[oclug] [OT] Re: Coffee

[miden]

People spend too much time being afraid of their food. Hell, people
spend too much time being afraid of everything.

I worked as an illustrator in a hospital for eight or nine years and had
to illustrate a lot of terrible things. I came out of there with the
belief that you should just enjoy what you can while you can.

-m

On Sun, 2006-08-20 at 22:45 -0400, Fred Williams wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-20-08 at 15:37 -0400, Croombe F. Pensom wrote:
> 
> > Perhaps in may ways we lost the art of making good coffee when we
> > abandoned the percolator a few decades ago..... I'm only speculating
> > here.
> 
> 	My father always said it was after the war, (WWII), that coffee started
> to taste bad and he could never get a good cup of coffee since then.  He
> passed away in 1997.  Shortly thereafter I read that sometime around the
> end of WWII coffee companies started mass roasting coffee and this
> changed the flavour.  It was *about* this time also that they began
> changing the way coffee was grown.
> 	Originally there was a small coffee bush that grew in the shade of the
> jungle.  Large coffee plantations wanted more production per acre and
> hybridized the plant.  They started growing larger plants in the full
> sunshine which weakened the plant.  More fertilizers were needed to help
> the plant grow and pesticides to protect the weakened plants from
> predators.  Coffee is now the most heavily sprayed food crop in the
> world.
> 	Most fair trade coffee is also organic.  Switching to organic coffee
> can cut your intake of fertilizer and chemical residues in half if
> you're drinking about 4 cups a day.
> 	Most supermarket coffees are also made with a large percentage of
> Robusta beans.  They lack the flavour of the larger Arabica beans and
> while they can give off a good aroma when you open the tin, the flavour
> in the cup, once it is made usually fails to live up to the smell.
> 	Look for coffee that is organic and 100% Arabica beans and roasted in
> small batches by speciality roasters who know what they are doing.  Yes
> it may be better if one uses water just off the boil, but if you start
> with the right coffee and clean water, the brewing method is secondary,
> unless you do something unusual.  Just Us coffee, that I used to sell,
> is all these things and Fair Trade to boot.  Naturally, I liked the
> "Radical Blend" best.  
> 	Most of the "buzz" that people get from regular coffee comes from the
> chemicals added, and only part of it comes from the caffeine.  If you're
> filtering, use the unbleached filters, (the yellowish brown ones),
> because there will be less dioxins in the paper to get into what you're
> drinking.
> 	I've successfully de-caffeinated myself over the past few days, at
> least the fatigue and the headaches have stopped, and it may be some
> time before I go back to drinking coffee again.  In the long run I think
> it might be better for me.
> 
> -- 
> Regards,
> Fred Williams
> unclefred at fredwilliams.ca
>