Nall on Starbucks

This sums up Starbucks for me:

Once upon a time America drank coffee. And America was strong. An America that drinks tall skinny soy lattes — one just a tad cooler than the other — is an America that is, dare I say, French.

A note to proprietors of restaurants

If you serve coffee at your restaurant and you cannot guarantee that the waitress will be by once a minute or so, simply give me an entire pot of coffee and some mechanism to keep it warm.

Your well-tipped waitress will thank you.

Busy days

No time for coffee or other blogging.

The Daily Grind

• 61 years of coffee and the Packers: a fun article on an old coffee club in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
• A guy named Winter ("My name is Winter. Only Winter.") has made it his personal mission in life to visit every Starbuck's franchise. (Hey UPI - you mispelled "programmer" in the 4th paragraph.)
• Cartoonist Jef Mallett is such a fan of The Water Street Coffee Joint in Kalamazoo, Michigan, that he put the place in his comic strip.
• Consider the sounds of Indian coffee shops.
• Coffee and crime: a coffee shop in downtown Nashville, Tennessee, sells more than coffee.
• A coffee-fueled meeting with local politicians at the Catawba County library in Newton, North Carolina. Note the use of the word "coffee" to suggest a sort of heart-to-heart talk. Newton is just a few counties away from our 2002 vacation site, Tsali campground in the Nantahala National Forest.
• Another coffee-fueled meeting with policians in North Carolina.
• "Coffee" as a bare synonym for "meeting" in the Redding, Connecticut, Pilot.
• Someone needs to send Sreekumar Raghavan a copy of Strunk & White:

It is black like the devil, hot like hell, and sweet like a kiss, and it is spreading its aroma cross the world now. The finest organic suspension ever devised in the world COFFEE is steadily conquering the taste buds of millions of people irrespective of caste creed or colour. The case in India is not different. The concoction made from the coffee beans is minting money for several coffee bar chains in India.

A note to newspapers with websites: somewhere on your website, please indicate where the heck you're located.

The Daily Grind

• Here and there:
  • Oh dang - sugar cookies dipped in coffee syrup.
  • Blood for coffee: you can buy a pound of coffee for a pint of blood in Lancaster, Massachusetts, next Tuesday. The coffee is provided by Dunkin' Donuts.
  • Mary Jacobs, a freelance writer in Dallas, Texas, is tempted to give up caffeine after hearing some anti-coffee claptrap from Laura Juliano, assistant professor in American University's Department of Psychology. She also relates her near-caffeineless experience at a Puritan spa.
  • Dr Manoranjan Misra of the University of Nevada at Reno is working on making biodiesel fuel from coffee grounds.
• Coffee business:
  • Independent coffee at Perked Up! in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
  • The Coffee N Cream coffee house in McKinney, Texas is sending 60 pounds of coffee beans to an American Army unit stationed in Iraq.
  • Ebenezer's Coffee House, run by the National Community Church in Washington DC, estimates they served up 106,000 cups of coffee since they opened in March 2006.
• Coffee economics:
  • Coffee prices are up.

The Daily Grind VII

• San Francisco roaster John Weaver tells an amusing story to explain why he drinks it black.
• Conchitta Basse, a blind girl from the New Guinea island of Manam, graduated 8th grade from Faniufa Sacred Heart school in 2005 and went to work as a coffee taster (a "cupper") at Monpi Coffee Exports.
• I suspect the "good cup of coffee" at Brunswick Community College's lifelong learning coffee forum will be the usual scorched and oily fare.
• Memo to Thailand: cut back on the coffee-break sweets.
• Cartoonist Dave Kellett has high praise for the Blue Butterfly Coffee Company in El Segundo, California. I imagine the store is named after the endangered El Segundo Blue Butterfly, Euphilotes battoides allyni, whose three colonies are at the Los Angeles airport, the Chevron El Segundo oil refinery, a few square yards on a local beach. There's a hard-luck story.
• Nicaraguan coffee exports are way up. Here's an overview of Nicaragua's leading agricultural export from Kenneth Davids and a cupper-level look at it from coffee experts Sweet Maria's.

The Daily Grind VI

• A coffee press/cup combination has restored Esther Sung's morning quaff.
• Coffee With a Cop is popular in West Fargo, North Dakota, but where are the cops? This month's guest speaker is Daryl Ritchison, weather blogger & teevee meteorologist.
• When in Bangalore, think twice about doing as the Bangaloreans do. Coffee powder? Someone else is skeptical, too (why is "Madikeri" a downmarket name in India?).
• I'm not quite sure what's going on here; is this written in some obscure Liverpudlian dialect? Something involving Paul McCartney, Starbucks and a Liverpool tourist attraction, The Beatles Story. Is the Starbucks going on the roof of the building?
• Here's a bit about McDonalds' coffee plans from an interview with Don Thompson, president of McDonald's. Not much detail; basically "Americans like their fancy coffee so we'll sell it to them. And maybe a southern-style chicken sandwich to go with it."
• Ukrainians like fancy coffee, too. Here's Alexandra Matoshko's elegantly-written feature in the English-language Kiev Post about a new Gloria Jean's franchise in Kiev. Or "Kyiv" as the kids say nowadays.
• Jungle Mom digs up some history: how coffee received the official papal seal of approval from Pope Clement VIII.
• It's hard to resist the allure of Marketing Engrish. Let me inform of the first ever healthy coffee known to the world!

The Daily Grind V

• Taylor Clark explores the Starbucks reverse jinx in Slate: when Starbucks opens a franchise next door to your coffee shop, prepare for a flood of new customers to inundate your store.
• Filipinos love their coffee, as documented in Kapihan: A Celebration of Coffee in the Philippines.
• They like to mix politics with their coffee at Just Coffee (get it? social **just**ice) in Madison, Wisconsin - check out the old-fashioned red star! Whatever. As long as the coffee's good...

The Daily Grind IV

• Folks in Warren, Ohio, want to learn about coffee. The newspaper's use of "coffee master" in quotes almost looks like a sarcastic editorial slam at Starbuck's.
• Headline alert: dangerous Los Angeles SUVs hopped up on caffeine! Do they pour it into the gas tank?
• Coffee economics:
  • A marketing look at three Toronto coffee-houses.
  • Someone thinks Berkeley, California-based Peet's Coffee & Tea is headed up. Peet's has a blog, of course, with pictures from Ethiopia.
  • Come visit the Uganda Coffee Development Authority in Kampala, Uganda. If you visit in person, this street map will come in handy. Here's an economic analysis of Uganda's coffee exports in the first quarter (October to December) of the coffee year. See this glossary from the International Coffee Organization for help with the technical terms.

The daily grind III

• Courtesy of Scott Bilik, here's Dave Barry on crappuccino.
• Bill Blocher of the Lakeland, Florida, newspaper The Ledger takes a good long look at the ingredients of "instant cappuccino".
• This is espresso, the coffee in cappuccino.
• "Studies suggest" reports are usually the latest in trendy BS; nevertheless, here's a study that suggests coffee may be related to a reduced risk of liver cancer.
• Ziggy Belli and Amy Bolen of Naples, Florida, sell almost-fresh-roasted beans at their new business Pick Your Bean. They coordinate orders and send them to roasters, who then ship the beans to you.
• Car companies at the Detroit Auto Show know reporters are suckers for good coffee.
• Fancy coffee and accessories in Kuwait.
• Early coffee-houses in London:

The first coffee-house established in the vicinity of London is said to have been the so-called Don Saltero's Coffee-house, in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. Many of those who have lately availed themselves of the little fourpenny steamers have, probably, seen a house still called by this name, near one of the steamboat piers at Chelsea : this was the identical house. This Don Saltero was a cunning fellow, half barber, half antiquary, named Salter, who having attracted many visitors to his house by virtue of the antiquarian trifles with which it was stuffed, sought to make it a kind of lounge by introducing ready-made coffee as an article of sale. Steele gives a sketch of the man, his curiosities, his fiddle-playing and other characteristics, in one of the early numbers of the 'Tatler.'

In the time of Addison and Steele, besides the coffee-houses and chocolate-houses which were attended by the gay and the rich, there was a "floating coffee-house" near Somerset House, a print of which was engraved at the time. This house was a lounge for idle pleasure-seekers ; but the company frequenting it grew, by degrees, so disreputable, that the affair was frowned out of existence.

The daily grind II

• Police in Tracy, California, are drinking a lot of coffee and meeting with a lot of, er, Tracians. It's good to get the cops out of their cars and back on the streets talking to people.
• South Jersey coffee houses provide live music with their coffee.
• The business of coffee is booming in western Canada - here's a piece on Calgary-based Good Earth Cafés. Note the hints of eco-spirituality.
• Coffee 101 - teaching coffee basics at Hamburg, Pennsylvania's Hard Bean Café
• More eco-nuttery: an uninsured sailboat with a crappy engine may not be as eco-friendly as you think. 2 tons of Belize coffee beans are now on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico.
• Starbuck's is offering used grounds as free compost.
• You can charge a heck of a lot of money for coffee if you claim a cat crapped the beans.
• Things are different in Los Angeles. Coffee suppliers LAMILL Coffee have opened their coffee boutique in LA.

The daily grind I

"The daily grind" - original name, eh?

• Cornwall-grown coffee. There's a lot of stultifying environmental do-goodery involved, from Eden Project biomes to a hint of global warming ("an increasing number of products associated with warmer climes are already being grown in the south-west"), and they've harvested only 150g of beans, enough for about 20 cups of fair-to-middlin' coffee.
• McStarbucks: McDonald's enters the gourmet coffee scene, complete with baristas and fancy machinery. Also, personal reflections from Boston's Ted Reinstein and a businesslike take on it from The Economist.
• They say you can do the girly latte thing at home with (shudder) instant coffee.