Caffeine crash

Jeez Louise, teaching a class is exhausting and scary and great!

Half of the time it was really fun to be prattling on about caffeine and coffee and answering questions, and the other half of the time I mostly spent beating myself up for not being very funny, which is sort of absurd on its face. I did manage to squeeze a couple of laughs from my "students," and should be happy with that. I should be even happier with the fact that just about everyone who came seemed to walk away with a little more knowledge about coffee & its little drug. And I am! I am happy! I promise.

So, that's that. My part of the coffee "semester" is over. We have a couple more classes coming up, and I'll post about them when I get my details straight! Phew!



In other news, we're trying to figure out how to make Joe @ Alessi run more smoothly. You know, the thing with new coffee shops is that you find the kinks as you encounter them, which makes it really frustrating for that first little bit of operation time. The shop's been open for about two months now, and we're still working out all the fussy little details.

One of these details is cleanliness.

The store is designed to be a sleek, seafoam-green spaceshippy kind of thing. Which means everything is painted very light colors. Which means that you can see every single coffee grind on the counter. Which means we are all driven mad by constantly having to clean and wipe and waste precious time that could be spent bettering ourselves as a shop and as baristas in other avenues.

One small step I'm thinking about taking is improving our knock box situation. I'm looking into the Grindenstein -- not only do they fit the aesthetic design of this place, they sound like a pretty square deal.



Our volume at the store is still relatively low, and I think we can handle emtpying out a rather small knock box a lot better than we can handle cleaning the heck up after every single knock. Of course, we could also go the large, stainless steel route, but I think this little guy will fit into the shop better -- seamlessly, even!

Man, I love shopping for gadgets! It's so satisfying.

Next, I have to convince myself that I don't need a fancy apron or my own tamper...