Meet the Press Pot

3/12/13

Hello, friends.

If you've come here looking for more caffeinated witticisms courtesy of the donuts & coffee post on Saveur.com, welcome—but I've got some bad news: Meet the Press Pot is dead; long live Meet the Press Pot!

This is not a press pot; it is a Chemex. But that's me brewing it.

Instead, please feel free to find more of my work via JustMeister.com, or peruse my other blog (which is also currently in a coma, but we expect it will pull through), The Nervous Cook. If coffee's what you're after, I write a regular ditty about it over at Serious Eats: Drinks. You can find those here.

Thanks for dropping by, and happy dunking!

8/23/10

Sweetness, in 10g intervals

Oh, hello. Hi there. How's it going? Good, that's great to hear. I'm glad you're well and keeping busy -- me too! You know, this-n-that. What's that? What's new with me? Well, you know, not a whole lot: Just celebrated my second anniversary of working with Counter Culture Coffee, and recently started writing for Serious Eats a bit in my downtime…

Oh! And I got this great present I can't wait to tell you about! It's the sweetest little coffee scoop; my best friends got it for me while they were visiting Japan!

Doesn't it just make you want to scoop the heck out of some beans, 10g at a time? It does me. I want to scoop them straight into my perfect little Hario hand grinder and crush them beyond recognition, and then I want to extract the living daylights out of them until there's some delicious magic going on in my cup.

It also makes me wish I could read any Japanese at all, so that when I shared the link from whence this scoop came I could at least tell you something about the company or the website or, well, anything relevant at all.

In any event, I think it was one of the sweetest little things I've ever gotten in the mail. Happy (early) birthday to me!

4/23/10

A beautiful thing

Do you want to know what the best thing I've seen all week is?

This guy, right here. An original Faema E61 -- lovingly refurbished, in perfect working order, cranking out beautiful, buttery, smooth shots of Espresso Toscano.

Do you want to see this guy, too? Get thee to Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, my friends.

Get thee to Saraghina.

2/26/10

Rosettas, relieved

Way to raise more than $2k for mental-health and
trauma-response relief in Haiti, New York City!

Thanks to organizer and mastermind Sam Penix, sponsor/host Joe, beer savior Union Beer, baristas all over the NYC metropolitan area, and all the donor sponsors who made last night's Rosettas for Relief such a triumph.

People crushed into Joe to watch some of New York's best and brightest baristas go head-to-head for Haiti, and nobody was disappointed. Competing latte artists solicited sponsorships, and people stuffed all kinds of dollars into another donation jar at the door.

Raffle prizes were announced, rosettas were poured, beers were drunk (and occasionally spilled) and, frankly, a good time was had and a good deed was done by all. But above and beyond, the New York coffee community managed to raise more than $2,000 to benefit a brand-new foundation, REBATI, that is dedicated to getting mental-health professionals on the ground in Haiti.

To read more about REBATI's mission and leadership, please visit rebati.org.

Thanks to everyone everywhere: Participants, raffle-prize donors, organizers, mouthpieces, people with open wallets and anyone who offered a word of support. You really outdid yourselves this time.