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Gotta Love Coffee!

administrator — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 18:40:48 +0000

According to The National Coffee Association, 54% of American adults, roughly 150 million people, drink 3.3 cups of coffee every day. To whom do they owe a debt of gratitude for their daily drink?

Goats.

Coffee

As one legend goes, a Yemenite mystic saw a group of old goats of leaping with “exceptional vitality” after eating a particular berry. The mystic tried the berries and got to feeling frisky, too. In another tale called “Kaldi and The Dancing Goats”, an Arabian goatherd observes gamboling goats, tastes the food they’ve been eating, and starts frolicking, too. Kaldi tells some local monks about his discovery, they take the berries, cook them to create a stimulating brew, and mornings become a lot easier to deal with for everyone from then on.

Horned animals aside, physical evidence suggests that coffee plants were cultivated in Ethiopia as early as the 9th or 10th centuries, exported throughout Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, and later to India and Indonesia. The first known coffeehouse appeared in Constantinople in 1475, from where the concept spread across Europe and on to colonial America, where they eventually turned into the Starbucks across the street from you now. Or is it in your building’s lobby?

But of the billions of cups consumed worldwide each year, what makes one better than the other? Is it the coffee bean’s provenance? Harvesting practices? Processing? How it’s roasted? Brewed?

The answer is yes to all of the above says Steve Smith, Master Roaster at Fonté Coffee Roaster in Seattle, Washington. Steve blends and roasts coffee by hand to coax the best flavor out of each and every bean. It requires experience, skill and intuition, but not a degree.

What’s a Master Roaster? ”It’s not like a sommelier,” says Smith. “There’s no “Academy of Roasting.’ There are no certifiers. In the 90s there were a lot of people throwing money at coffee and at people who may or may not have had experience or interest in coffee. Some of these people called themselves ‘Master Roasters.’ Me? I’m just the ‘coffee guy.’”

Of course, that’s like saying Roger Federer is just the “tennis guy.” Smith is regarded as one of the most experienced roasters in coffee-crazed Seattle. He roasts and blends beans to order for clients including Wynn Resorts, Four Seasons Hotels, Los Angeles’ famous celebrity haunt Chateau Marmont, and top Seattle restaurant Crush.

Smith was one Starbuck’s first employees back in 1979, working with the original three owners. Wanting to pursue a more artisanal approach to roasting, he left in 1991 on the cusp of the coffee boom. A year later, businessman Paul Odom opened Fonté Coffee Roaster to create one-of-a-kind coffees and espressos, and Smith came onboard.

Odom saw a niche in the market, a lack of high-end coffees in the hospitality industry. “We wanted to continue the attention-to-detail and roasting techniques that were done best on a smaller scale,” Smith says. “Paul and I figured we could offer a range of high-quality coffees that would be consistent with the experiences that these hotels and restaurants offered to their customers.”

In other words, they would offer four-star coffee to four-star hotels and restaurants by creating distinct blends for each client. Two things made Fonté stand out: they shipped the coffee the same day it was roasted and their packaging had a special one-way valve to maintain freshness. By 1997 their wholesale reputation was strong enough to support a thriving online retail business for individual coffee-lovers, as well.

Smith is responsible for sourcing Fonté’s coffee beans by working with importers and visiting growing areas. He also holds “coffee cuppings,” similar to wine-tastings, and hand-roasts his blends in German-engineered Probat machines.

Smith says there’s no trick to roasting coffee, “but there are lots of interpretations. Coffee is a beautiful agricultural product that can express itself if done the proper way. One person’s dark roast is another person’s not dark enough.” He explains that “roasting is the process of creating variable atmospheres for the beans to enhance their flavor. You’re not enforcing your will on the bean. You put the coffee beans in a drum, you heat them up, and in doing so you’re creating the ideal conditions for a set of chemical reactions.”

Custom tastes are still being rediscovered in the US after the country industrialized coffee roasting during WWI to provide it for soldiers, ingraining a relatively bland brew in our culture. At the time, coffee production was mostly about price and convenience, and the brewing method of choice was the percolator coffee pot. Percolators expose coffee to higher temperatures than other brewing methods and re-circulate already brewed coffee through the grounds.

“A percolator is the worst way to make coffee,” Smith says. “I’d be hard-pressed to find a worse way to make coffee. As the water turns into coffee it goes through the coffee grounds again and again and again. It’s like saying, ‘Hi, I need my coffee ruined before I can enjoy it.’”

You get the impression that he’d rather drink Sanka.

But while most Americans were happy to buy coffee in a can, immigrants were bringing their own blends and brewing methods with them from across the sea. Italian espresso. Cuban coffee. Turkish coffee. French dark roasts. One thing they all have in common is that they were made on-demand. Starbucks was the first to take this concept and run with it.

Fonté’s roast-to-order strategy might not be the most efficient way to run a business, but it does let Smith create the best-quality coffees possible, and that’s the goal. But he’s not just roasting for luxury properties and coffee aficionados anymore. Fonté is taking its product to the streets, albeit on its own terms.

Its first retail space, Fonté Coffee Roaster and Wine Bar, opened this year in Seattle offering coffee, wine, a few beers on tap and food. The elegant, sleekly tranquil setting reflects the company’s reputation for high-end hospitality. If the part café, part wine-bar vibe works as it did for me, Odom and Smith may have found yet another niche in the market.

But is it just for coffee connoisseurs?

“No!” says Smith. “I look at it this way. I take my car to my mechanic for a tune up. He can’t believe I drive this thing. He says, ‘How can you drive this thing? Look at these struts, look at your spark plugs.’ I go inside and pour myself a cup of coffee from his carafe. I can’t believe he drinks this stuff. I go out and say, ‘How can you drink this stuff?’”

How To Pack for a Road Trip

administrator — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 18:39:38 +0000

Years ago I discovered an old-fashioned device that not only helps me pack up the car, but also makes adjustments and suggestions if I’m doing it wrong.

The device is known as my father-in-law.

Somewhere in your family or Facebook you’ve got a similar device. If you don’t know who it is, think about who gives you turn-by-turn directions whenever you fire up your grill, or try to bowl.

If you’d rather not know who it is because you prefer packing the car by yourself, that’s fine. But just in case, consider these road-tested tips on having a better-packed and more comfortable car.

Do it the night before.

Unless you’re renting a car the day of your trip, give serious thought to packing up the car the night before, especially if “you hope to make an early morning getaway a reality,” says Susan Foster, author of “Smart Packing for Today’s Traveler,” who figures she’s packed and unpacked more than 5,000 times over the last three decades. If you get that early start and happen to have young children, Foster and travel writer Beth Blair suggest loading the sleeping tots directly into the car, perhaps bringing the pillows from their beds to ease the transition.

Load in and out properly.

You know the big suitcase your family shares for plane rides? Leave it in the closet. It won’t be easy to pack around, repack, carry, or access, especially for any emergency wardrobe changes. Sturdy soft-sided bags are not only easier to load and unload, but letting your older kids pack their own bags will teach them travel skills and curtail their complaints about what you brought, Foster says.

Have everyone bring their stuff to a central gathering place so you can do a mental inventory and “decide where things should go in the car based on when during the trip they’ll be needed,” Foster says. The basic strategy for loading car cargo is “last in, first out,” she says, “so the things needed at the hotel for the first night should be packed last.”

And if everyone packed his or her own bag, that doesn’t mean you can’t shuffle and consolidate their clothing, especially if you want to limit the number of bags you carry into the hotel, says Blair. “When traveling [between hotels], everyone can have their own suitcase,” she says, “but insist on family members sharing suitcases to be brought to the hotel room packed with one-night necessities — pajamas, change of clothes, toiletries. That way you’re not hauling four or more suitcases in and out of the car every time and the room isn’t crammed with luggage.”

Pack differently for one-stop trips.

If your road trip involves staying at just one place like a vacation home, alter your packing strategy, “devoting a quick hour or so to shopping for what you need to set up house once you’re settled” rather than trying to bring it all, says mother of three Mary Fiore, noting that over the years she “spent way too much time obsessing over what to bring, to the extreme discomfort of the entire family. We packed so much stuff that there was no room for comfort in the car. An hour into the trip, no one was happy and everyone was uncomfortable and cramped.”

Speaking of comfort.

If you allowed your sleepy passengers to bring their favorite pillows, get in on the act, perhaps with a personal travel pillow. “The one I carry is down-filled and it can overcome otherwise uncomfortable motel beds,” says RoadTripAmerica.com publisher Mark Sedenquist, who has spent 35 years and nearly a half-million miles on the road in North America. Another item he prefers not to hit the road without is his folding chair, which “can be set up and taken down with one hand in about 10 seconds,” he says, noting that there’s “nothing like being comfortable and away from the car for either a planned event, like a concert, or while waiting for fuel pump to arrive.”

Sedenquist also likes to pack what he calls a rescue bear. “It may sound corny” he says, “ but a teddy bear or other comfort animal can provide needed solace in an emergency, especially — but not only —to kids. The rest of the time, the bear can be your road trip mascot.”

Check your weight.

While you won’t encounter an airline staffer itching to slap “Heavy” stickers on your bags, you should still be mindful of your car’s payload capacity, or gross vehicle weight rating (GVWR), which is the maximum combined weight of all cargo and passengers that the car is designed to carry. The GVWR is usually indicated on a sticker on the driver’s door. Planning to stow luggage on top of your vehicle? AAA says to limit that load to a maximum of 18” high and no more than 100 pounds.

Always, always have full bars.

A fully-charged cell phone is a given on any trip, but also bring plenty of backup. Pack all available power sources for your phone – a spare battery, an alkaline or lithium battery-powered charger if one’s available for your phone, a USB cell phone charger that can be plugged into your laptop’s USB port, and, above all, a cell phone charger adaptable for your car’s lighter socket.

Consider keeping your cell plugged into the car socket during all your driving time, advises Blair, “since cell phones are likely to be constantly searching for a connection as road trippers drive in and out of service and the battery is using more power.”

For additional peace of mind, consider carting along a hand-held CB radio, Sedenquist says. Aside from enabling you to communicate with fellow radio owners in an emergency, many CBs permit you to tune in weather reports from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), he says, best known for broadcasting advisories via its National Weather Service.

Pack these handy holders.

If you’re bringing an ice chest, Blair says to ensure it has “a working drain plug at the bottom to get rid of the melted water.” And almost nothing beats a laundry basket for versatility, she says, noting that it can be used for “beach toys and towels, transporting items between the car and hotel room, and of course, laundry.” She adds that the basket’s easy to pack, too. “Just place luggage inside the basket, or flip it upside down on top of the luggage.”

As receptacles go, there’s perhaps no item handier for traveling parents than disposable, gallon-sized zip-top bags, says mother of three Suzanne Rowan Kelleher, co-founder and editor-in-chief of family travel site WeJustGotBack.com. The bags “always come in handy for storing half-eaten fruit, almost-finished juice boxes, or anything else that’s messy or wet,” she says, adding “I know this is gross, but they also make excellent barf bags if your kids are prone to car-sickness, since they keep contents, including smells, hermetically sealed until you can find a place to pull over and throw it away.”

No matter how you pack, what you pack, or how much, there’s one more thing that should always be in your car, says Foster: a folding luggage cart. It’s a gift that keeps on giving when you get home, too.

Gotta Get a Bugatti

administrator — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 18:35:54 +0000

When you build one of the fastest, most expensive cars in the world, there are really only two things you can do to improve it: make it faster, or take the top off.

In the case of the 253 mph Bugatti Veyron 16.4, the latter was deemed the appropriate choice. At first blush, it seems like the path of most resistance to achieving a new round of buzz for the 4-year-old supercar.

Ever since pretenders to the production car top speed throne started showing up on the scene, like the SSC Ultimate

Bugatti

Aero and Koenigsegg CCXR , car enthusiasts have waited anxiously for Bugatti to put the upstarts back in line by adding a couple of horses to the Veyron’s stable of 1,001 hp. (For those of you who are unfamiliar with this vehicle, that is not a typo. But just so you’re sure, I’ll spell it out like on a check: One Thousand and One.)

Surely, a small boost in output couldn’t be that difficult to achieve?

No, it wouldn’t, but for Bugatti to do so in answer to a challenge would be uncouth, and explicit recognition that any other vehicle on the planet deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as the Veyron.

Consider for a moment what we are discussing: the Veyron has a 16-cylinder engine measuring 8 liters in displacement that is boosted by four turbochargers and directs its power through a twin-clutch 7-speed transmission to an all-wheel drive system. What Bugatti has created is nothing less than the ultimate expression of the pure, gasoline-fueled internal combustion era. Will there be faster, more complex vehicles created in the years to come? Certainly. But they will be hybridized and hydrogenated on some new technological plateau and, very likely, a few of them will carry the name Bugatti as well.

Click here for PHOTOS of the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport

In the meantime, we now have the Grand Sport, which is not so much a convertible as it is a targa top version of the Veyron. And when I say “we” I’m referring to the 150 members of our species who can afford a car that costs $2.1 million and have the inclination to buy one, because that is how many are being made.

Keep in mind this is far from one of the Sawzall jobs that the custom shop down the block from you performs on Camaros. Several calls were made from Bugatti’s headquarters in Molsheim, France, to the local carbon fiber supplier, and a large quantity of the material was engineered into the structure of the car to maintain the rigidity and safety lost by turning the ceiling into a gaping maw while keeping weight gain to a minimum, which is very important in a car that weighs nearly 4,400 pounds.

Fitted with a transparent removable roof, the Grand Sport is still as fast as the hardtop Veyron, but top speed drops to a more pedestrian 215 mph when it comes off. That is still enough to qualify it as the world’s fastest open-top car, at least for now.

The car’s active, kite-surfing-ready rear wing has been recalibrated to deploy at different angles corresponding to top-on and top-off motoring. Technically this isn’t much of a feat, but the aerodynamic modeling that went into calibrating it is mind-boggling, and evidence of a couple of very expensive trips back to the wind tunnel. The effort put into the conversion may seem like a lot for the purpose of letting Veyron owners see the sky and be seen by passersby, but there’s much more to it than that.

I recently took a Grand Sport on a painfully short drive on the country roads and highways surrounding Greenwich, Conn. It’s the kind of place that’s filled with people who can afford a Veyron, but where there are far too many speed limit signs with the number 25 printed on them to experience even a hint of its full potential.

I’d like to think that those who possess this car are met with the same types of limitations, but I know that I am wrong. Veyron owners live on a higher plane of existence. When they want to drive fast they don’t just rent racetrack time like other exotic car owners, they hire airport runways and purchase large parcels of land in the Middle East. Shackled by law and propriety to subsonic speeds, I was instead forced to appreciate the Veyron on a very different level.

Click here for VIDEO of the Grand Sport

After sliding into the spacious driver’s seat, the first thing you notice is the simple elegance of the interior. No over-the-top glitz on display here, just the finest materials known to man formed into oblong shapes complimenting the exterior. The leather alone is so precious that it comes from cows bred at high altitudes, where there are no mosquitoes to leave bite marks in the hides. Similarly, the aluminum trim is a custom alloy blend, also free of nibbles.

There is a stereo with an iPod connection, but no satellite radio, and the monitor for the backup camera is integrated into the rearview mirror along with the navigation system. To program it, you use a wireless PDA hidden in a compartment between the seats. No touch screen or unsightly knobs are found here.

Remarkably, the Veyron uses an old fashioned key to unlock all of this elemental goodness, rather than some high tech smart fob. To start it, there is a button located just behind the shifter for the automatic transmission. Press it and the engine comes to life, not with the kind of head-turning, frightened animal roar that we’ve come to expect from cars of this ilk, but more of a smooth purr that slinks its way into a crowd the way an out of costume Catwoman suddenly appears in the middle of one of Bruce Wayne’s dinner parties. “Oh, hello. I didn’t realize you were standing there, Ms. Kyle.”

Click here for an interview with Bugatti’s US Market Manager, John Hill

Cruising through town, the Grand Sport is as sedate as a power boat idling across a no wake zone, but much easier to helm. The power is entirely under control, the gearbox seamless, and the speed-sensitive steering as light as a feather, which is astonishing. Veyrons are the same length as a Ford Focus, but weigh nearly as much as a Ford Explorer. It is an immensely dense vehicle, the automotive equivalent of a chunk of neutron star. Behind the wheel, you’d never know it.

Trawling around town Grand Sport is a good neighbor, and not at all obnoxious like its Italian-sounding name would suggest. Bugatti is a French company, owned by Germans, and the Veyron knows when to keep to itself.

Thankfully, all roads eventually open up, traffic subsides, and the Grand Sport lives for these moments. Press on the accelerator and you are rewarded with a sound that many liken to a jet engine, but that is really more like a vacuum powered by one. There is no engine cover. Like you, the powerplant is exposed to the elements, and one of the air intakes is directly over your head, sucking in however much air is required to combust eight liters worth of atomized gasoline. This is the payoff for losing the roof.

Acceleration is beyond comprehension. Even on the soaking wet roads encountered on the day that I drove it, the Grand Sport’s tires didn’t spin a hair before hurling the car down the road. The trip to 60 miles per hour technically takes about two and a half seconds, but, when you floor it, you feel as though you’ve been instantly transported to that speed without having wasted any time going through 1 mph, 2 mph, 3 mph…

As far as handling goes, at sensible velocities, the word “dynamics” doesn’t even come into play. The Veyron brushes off curves and corners like an elephant being run into by a field mouse. The ride is understandably firm, but not punishing, and the car remains as flat as the dry lake bed you wish you were driving it on, regardless of what kind of twists it encounters.

But the Veyron’s most entertaining trick is the way the transmission kicks down when you’re cruising on the highway and put the pedal to the fine carpet. First, the engine winds up with an unearthly sound that hangs in the air for a long breath before anything happens, then the transmission drops into second gear and you enter a state of what feels like horizontal freefall.

Fuel economy, you ask? Ten miles per gallon combined, which ties the Lamborghini Murcielago at the bottom of the oil guzzling barrel. The Veyron is not exactly a model citizen in the arena of consumption, but the tires on the car cost $30,000 a set, so even if gasoline was priced at $20 a gallon, its owners wouldn’t be bothered at all.

The only bit of absurdity found on the car is the soft top, which you can characterize as either a design failure or an eccentricity, depending on where you stand on the Veyron. There is no room onboard to carry the removable roof. Instead it comes with what is essentially a rectangular, carbon fiber framed umbrella that clips into the opening, with a droopy fit that looks a little a tent at a Renaissance fair. When in use, you are advised not to drive over 100 mph. Having had the unfortunate need to try it out, all I can say is, it doesn’t leak.

Whether you despise the Veyron for its excess, or are intoxicated by its sheer audacity, one thing is for sure: a hundred years from now, when someone is telepathically ingesting the history of the 21st century during a trip to the local spaceport in their automated ion-engined hoverpod, more than a few paragraphs in the chapter on transportation will be dedicated to the Veyron.

Heck, if telepathically ingested history books have covers, the Grand Sport will probably be on it.

—————

2010 Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport

Base Price: $2,100,000

Type: Mid-engine, all-wheel-drive, 2-door roadster

Engine: 8.0L W16

Power 1,001 hp, 922 lb-ft torque

Transmission: 7-speed automatic

Fuel Economy: 8 city/14 highway

What do you think of the Grand Sport?