I can't help but just lean back and enjoy this coffee. Every single cup.

More description would ruine the experience. Love!

I'm sorry to pollute you with my tasting notes, I feel the urgent need to get some more training on developing my taste descriptions and what's the best place for it if not here?

The Gethumbwini was on my wish-list for the most part of the last year, but I never really got around ordering and roasting it. That moment finally came last week and I'm now sipping a cup of nicely brewed Gethumbwini Peaberry, roasted three days ago on my lovely stovetop roaster, possibly a tad bit too dark but still before the first pops of second crack.

This coffee tastes in many ways as I expected it to, which is a nice suprise and means I can start to really trust in my own senses and sensuary memory (I've had the non-peaberry over a year ago and still remember clearly how it tasted to me back then).

Brewed in a Melitta porcelain filter (I really need to rinse the paper filter for longer beforehand), this cup is so bold and so clean at the same time. It has a very blackcurrantlike zing to it and high, pleasantly high acidity. That berry taste is a bit like the Fortaleza which has that notes more in the aroma, whereas the Gethumbwini has it in-your-face in the cup and in the nose. The aroma of the fortaleza I'd describe as more wildberry like, whereas the Gethumbwini is really more blackcurrant than anything else. The body is as bold as you can get through a paper filter, very distinct and not overwhelming at the same time.

Through altering the roast profile I could possibly bring out the blackcurrant a bit smoother and mute the acidity just a little little bit, but I fear that's out of my possibilities with the stovetop thing and reserved for times having a proper roaster. Curious how this will taste in the vacpot!

Update: sipping through my second cup, of which I thought I wrecked up the brewing. But holy cow this is liquid blackcurrant juice, or wait, more like blackcurrent fruit tea. wow.

A while ago, I wrote about the freshness of coffee. The last two days, friends were coming to taste some of Walter's coffees I told them so much about - the Fortaleza and a blend of Rwanda Nyamagabe and the Guatemala El Bosque (guess where the idea originated from). The coffees were roasted on July 3rd (the blend) and July 7th (the Fortaleza), that makes them 8 and 12 days "old". I won't go into the tasting details today (other than we all got the berry berry berry aroma of the Fortaleza (which I still can't really believe) and a very interesting ... mix of the fruity plus liqourice plus great mouthfeel from the blend), but there's one thing both of my friends said:

"So this is how fresh coffee tastes!"

Both were stunned (at least that's what I interpret into their facial expression). One of them a home barista, one a professional.

Hell yes, this is how fresh coffee tastes and I have to admit that my writings of April last year don't take into account just how crazily good fresh great coffee tastes.

Incredible coffee.

(sorry for the poor quality picture, Jessica is in Bristol with all her nice'n'shiney cameras doing amazing things so I only have the webcam to make pictures)

I've had this before, but never with my shiney new old La San Marco. And I certainly would have remembered if it tasted like this one now: it has dark, ripe berries all over from the smell of the grounds to the armoa to the cup - the aroma is incredible, it reminds me of childhood times when my mother made concentrated juice of dark berries and the whole kitchen smelled of it. What a backflash. I was quite surprised initially as I've had this berry aroma before though not as concentrated - in a brewed cup of Kenyan coffee (I don't remember which one, perhaps the Gethumbwini), but never in a brazilian! That berry aroma translated well in the cup, which had a concentrated juice-y mouthfeel and was sweeeet. I'll report back when I'm over that berry taste and try to describe the taste a bit better, but for now it's all berries to me.

On TMC and the Kaffee-Netz I expressed that I'd love to taste some of the Panama Hacienda Esmeralda Special Batch 5 (see the auction result). You can guess my puzzled face when I opened a parcel from Austria that was eagerly awaited: my latest shipment from Walter that not only contained my order, but also this little gem:

Yes, Walter really sent me one of his last samples of the Batch 5! I can't wait to get my hands on a sample roaster and finally try it out. Thank you so much Walter, you made my day (and probably the days of the next weeks also. And after that the next months, until I can actually order that coffee from you, when you'll make my days again!)! Oh and by the way, your 'special blend' tastes damn fine (I'll get back to that once I had a few more shots of it)!

I'm stunned. This is just awesome!

Now I know why secure encryption hasn't made it into the daily use of the masses yet. When it isn't even possible to do simple things for developers, how are developers supposed to make it easy for users? Yeah, crypto is hard'n'stuff and I'm no crypto expert at all. But heck, there should be a working way for generating keys, encrypting, decrypting and signing messages using non standard homedirectories with python and gpg.

• GnuPGInterface.py: yeah, like wrapping shell commands in objects help. FAIL.
• python-pyme: FAIL. It barks loudly when I try to do anything else than what's in the examples.
• GPG.py: FAIL. http 404? c'mon.

Gah. I need easier crypto.

This might be shocking, but this post is actually not about coffee.

It's been a long time in the making, and it's still far from finished, but much of the work to get a first release is now done. Amazing that this little project is already two years old and has already undergone the odd rewrite.

What am I talking about you might ask? Right. The mokeladmin. Currently, it's an application to manage mail accounts (smtp/imap/pop3), aliases/forwards and xmpp/jabber accounts. It has a web frontend for admins, written with the incredible django framework. The basic features currently implemented are:

• one account for everything: smtp/imap/pop3/xmpp
• per-account settings for smtp/imap/pop3/xmpp
• flexible layout of the users' maildirs
• migration script for the old version of this (yeah, like anybody but me cares)
• doesn't require postfix to store all mail under the same UID/GID
• features an ejabberd extauth authentication script
• no backend servers need database access; all they see are files
• generation of all the necessary maps

And probably many things I've forgotten.

The minimum requirements are a sane admin who knows what he/she's doing. Seriously. We support postfix and dovecot and ejabberd. Definitely planned for the near future are:

• handling of multiple different backend (postfix or dovecot or ejabberd) servers
• communication (for map exchange) between that servers per http, but gpg secured (yeah, this is a big one)
• an interface for the joe user to manage his/her accounts
• adding support for tinydns, including generating all kind of SRV and other records
• reactivating support for powerdns. It's there in the tree, but doesn't really work and I havend worked in in ages, the code is from an old version

Why am I making this public? Well, currently, it only runs on one server (this), but it needs more work and it has potential. I just wanted to have this out of the bzr repository into the public. If you, dear reader, really want to try it out, the code lives in the bzr branch

which you can checkout with if you happen to have a recent version of bzr installed. Yeah, the little documentation that's there is out of date (you guess). Setting up the web frontend is the easy part (go over to the django tutorial for info on that), wiring everything with the respective server software is the hard part and needs to be done quite manually and is the main reason why this requires an admin and is completely uninteresting for anybody else (I think). Oh and you need the newforms-admin-branch of django, which will eventually get merged to the main developement branch which will eventually result in a 1.0 version near the end of this year. If you like python and what we've written here so far, feel free to contact me (or send patches). I especially welcome input on that gpg-encrypted-maps-over-http-part.

Thanks Jan for writing the powerdns part, we will get that working again eventually. Thanks to jcs for the hours of SQL-juggling with the old version and the help with rewrite and the web fronted. Thanks to Ingo for the visual inspirations!

A short list of coffee-things I've been up to lately:

• 
  new tampers
• 
  new (old) grinders
• 
  new (odd) portafilter
• 
  new t-shirt
• 
  new (BIG) machine
• 
  not for me this year

Starbucks bought the Coffee Equipment Company, renown for it's Clover single-cup semi-automatic coffee brewer.

I'm shocked. But this is also way cool at the same time. A very smart PR move from Starbucks, and I bet a very smart business move from the Clover guys. There are interesting and insightful threads on toomuchcoffee.com and coffeed.com and probably many more sites, and also probably many more people have blogged this and as such have helped Starbucks in gaining more PR. But credit where credit is due. This move is very smart, and it will raise the bar for quality in Starbucks (if they manage to back off their dark roast a bit) and highlight good coffees. Who knows, in the end the Clover might even cost less than the $11,000 where it's now? Or some smart people invent an even newer and better method for extracting better coffee?

But one thing's for sure: this is a little earthquake in the industry. At least it feels as such. Until yesterday, Clover was the tiny, independent flagship of quality coffee. I just hope Mr. Schulz and the Clover people are doing things right.