Showing posts with label coffee. Show all posts
Showing posts with label coffee. Show all posts

Thursday, February 13, 2020

If you wigged out, Luzianne had you covered

Baton Rouge State-Times, Feb. 12, 1970

Maybe it's the caffeine.

Well, switching to Sanka might've been one cup over the line, so 50 years ago in coffee-loving Louisiana, Luzianne had a plan for when the ladies might get a little jacked up and tear their hair out -- buy our coffee, get wigs cheap.

Works for me. So, did they have any toupées?

Wednesday, February 08, 2017

South Louisiana personality test

 
Coffee.

The way God intended it to be made and consumed.

☐   Yes
(Perfectly normal)

 
☐   No
(It's bad, bad)

Thursday, April 25, 2013

Café à l'orange

I love me some Community coffee, the Louisiana brew I grew up drinking.
Lots.
Lots. Lotslotslots. Drinking lots. Lots. The coffee I grew up drinking lots of.
I also love me some Clementines. So one day after eating me some Clementines -- but right before I was about to make me a pot of coffee -- I got to thinking.
What if. . . ?
Hell, what could it hurt?
In went some orange peel into the bottom  of our old French-drip pot. And then a little piece went atop the coffee grounds.
The effect on the brewed pot of Community was subtle, but right tasty.
Give it a try, especially if you're fond, as I am, of making your coffee the old-fashioned -- translate as "best" -- way.
Tonnaire! Ça c'est bon, oui!

Friday, January 13, 2012

Didja hear the one about Starbucks 'blonde'?

. . . we were told at a Regional Rally there are absolutely no Blonde jokes to be told around the coffee what so ever. It will be a written offense if so. This came right from the RD's mouth to about 100 SM's so communicate back to our stores at our own meetings.

It's like the time they told us we could not refer to Via as instant it must be called micro ground but then wrote instant on the packaging...great idea!

-- Comment from the Starbucks Gossip blog

Tuesday, November 08, 2011

Friday, April 01, 2011

Give me a latté and some paper. Ding.


Amazing.

See, like I always say, if you hang on to something long enough, you'll eventually become cool again. Now all I have to do is find a 1950s-vintage Underwood manual.


FROM THE Omaha Bee-News:
This is one coffeehouse where you won't find free wi-fi.

You won't find expensive wi-fi, either. Or dial-up at any price.


As a matter of fact, you'll be asked to check your laptop at the counter. And your cell phone or tablet computer, too.

You see, RetroGrounds in Omaha's Old Market district is a no-tech zone.
It's all an outgrowth of the slow-food and slow-tech movements, says owner and chief barista Ole Lud-Dytes.

"If you want a good cup of coffee, it something you just can't rush. It's the same thing with a good meal, and it's the same with communicating with one another," he says. "You just have to take your time."


To walk into RetroGrounds is to step out of time -- and into history. There is a 1936 Zenith radio sitting on a corner counter, tuned to a local "standards" station. AM, of course. And if you have to stay in touch with the world while you enjoy a latté or brèvé, manual typewriters -- circa anywhere from the 1930s to the 1960s -- sit on tables around the establishment.

Chasity Lemuels sits at one of those tables, hunting and pecking at a 1962 Royal. It's the first time the 20-year-old has used a typewriter, and only one of a handful of times she's even laid eyes on one.

"It's so . . . tactile," she muses. "It's fun -- very different from using my laptop. I feel like I'm writing with authority, but my fingers hurt.


"I think I know why my grandparents have arthritis," she says, giggling.


RetroGrounds opened about a year ago, and Lud-Dytes says business has been growing steadily.


"I started this with no more than a gut feeling that people just might want to step off the modern treadmill," he says as he foams yet another latté for a customer who has checked his iPad and stepped out of cyberspace and into. . . ?


"Peace. Contemplation. The world where the physical and the realm of communication have once again become one," Lud-Dytes says.

"That's the yearning I just felt people had in this hyperconnected, overly technological world. So far, business is good and tells me I just might be on to something here."


The first-class stamp for your first letter is free with your coffee.
COUNT ME IN. I think my coffee intake will be increasing dramatically.

Sunday, February 13, 2011

Power to the percolators!


Would you like to see the definition of insanity?

The epitome of consumerism run wild?

The alpha and the omega of insane faddishness?

Yet another example of planned obsolescence in the name of unnecessarily separating suckers from their no-longer-so-expendable income?

Making a damned cup of coffee a lot more complicated than it has to be?


HERE YOU GO, courtesy of Reuters:
Starbucks Corp, the world's biggest coffee chain, on Sunday said it plans to announce a new product for the single-serve market "in the near future."

Analysts long have expected Starbucks, which also sells Via instant coffee packets, to make a more aggressive move into the small, but fast-growing single-cup brewing segment.

Word of its new plan comes as Starbucks is getting ready for the March 1 termination of an agreement by which it provides coffee discs for Kraft Foods Inc's Tassimo one-cup home brewer.

Kraft's Tassimo brewer won some loyal fans with its bells and whistles, but it was bested by Green Mountain Coffee Roasters' generally lower-cost Keurig brewing system that now has a near-monopoly in the single-cup category with roughly 80 percent market share.

While several analysts expect Starbucks to begin providing coffee for the Keurig system, some also have concerns about expiring Green Mountain patents, patent challenges and whether curr
ent Keurig users will migrate to the company's new machine.

"Starbucks is currently exploring all options to expand its presence in the premium single-cup coffee category, beyond our initial entry with Starbucks Via Ready Brew," Starbucks spokeswoman Lara Wyss told Reuters.

"Single-serve is still in the earliest stages and no clear delivery system has been established as the gold standard so it is important for us to look at all options," Wyss said.
HERE'S THE PROCESS: People threw out their old drip coffee pots and percolators because somebody invented the Mr. Coffee, which was way better because it was NEW! And because it cost more.

But the Starbucks took over the world with espresso drinks and other gourmet coffees, which you couldn't have at home unless you bought an expensive espresso machine, which was better than a $25 stove-top espresso pot because it,
like, cost 10 times as much. Duh!

Espresso makers, though, were too complicated. What was needed was something as simple as a stove-top espresso pot, but would make only one cup of coffee using high-priced, proprietary little packets that fit in little coffee makers that cost $200. This was real progress, which is defined as quadrupling --
through technology -- what the average consumer might have paid in Luddite days for an espresso pot and a hot plate.


ENTER
the Tassimo single-serving coffee maker, for which Starbucks supplies overpriced coffee in little proprietary packets. The Tassimo represented a tenfold leap in progress, as measured by the cost of making a cup of decent coffee increasing from roughly a dime to a dollar.

Progress, however, requires obsolescence. Thus, the inevitability of Keurig -- shoving Tassimo to the margins of java history, and the need for your average coffeeaholic to shell out another $120 bucks -- Look, Marge! Economical coffee at home! The new coffee machine is $80 cheaper than the one we bought last year! -- for the new coffee-making system that's incompatible with the old one.

AND STARBUCKS will be there with a product that we know will be superior to whatever swill you're drinking now . . . because it will cost so much more.

It's
The American Way.

As a card-carrying Democrat, however, I have no interest in The American Way. So you'll see me in the kitchen of our little collective here in Omaha,
by God, Nebraska, spitting in the face of bourgeois society by making myself a cup of communist coffee in a proletarian pot.

On a prehistoric contraption called a stove.

Thursday, February 10, 2011

This is a coffeepot


This is a coffeepot.

A coffeepot is what one uses to brew coffee. Not a "coffeemaker," a coffeepot. On a stove.

Making coffee in a coffeemaker is like leaving your children to be reared by a nanny. They might come out OK, but why did you bother having them in the first place?

Coffeepots are hands on. Coffeepots, especially in this Coffeemaker Age, make a statement. They stand out from the robotic hustling mob.


COFFEEPOTS are sacramental. Coffeepots are all about pouring a cup with the communion of saints, many of whom boiled a kettle of water and poured it into a coffeepot, where the hot water kissed the chocolate-hued grounds, then dripped into manifest destiny.

A coffeepot is grandma and grandpa. A coffeemaker is . . . is what, exactly?

This right here, friend, is a coffeepot. It seems to long predate Joe DiMaggio's first commercial for Mr. Coffee (he says, spitting on the ground, but never the grounds).

NOT ONLY is this a drip coffeepot, this is the finest example of a drip pot I've ever seen. It's made of heavy aluminum, and it wasn't made to wear out. Ever.

Mrs. Favog and I found it last weekend at an Omaha estate sale. The price -- $10. And now it once again fulfills its manifest destiny.

That would be making a damned fine cup of joe.

Thursday, November 04, 2010

Your Daily '80s: Cold coffee. I blame Reagan.


Cold coffee.

Before Starbucks.

Came to Omaha.

The state of office coffee drinking, circa 1983, immortalized by University Television at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. The weekly TV show was called Cityscape; the music was by Citydog.

Welcome back to when Omaha was New Wave.

Tuesday, July 06, 2010

An extra shot of quirkiness with my brevé


Here's a slice of life from our favorite Omaha coffee emporium, Caffeine Dreams.

Oh . . . the painting? Yeah, there's a story behind that bit of artwork -- which is among the works on display, and for sale, at the shop.

Unfortunately, I don't know what it is.


I DO KNOW that it once lacked the coffee-shop version of a fig leaf. Pig Boy, though, left full frontal nudity behind one night when some high-school kids were playing a gig at Caffeine Dreams . . . and parents in the audience complained.

It wasn't about the music.

The first fig leaf -- quickly applied by the barista, who knew better than to mess with PO'd parental units -- was a bit of newspaper just big enough to mask the pig-man's shame. This later morphed into a sticky note . . . and now the added protection of a paper-napkin loincloth.

This is overkill, admittedly. Pig Boy wasn't that well endowed.

This, however, is the Midwest. And Mother knows best that edginess has its limits.

Wednesday, June 09, 2010

Tuesday, June 08, 2010

Coffee time


Cher, I was gettin' tired tired, and I damn near fall asleep, yeah! So I made me a pot of coffee.

Thursday, April 22, 2010

I like my juleps dark roasted

I am from the South.

This means I will find a way to put fresh mint in everything. Even my Community Coffee.

No bourbon for mint juleps? No problem. Just make your pot of dark roast minty.

Personally, I thought the garnish in the cup was a damn nice touch.

It is always -- repeat, always -- nice to be able to walk out the back door and cut a mess of something to put in something that will make that something taste like something special.

Sunday, January 24, 2010

On a Sunday afternoon


It's what we do around the Favog household on a lazy Sunday afternoon -- make coffee and listen to Zia's jazz-and-blues show on KLSU in Baton Rouge.

Friday, November 20, 2009

3 Chords & the Truth: Black coffee & blues


Whatever gets you through the night (or the day) is all right . . . is all right.

Lots of the time, it's coffee. Coffee made with love, patience and an old, old pot -- because it's better that way.

OTHER TIMES, it's the blues.

This week on 3 Chords & the Truth, however, we're putting together the blues with a little black coffee and seeing where it gets us. No doubt, somewhere that's all right . . . is all right.

Of course, there's lots of other tasty stuff on the Big Show this go around as well, so you'd just as well stick around and give it a listen. You just might have your horizons expanded amid the musical fun.

Well, that's about all for now. Go grab yourself a hot cup of joe and meet me back here at the Internet connection.

Because it's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

A nice, hot cup of . . . DUDE!


In the middle of a hard day's work on a cool fall day, nothing refreshes like a fresh pot of pot.

Dude!

HOLD THE PHONE. That's not how we roll -- er . . . not that we roll anything at La Casa Favog -- on this blog or at 3 Chords & the Truth. It just looks like it, kind of.

And the sight reminded me of the time some friends brought back some oolong tea from China and gave us some sealed in a sandwich bag, prompting Mrs. Favog to exclaim "It looks like a lid!" That brought down the house -- which you'd understand if you knew Mrs. Favog.

In reality, I was making a pot of Community Coffee (the coffee so good I advertise it for free) when I thought it would be nice to go outside and cut some fresh mint to add to the ground coffee. So I did.

So here's what you do, particularly if you're blessed with mint coming up all over your yard: Cut a nice sprig of mint, wash it off, finely dice it with a good kitchen knife and add it to your ground coffee in the pot.

It's as simple as that.

As the late Vernon Roger used to say at the end of his cooking segments on Channel 9 in Baton Rouge . . . "Tonnerre! Ça c'est bon, oui!"

Friday, August 07, 2009

Café chaud de la Louisiane


My Aunt Rose made the best coffee in the world.

That's because she made it the way God intended coffee to be made -- in the kitchen of a double shotgun house, on an old stove with a whistling kettle and a little, well-used French-drip pot filled with Community coffee. If you want to better understand Louisiana, you need to know about Aunt Rose's coffee.



I'll tell you how to make real Louisiana coffee in a second -- and, mind you, I know about these things. Take Community coffee, for example. That's what just about everybody from my corner of South Louisiana grew up drinking . . . that strong and wonderful inky-black brew.

Hell, I've been drinking Community since I was . . . well, for as long as I can remember. When I was a little kid, I started off with coffee milk on the weekends.

Anyway, that's what you start your pot of coffee with, some Community "Pacquet Rouge" (above), named for the red bag (or can) in which it's packaged.


THE BRAND has been around since 1919, when Henry Norman "Cap" Saurage started custom grinding dark-roast coffee for customers of his Full Weight Grocery in "Dixie," a north Baton Rouge neighborhood that was pretty much "out in the country" back then. Today, the brand covers the Gulf South like the dew. It's found in every grocery store, and there's a chain of coffeehouses and a booming mail-order business.

I guess you could call ol' Cap Saurage a coffee tycoon. We just called him Uncle Norman, being that he was my great uncle. My half of the family was the poor relations, alas.

But we knew how to enjoy our Community coffee. Which brings me back to Aunt Rose, the little pot on the old stove, a kitchen table and an old double shotgun house off Greenwell Springs Road with a yard full of pecan trees.

Oh, and get you an old French drip pot, too. The one pictured above was Mama and Daddy's, and it's probably 60 years old.


AND BOIL you some water, cher. To make hot coffee, you need you some boiling water
. But you knew that.

When I was a kid, I remember half the damn family crowded into Aunt Rose's little kitchen, all talking at the same time -- and loudly -- as everybody waited for the water to boil and then for the coffee to make.

This, realize, was an ongoing and repetitive process. Those little pots only make about five cups of coffee at a time.

Aunt Rose would be boiling water and brewing coffee as the conversation swirled around, by and through her. That's the beauty of coffee the "slow food" way. It's a great excuse to gab while you're waiting.


AS THE TALK went around and around, Aunt Rose would get out the bag of Community and fill the pot up to the ridge there.

Mama would be gossiping with her and my other aunts while Daddy complained about the world with my uncles, and all the young folk kept track of the dual streams of consciousness whizzing past each other -- and sometimes crashing into each other -- somewhere above the kitchen table.


OVER ON THE old stove, the coffee pot looked something like this. Poo yi yi, dis gonna be good, yeah!


AT SOME POINT, everybody would just have to talk a little louder, because the kettle was starting to whistle.

And when the water was boiling, Aunt Rose would turn down her fire just to that point where the kettle would stay at a slow boil. Nowadays, I find it easier to pour my boiling water into something that's easier to pour from than a big ol' kettle.

While the womenfolk were verbally separating the sots of the family from the saints, it was time to get serious about creating a pot -- OK, several pots -- of South Louisiana magic.

See, you pour you water on the grounds a little at a time so you don't make a mess, yeah. You don't want to make no mess with dem water and coffee grounds all over you burner, no.


AND WHILE the menfolk debated the relative merits of, say, Richard E. Nixon, dat communiss Hubert Humphrey -- well, Uncle Jimmy would object to that characterization of Humphrey, being the family's yellow-dog Democrat -- and George Wallace, cher, you grounds gonna start to look like this when dey foam up (above).

I could eat it like this, yeah.


WITH THE running tally being Richard E. Nixon 1, George Wallace 3 and dat communiss Hubert Humphrey 1 (God bless Uncle Jimmy, good Catholic that he is), Aunt Rose would be keepin' on keepin' on with the coffee.

See above? You keep doing it just like this until you got you a pot of good Louisiana coffee. Don't get impatient, cher. All good things -- especially coffee -- come to those what wait. They always somethin' to talk about.


AFTER YOU BEEN doing this a few times, you got to lift up the grounds holder to see how much coffee you done made, yeah.

You don't check on it, cher, and you gonna have a black-coffee fountain spoutin' all over you nice clean stove.


BY NOW, Aunt Rose would have all the coffee cups and spoons on the table. The sugar bowl would be there, too, as well as the can of Carnation or Pet milk if you wanted you some cream with your Community.

Now, ain't that one of the prettiest things you done ever seen? Hahn?


NOW THAT'S some coffee perfection, yeah. Ain't no Starbucks gonna give you no coffee like that, no.

Then again, back in Aunt Rose's day, we didn't know what Starbucks was. (Intergalactic cash money???) We didn't need it.


WHEN YOU HAVE good Community coffee, made amid your little community with care and love, every kitchen table is Starbucks -- only better. That is, if you make time to stop and smell what's brewing at Aunt Rose's.

I bet you can taste it now. Bon appetit . . . dahlin'.