. I probably average about 1 cup a day at the most. This is because coffeegeeks are also coffeesnobs; we think most of the world’s coffee sucks. Good coffee just aint readily available, so we can’t drink that much.
2. Adding flavoured syrup to coffee is nice. No, it’s not. You don’t need some sugary syrup to give coffee flavour. If a coffee tastes like chocolate it’s because of the way it was grown, harvested and roasted (and probably a bunch of other stuff I don’t understand). Fresh coffee has flavour and it’s inherent in the bean.
3. I want coffee related presents for my birthday. No, I don’t. I’m really sorry if you’re one of the people who’s given me coffee stuff for my birthday, but I probably only pretended to like it*. It’s just that I’m really picky with that sort of stuff.
4. Tea is the enemy. No, tea is quite nice sometimes. Tea can even be a good alternative to coffee, especially when the coffee on offer is average.
5. Espresso is king, plunger sucks. No, they’re just different. Coffeegeeks enjoy coffee prepared a variety of ways.  Sometimes a coffee that tastes really nice in a plunger just doesn’t work as espresso.

*I have received a couple of good coffee DVDs for my birthday. I think my wife bought me both of them.

I’m going to run 10km (I think)

I decided today that I am going to enter this “fun run”. I also decided I should post this on my blog otherwise I would change my mind.

Who else wants to join me? C’mon ya lazy bastards.

I wrote a letter to the Editor

I wrote the following letter to the editor of the Mercury just over a week ago.

Dear Editor,

Regarding your story “’Sexing up’ our tweens” (online Tuesday 6 October, http://www.themercury.com.au/article/2009/10/06/101725_todays-news.html).

I am interested by the paragraph that states: “Experts said that by age six girls want branded clothes, at seven they want styled hair, by eight they diet, and by their early teens girls engage in sex or “sexting” — explicit text messages on mobile phones.”

It is not clear in the article who these “experts” are. Are you able to provide some further information to substantiate your claims? Can you please advise who these claims have been made by and on what research they are based?

As your own David Killick suggests, it is problematic to base claims on “anecdotal” and “preliminary” evidence (“Damn lies and enrolments”, 7 October 2009, http://www.themercury.com.au/article/2009/10/07/101955_opinion.html).

I eagerly await your response.

Regards,

Matt Bowditch

They haven’t written back to me yet. The story appears to have been run in most major News Ltd papers with exactly the same wording.

To clarify, my gripe is around the use of the phrase “experts say” without further support. After conducting some research, the expert appears to be Maggie Hamilton. Although she is mentioned towards the end of the article, there is nothing attributing the statement to her.

Experts say that News Ltd has used the phrase “experts say” in an unsubstantiated manner in excess of 1000 times this year.

The House of Mirrors

Anyone browsing the internet for properties to rent or buy lately might have noticed a new trend emerging. It seems that real estate agents seem less satisfied with the real, and feel the need to bend and warp their photos slightly to make the places look bigger/more attractive in some way. A friend of mine in the real estate business tells me it’s just the lenses they use; but I don’t care how you achieve it, it’s still a misrepresentation of the house.

Here’s some fine examples:

First of all, the good people of Petrusma. Like most things they do, they do it well. Sure the photos look a little odd, but at least they do help to make the place look bigger. Compare these two photos of the same lounge room and note how the heater changes shape:

Here’s another photo from the same place, but of the bathroom this time. Long bath, tiny taps.

Next, Charlotte Peterswald. Similar results to above, but some things look slightly more odd. Here’s a really long TV and couch:

Bathroom from the same place. I challenge someone to explain the shape of the shower curtain rail.

Finally my favourite: Raine and Horne Kingston. Here’s a new listing from them:

Just in case you were wondering, this isn’t a one off for Raine and Horne. Check out this one.

Apparently the ACCC has also noticed this trend.

Today’s top search is…

… ‘what happens if I punch a cop’. Okay, it wasn’t the top search, but someone searched for this and came to my blog.

The best book I’ve never read

I think it’s fair to say that I don’t read heaps of books (although perhaps more than my brother). If you asked me why, I’d tell you that I’m too often disappointed by how rubbish books usually are, despite the hours of effort I’ve put into reading them. However, in reality I’m just too damn lazy, and watching televsion is so much less effort anyway.

Despite this, I sometimes still get really excited by a book. At the moment, I can’t wait to read Donald Miller’s soon to be released A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. You should go read the first 30 pages here. Don’t be a lazy bastard, read it. Go on. Do it.

Lessons in Etiquette from the Hyatt Toilets

I’ve just returned from a weekend in Canberra staying at the fairly plush (by my standards) Hyatt hotel. This is probably this most ‘upmarket’ place I’ve ever stayed, and it taught me some important lessons about how one should conduct themselves.

Lesson 1: One should not laugh at hotel staff’s uniforms. Upon arrival we were greeted by two young men who looked ready to tee off at St Andrews in the 1820s. They wore pinstripe pants tucked into their socks around their knees, a patterned woollen vest, and topped it all off with a hat that matched their pants.

(not an actual Hyatt staff member, but I wasn’t brave enough to ask for a photo).

Lesson 2: One is permitted to speak on the telephone whilst relieving oneself. I have always found it awkward to hear a toilet flush at the other end of the line. However, it appears my reservations are misplaced. Constipated? Need to teleconference? No worries, the Hyatt has you covered.

Lesson 3: One is not required to clean after themselves. Whilst this might initially seem obvious (there are cleaning staff after all), I did not realise how far this principle went. Refer to photo above and note the lack of toilet brush.

Lesson 4: One should only touch the mini-bar if one has a very large credit limit. Five dollars for two Tim Tams. That’s two biscuits kids, not two packets.

Here endeth the lesson.

I wanted to punch a cop today. But I didn’t.

They have recently installed one of those fancy flashing speed signs in the school zone just down the hill from my place. I think these are great, because now I can drive through a school zone with my concentration on the road instead of trying to remember what times I’m supposed to go slow and whether today is a school day or not. It means you really have no excuse for speeding in a school zone now.

Or do you? I would like to propose the following exception. It requires a certain level of understanding of Churchill Avenue near Wiamea School, so I’ve drawn a diagram to assist (with a little bit of help from Google Maps). The areas inside the red squares are the 40 zone (when the sign is flashing). If you are travelling towards the University, you exit the 40kmph zone into a 50kmph (shown in green). If entering the 40kmph zone and travelling from the University, you enter from a 60kmph zone (shown in blue).

This itself is absurd. There is a stretch of some 250 meters where the speed limit is different depending on which direction you are travelling (obviously you are far more likely to hit kids travelling North). But as my diagram indicates, there was another absurdity present as I walked to work this morning. At exactly 8.30am (when the flashing sign turns on) a police officer was standing in the the 50/60kmph zone, pointing his speed gun into the 40kmph zone. I wanted to punch him. There he was, trying to catch people who were in the last 5 meters of a school zone, that may not have even been a school zone when they first entered.

Poor bastard was only doing his job I guess.