[This blog series was created in the summer of 2008, after my brother gave me a steam-powered home espresso machine, the DeLonghi Caffe Parma BAR6, for my birthday. Since that time, my experiments with the espresso maker have been sporadic and with varying degrees of success. This blog series chronicles my experiments, failures, and successes as a home-kitchen-barista.]

The very purpose of this blog series was to chronicle my exploration and growth as a home-kitchen barista. I must, however, take this time to discuss coffee in the workplace--specifically my workplace.

I don't work in one of those big, cold offices filled with cubicles and ID badges. My company doesn't have a big kitchen with a Superior or Bunn coffee monster that brews two pots at once and has an internal water system. We have a small drip coffee maker used almost exclusively by two employees (myself and another). So our needs were relatively simple when we went shopping for a coffee maker two years ago. We needed a machine that would be able to brew 12 cups and keep them warm, in case we had clients in for a meeting. We also needed to buy a machine that had an attractive carafe, again for those client meetings. After doing some browsing on Amazon, the two of us chose a Cuisinart 12-cup thermal, programmable coffee maker.

At the time, the thing looked sweet. For one hundo dollars we assumed we were getting the top of the line. It had all these fancy TM'd features like a "Patented Brew Through & Pour Through Lid TM" and "Brew Pause TM." It promised to keep the coffee hot all day. It promised to make my mornings a little brighter. Its promises were about as trustworthy as "Columbian" beans from Maxwell House.

Allow me to break down each of the machine's features so that you can better understand how this expensive dripper actually operates:

1.) The Patented Brew Through & Pour Through Lid TM: This special lid offers up an airtight, labyrinthian journey for your piping hot coffee, ensuring that your joe will stay scalding hot and that any flavored coffee will linger in the lid for years to come. The lid features a screw top with a little white ball inside that will turn a dark brown after your first use and never be the same again. The coffee then travels around the lid for a while, getting in to all sorts of little cracks and crevasses, until finally meeting a second white ball before dripping into the carafe. There's no way to open the thing up, and there's certainly no way to ensure the thing is clean. Cuisinart!

2.) The Brew Pause TM: Because sometimes you don't want to wait until the coffee maker beeps, the Brew Pause TM method allows you to rip the heavy, steel carafe from the machine and pour yourself some coffee. The machine utilizes an advanced piece of technology to know when to stop dripping: a "spring." This "spring" expands when you take out the carafe. I don't know how they did it, but it's probably worth $100. Cuisinart!

3.) The Stainless Steel Carafe TM: This thermal coffee pot holds like 12 cups of coffee, and really does keep those cups warm all day long. Of course, if you let the coffee sit in there for more than thirty minutes, it congeals into an oily, bitter sludge perfect for keeping the breaks on your car from squeaking. Then there's the issue of actually cleaning the thing, which is next to impossible to do by hand because the opening to the carafe is about the size of a golf ball. In the office, your only option is to squirt in some dish washer soap, fill the thing with hot water, and swirl it around a bunch. If you're as lucky as I am, eventually the inner coating of the stainless steel will begin to flake off, producing lots of black specks in your coffee! I love metal in my coffee. Cuisinart!

4.) The Clock TM: You can set the clock on the coffee maker!

The Cuisinart 12-cup thermal coffee maker is a joke. Like so many other high-end coffee makers, you are paying more for the name and the look of the thing than the actual brewing method. Somehow, the Cuisinart manages to work worse than my parents' Proctor Silex machine at home, which cost $15. The lesson here being that coffee making should be kept simple: hot water, ground coffee, a filter, and something to put the liquid into (like a cup, or your hands). Adding fancy filtering systems and impenetrable carafes will just leave a bad taste in your mouth.

Needless to say, now that the Cuisinart is spewing enamel (or whatever it is that is flaking off the inside of the steel), we're replacing this piece of junk. I'm recommending we go with something under $20. Something with a sir name.

You can read my previous entries in the series here:
Volume 1: The Introduction
Volume 2: The First Run
Volume 3: The Blow-Up
Volume 4: The Failed Latte
Volume 5: Ready Set Joe

Posted by Mike Rubino at 3:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The city of Columbus, Ohio, is an oasis in a sea of wheat. I find the state of Ohio to be painfully flat and dull, dotted with famous cities that all happen to start with the letter C. Columbus just may be the nicest of those cities--although to be fair, I haven't been to Cincinnati, mainly because it's so difficult to spell. My family went to Columbus, along with ten thousand or so other hockey fans, to see the Pittsburgh Penguins play the Blue Jackets.

We rolled in to the city Friday afternoon and the streets were clean and empty. The boulevards of Columbus are wide, and on a simple grid system. I got the sense it was a leisurely sort of town; it didn't have the cold, stressful atmosphere of, say, Harrisburg. We spent most of our time in the Arena District, a part of town that's almost entirely owned by Nationwide Insurance. This side of town has the look and feel of a high-end shopping district--think Pittsburgh's South Side Works. It was as if city planners actually thought through the lay of the land.

Columbus was even better because it was swarming with Pittsburghers. At every intersection, we saw Pens fans marching around. Of course we were all wearing our various jerseys, including my mom, whose Ron Francis jersey got random cheers from passersby throughout the evening-- "Ronny Franchise!" As Pens fans passed each other, they exchanged a quick "Go Pens" and kept moving. The bars that surrounded the arena were packed with gold, black, and powder blue. We even saw two kids carrying around a homemade Stanley Cup.

That's not to say that the Blue Jackets fans didn't show up. Not only does this young hockey franchise have a devoted following, but it has a fairly friendly fan base as well. A lot of folks we talked to were former Pittsburgh residents who moved out to Columbus. It was a relaxed atmosphere, even with 19,000 people streaming into the arena. Before the game, Nationwide even had a little party tent set up outside with lots of free stuff (Blue Jacket blankets, cozies, cups, etc). I can't pass up free stuff.

This was all secondary, of course, to the task at hand: the Pens game. We had been planning this trip for a while, ever since we heard how many Pens fans turned out for last year's game against the Jackets. This year's attendance was made even greater because the Jackets' pre-season ticket code leaked online, allowing the Penguins blogs to spread the word.

I'd like to mention that the Blue Jackets have a cannon in their arena.

The team has a Civil War vibe going for it that's really cool, and they use it to great effect throughout the game; the best use of the theme is with the giant cannon they fire after every Jacket goal. They blast AC/DC's "For Those About to Rock" and fire a blank into the crowd. It's awesome. I was sort of glad the Jackets were able to score three goals on us just so I could witness this thing in action (it's okay, because we won.)

This was probably the most intense hockey game I've gone to. Sure the playoffs last year were incredible, as was the banner-raising game opener this year, but imagine two sets of fans, at about equal intensity, screaming for their respective teams at the same time. Chants for "Let's Go Jackets" and "Let's Go Pens" alternated almost the entire game. Things stayed friendly, at least in my section; when an overly-served Pens fan sitting in front of me lost his footing in a drunken exclamation, stepping on a Jackets fan's beer and falling on the woman in front of him, everyone was more concerned about the guy's well-being than about punching his lights out.

Even after the game, when the Pens came back in stunning fashion to tie it and then win in a shootout, Jackets fans were pleasant. The thousands of Pens fans marched around the arena, high-fiving one another, chanting and celebrating. An elderly couple, both wearing Blue Jackets jerseys, passed by me, and the man turned to his wife and exhaled, "Honey, we blew it." That just about made my night.

The Blue Jackets may have lost that game, but the city of Columbus came out big. The influx of thousands of Pens fans, all hungry and thirsty, surely made for quite a revenue bounce that evening. After the game, the streets, bars, and restaurants were packed with Pens fans of every ilk (even a dude wearing the bizarre "00" Zamboni jersey). It was a great evening for hockey, and it couldn't have happened to a more pleasant city.

Posted by Mike Rubino at 8:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)