Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow,
Piet Mondrian, 1930
interpreted with pearls
Tuesday, December 08, 2009
Tuesday, December 01, 2009
Before and After - Coffee Roasting
Before and After - Coffee Roasting
Taken with an Epson Perfection 4990 scanner.
cgfan writes:
The particular beans that you see here are from a batch of Josuma Select Malabar Gold, a blend of coffee beans specially formulated for espresso.
In the center are the so called "green beans" before they were roasted, and on the outside are some beans after I roasted them in my home coffee roaster (a Fresh Roast Plus).
For espresso I manually grind them to a slightly gritty but still fine powder in a manual burr grinder (a Zassenhaus). This gets loaded and hand-tamped into a double basket portafilter, conventionally used to dose for a double shot, and inserted into either the La Cara or La Pavoni manual piston espresso machines. Both of these machines involve the user by having him push down on a lever to force the hot water through the tightly compacted espresso grounds.
The shot then gets pulled under great pressure into a pre-heated tazzina (a small espresso cup - I use a 68 cc feldspathic porcelain tazzina made by IPA Porcellane in Italy, pattern Bologna), for a total draw of around 1.25-1.5 ounces (2.5-3 tablespoons).
Such a very short shot is called a ristretto, which when made correctly has to be the purest form that one can enjoy an espresso - a wonderful concentration of coffee flavor with plenty of mouthfeel and a pleasant bitterness.
...and once in a blue moon when everything is right it produces the proverbial "god shot", which is actually creamy in taste. (And yes, this is all without using any milk! :-) )
This shows a workflow using a doserless Mazzer Super Jolly, Expobar Brewtus I, and a canning funnel to produce a Latte using 100% of the pre-dosed beans.
This shows a workflow using a doserless Mazzer Super Jolly, Expobar Brewtus I, and a (very handy) grain funnel to produce a 0.7 oz. ristretto and a 5 oz. Rosetta Latte.
More info:
Mazzer mod
Grain funnel usage
Brewtus
Gene Cafe roaster
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Friday, September 04, 2009
Cinema Ticket Collage
These are all old style cinema ticket, before they all migrated to the computerised tickets that have the movies titles printed on them. They're mostly from movie theatres in NYC, some that are no longer in existence.
Thursday, July 02, 2009
Monday, June 22, 2009
HP Scanjet G3110 Flatbed Photo Scanner
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Thunderbird totem pole
I love this Canadian style Thunderbird Totem Pole because I made one quite similar when I was a small boy and painted it.