The (Incomplete) Unimportance Of Brew Methods: Earlier this week we highlighted a post by John Martin of Intelligentsia called “The Unimportance Of Brew Methods”, and it’s resulted in quite a bit of thoughtful, interesting discussion. Martin argues that all brew methods can yield the same extraction and encourages baristas and customers alike to stop focusing so much on methodology. Everyman Espresso’s Sam Lewontin responds, adding that an overemphasis on methodology by the barista leads to service that can seem unpleasantly didactic and condescending to the customer. Both Martin and Lewontin agree that what matters most is what’s in the cup. We highly recommend you read the full posts and check out the discussion on Sprudge’s comments section — it’s interesting stuff!

Craft Coffee’s Kickstarter Fully Funded: We were happy to see that the monthly coffee subscription service Craft Coffee has reached its Kickstarter goal. These folks feature coffee from some of the best microroasters in North America, blind-taste test all of them, and deliver them to your door. We love what these guys do and look forward to seeing them continue to grow. Click here to sign up.

Let’s Talk Let’s Talk Coffee Recaps: The Let’s Talk Coffee conference in Colombia last weekend was a fantastic, informative, and eye-opening event, attended by producers, importers, finance experts, WalMart marketing staff, Colombian politicians, Sustainable Harvest staff, and assorted roasters from 28 countries on 6 continents. It has completely enhanced our perspective of the coffee world, and we had a blast hosting our late-night talk show (aka our panel interview featuring a handful of specialty coffee experts). Video footage and continued recap coverage from the event will be coming your way soon, and until then, take a peek at the video introductions we put together for our guests.

Divine Providence!: Your tireless Sprudge editors have very little semblance of a work/life balance, and as such they are currently in Providence, RI hosting not one but two panels at the Mid-Atlantic / Northeast Coffee Conference (MANE). The panel topics are “How Did I Get Here?” and “Retail Therapy,” and will involve candid and insightful discussions with a bunch of industry notables/geniuses (click here for the full list of speakers). Check by for tweets, photos, and recaps all weekend long on Sprudge.com! And then they get to go home. For 8 whole days!

Reading Rainbrew: Blue Bottle Coffee’s much-anticipated book, “The Blue Bottle Craft of Coffee,” is now available! You can catch James Freeman and company on their book tour in NYC.

SERBC Dates Leaked: It’s officially unofficial! The Southeast Regional Barista Competition, the second event in the 2013 USBC regionals, will be held in Atlanta, Georgia starting Friday, November 30. Regional competitions for the US Cup Tasters championship and the US Brewers Cup are happening the same weekend, and word on the street’s that Batdorf and Bronson, the event host, will throw a massive party Friday night at their new Ponce City Market Dancing Goats coffee bar. Sprudge will be there to keep you updated, and we can hardly wait! Atlanta is really an amazing city and the folks in that community are real sweet. Here’s some of our video coverage from last year’s SERBC just to whet your whistle:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

The post Unpaid Intern: Weekly Weekend Week In Review for 10/13/12 appeared first on Sprudge.com.

• the most thoughtful, user-friendly brewing guides the world has ever seen.
• web videos for brewing coffee every way you can imagine.
• An open database with thousands of tasting notes from coffee evaluations. This will be the most in-depth open database of coffee tasting notes in the world (that we know of, at least).

The project has until Tuesday, October 9th at 12:30pm EST to be fully funded – backers receive a variety of prizes, not least of which being access to the monthly Craft Coffee tasting box, which really does feature some of the best microroasters in North America, and actually is a joy to receive each month. This feature is in no way sponsored or funded by Craft Coffee – we just think what they do is cool.

Kickstarter here.

The post Craft Coffee’s Kickstarter Needs Your Help appeared first on Sprudge.com.

“it’s way cheaper than a daily Starbucks/Stumptown habit, and way more fun.”

You, too, can be “fierce, funny, and proud to be female” like the staff of Bust, by simply cruising over to Craft Coffee and signing up for a subscription. (Ed note: your impending ferocity and hilarity is not guaranteed, nor gender constrained.)

Photo by Jonathan Meter for Bite Sized Blog

The post Brooklyn Based Craft Coffee Gets Bust’d appeared first on Sprudge.com.

(Editorial note: the following conversation occurred over macchiatos infused with yellow chartreuse provided by Alex Bernson, formerly of Vandaag, now of Joe NYC)

Sprudge: Sam! Talk to us about how Craft Coffee whittles down the roasters you use.

Sam Lewontin: Man, this Yellow Chartreuse macchiato is serious business. Alright, so here’s how it works: we ship 3 coffees a month, but those are chosen out of a batch of roughly 20-30 coffees total, which usually represent around a half a dozen roasters. We do some light solicitation of roasters, but for the most part we’re getting a lot of top quality stuff sent to us – the recent coffee we included from Dogwood in Minneapolis is a great example of that.

Sprudge: So you get the coffees into New York, and then what?

Sam Lewontin: Well, we get the samples, we cup them, and then we narrow those samples down by choosing the standouts from the “first table”. Our favorites wind up on a “second table”, which is where the tough choices are made. We cup all of our coffees blind – previously Craft Coffee wasn’t cupping using an evaluative method, but that’s something we started doing around 3 months ago. After cupping, we brew our favorite coffees in our lab and choose the ones we think standout and compliment each other.

Sprudge: We’re a huge fan of your tasting notes. Are you pulling those notes from cupping, or from brewing, or some kind of metaphysical black magic?

Sam Lewotin: Our notes come out of a variety of brewing methods, but not from cupping. My personal favorite method for brewing notes is the Kalita Wave, but we don’t restrict people to one particular brewing method or another.

Sprudge: So it’s all blind? Or is there, you know, an overarching theme you’re going for each month?

Sam Lewontin: We do cup blind, but it’s important for us to have variety – last month we featured two African coffees, but they’re wildly different coffees from each other. That Kenya from Dogwood is a crazy jammy natural coffee, while the Augie’s Coffee Guji is your classic washed Ethiopian. We don’t like repeating flavor profiles or origins in the same box, or even from month to month.

Sprudge: We gotta admit: we’d never heard of Augie’s before we received last month’s box from Craft Coffee.

Sam Lewontin: Yeah! Augie’s is from Redlands, California – really great coffee, right? We usually feature a couple of roasters that specialty coffee types have heard of, and then some other ones where you’re like “Huh?” – that’s part of the fun. The idea is to be really even-handed and go by coffee quality, but we’re particularly interested in boutique microroasters. Featuring coffees from places like Augie’s, Dogwood, Olympia Coffee Roasters, Paradise, Coava…we want to give these boutique roasters more exposure.

Sprudge: Last question: from a logistics perspective, when in the post-roast cycle do Craft Coffee subscribers typically receive your coffees?

Sam Lewontin: The roasters ship their coffees to us ASAP off-roast; we turn around and ship them to you right away, so that they typically arrive 7 days after roasting. Since we’re shipping 3 4 oz. bags, you wind up up with enough to make a couple of nice coffees for yourself every day for a week, while the coffee is still optimal.

We expect a lot more great stuff from Craft Coffee in 2011 and beyond – learn more by checking them out here.

The post Getting Crafty: Craft Coffee’s The New Hotness appeared first on Sprudge.com.