This weekend turned out to be more than one could have hoped for. I scored a new, single-wall ultralight tent at a local store's sale, then headed out to the NC/TN border for some Appalaichan Trail fun!

What blew me away was the delicacy of the alpine-esque tundra, complete with grassy fields at 6000+ feet, midget pines and meadow flowers.

Tundra


Meadow flowers


These mountains are wonderful, and the AT is reasonably gentle throughout this stretch, at least to a hiker used to the ADK trails. The rhododendron gardens near Roan High Bluff are supposed to be in full bloom at the end of June; and judging from the amount of rhododendron thickets I saw, it should be mindblowing! I'm planning the return trip as I type...

The full photo album is on my Yahoo photo page

Smack Down! kicked some serious you know what

Well, tonight my volleyball team, Smack Down! kicked some serious ASS, so celebration was in order. Three games out, all solid winners. All of us just gelled, and beautiful bump-set-spikes ensued. Afterwards we toasted the town and I enjoyed many an Old Speckled Hen at the local pub; and polished off the evening with a well deserved Macanudo.

Cheers, huzzah!!!

Caffe Fresco roasting wizardry

The Daterra rant, it turns out, had less to do with the actual origin than the man behind the wheel so to speak. It also turns out that this particular batch is not 28 days out of roast; but 34! Amazing yet true.

Caffe Fresco roaster Tony Sciandra describes his roasting technique as encasing each and every bean with a sugar-brown enamel. What this apparently boils down to is roast batches that are essentially unusable for 6 days of degassing, as opposed to the normal 2-3 days. The upshot to this, obviously, is that the usable duration of the average bag exceeds most everything else. I think Tony should be knicknamed "magic fingers" because he's doing something to coffee beans that is heretofore known as impossible by my account.

Aging Daterra pulling too well?

Tonight's espresso was from "old stock" Caffe Fresco Daterra Reserve that I had on hand, unfortunate or so I thought, since I had just run out of Counter Culture Toscano. I jumped on the Caffe Fresco bandwagon a month ago, mainly to try out the famed Ambrosia blend (suh-wheet) and got a bag of Daterra as well because I had heard good things.

Normally I would shy away from using month old beans and wait for a new delivery, but founder Tony Sciandra has this roasting technique that prolongs the lifespan of a roasted coffee bean, to quote Tony:

"My slow, gentle roast style yields a bean with most of its outer cell structure intact and incased with a sugar-brown enamel. You'll see. The beans are dark in color and dry. I feel the prime flavor window is between days 6 through 10 after roast. Some customers like it all the way out to day 14. I even have had customers tell me that an unopened bag was good out to 20 days after roast."

True enough, and I'm here to tell you that 28 days out of roast works in a pinch. Certainly the blend has lost some of its subtleties, yet when I pulled it as a ristretto I still found it to be luscious and chocolatey, with hints of dried fruit that were suprising (I couldn't peg the flavor) and a bright candy-sweet finish on the last sips.

Bravo Tony.