Dec 20 - like a fine wine

How do you compare:

-- a fine wine to two-buck-chuck ? we usually drink something in the middle
-- a twinkie to French cuisine ? on this we score near the top
-- cheese whiz to high-end cheese ? we're in the middle ... occasionally taste good (like when Jason brings some up !)
-- Highliner fish sticks to freshly caught ? we're middle to high
-- Tim Horton's coffee to ... well, we now know what the upper end of coffee is ... self-roasted beans.

Wow. All along I thought that we were drinking good coffee with our self-designed blend of beans from Timothy's. When fresh, our blend of French Roast with La Vereda (a medium Columbian roast) is good coffee. Until last night, I had never had really-really-really freshly roasted beans, freshly ground ... I had never had wonderful coffee. I have had good espresso ... and now I'm looking forward to doing an espresso roast and brewing wonderful espresso.

What an experience. It's easy to do, with the proper machine. It's no more expensive -- ok, it's more expensive in the short term but will pay for itself in one year ... after that it actually gets cheaper. Like anything else though, it takes time to do things right. Not much -- 20 minutes to roast, 10 to cool down, a few more minutes to get to room temperature, grind the beans, brew the coffee ...

We roasted one scoop-full of green beans, using the scoop that comes with the machine. As they roast, the swell and lose moisture so the 3.5 oz of green beans represents under three oz of roasted beans. I forget the exact ratio. The maximum that you can put in the machine is 10 oz of green beans, which probably produces about 1/2 pound of roasted beans.

There are many variables to roasting. First, of course, there is the origin of the beans. Last night we tried Sumatra. We bought several different beans at The Green Beanery so we'll be doing some experimenting. Then there is the temperature and time of roasting. Higher and longer means darker roasts. Online I've seen recipes that called for a period at one temperature and a period at another temperature. It's a tended process when you start doing that sort of thing. It's a same-room process anyway because of the small chance of the chaff starting to burn ... according to the user manual. I do find it hard to believe that anything would catch on fire.

Was my coffee this morning, made with the roasted & ground beans from last night as good as that prepared last night ? It probably was, but it's lost the wow-factor.

What else from yesterday ? I caught a small pike, still a keeper but not a full meal. It's of a size that if I were catching more I'd have thrown back. I'm hopeful that the big ones will start biting soon. It stayed cold all day so we did not venture out much although I did go into town and pick up milk and ripe bananas for banana bread.

I spent a chunk of yesterday setting up shelves in the games room and unpacking the final boxes of books, rearranging furniture in that room etc. I now only have three large boxes left from our move -- all CD's. That's pretty good, considering.

Today we're supposed to get more snow. It's already warming up as the front moves towards us -- at last check we were close to 0F -- it shows you where we've come from when 0F is "warming up". I have not decided yet whether I'll go to Sudbury or Britt ... I'll have to decide soon. The mucky weather is coming from the south but either way I'll hit snow.