James Hoffman and Stephen Morrisey already made writeups of the SCAE Coffee Team Challenge in Dublin. I'll be doing one too in the next weeks, but first I need to get all my pictures sorted which will take a while ... in the meanwhile, just read Jim's writeup and Stephen's. How nice that I'm on so many pictures on Jims blog! I think most people agree that the cupping competition was the most fun, and the filter brewing workshop the most educational. See you in Cologne next year!

I still can't believe I'm going to Dublin. In less than a day, the European Team Coffee Championship will take place at the Royal Dublin Society's. And I'm part of the german team ... wow. I look especially forward to buy Steve and Gary a guinness! The lectures and workshops promise to be very interesting, and I really fear the blind latte art contest. Can't stop being nerveous!

This looks kind of funny. Somehow, a bit broken. But it worked after reassembling everything, with one exception: the 20+ year old boiler leaks. Now if I only knew wether the gaskets of the newer Gaggia boilers fit in my old one ... hope this works out.

So, about my recent tips for using the french press, I propagated a one-minute brewing time and a quite fine grind. Steve suggests in an article on his coffeearticles.co.uk website a 4-minute brewing time. Who's right? Who knows better? I mean, come on, Steve's the man, he just has to know. Or not?

Well, as with everything about coffee, it just comes down to taste. And experimenting. I recently roasted a batch of ethiopian Limu and brazil Bourbon, both delivered from Joey. The descriptions of the Limu I read suggested it's got slightly less body then the ethiopian Yrgacheffe I know quite good now, but more fruitness. I struggled hard to get that in the cup with my method - and tried Steves, a 3 and a half minute brewing time. But that gave me a quite bitter brew with none of the deepness in the cup that I like. Well, it came together then: bitter? hell, overextracted it is. Reasons? Too long brew time, too fine grind.

Tried again, 2 and a half minute, a slight coarser grind. Just sipping the last drops of it, they're cold by now, and just full of fruit. It was actually so enjoyable that I hate myself for not having roasted some more in the last days! Arg, have to wait now for a new roast to gas out a little.

So, lessons learnt today: everything is relative. For each and every new bean, and roast, experiment with the variables. 4 minute brewing time, but too bitter? Try a coarser grind and/or shorter brewing time. 1 minute brewing time and too harsh? Try a longer brewing time. And what not. The result in the cup is what matters!

So, with all these little nifty things in place, and the PID finally arrived - let the fun begin! I took the machine apart earlier, and really hope I won't ever see a 30°C difference in the boiler temperature again. If this turns out well, I really have the hope that I successfully fought upgradeitus for quite a while.

I hate technical meta-nonsense on weblogs. Nevertheless, the feeds do work again.

Due to my technical incompetences, feeds are unavailable for the moment. Need some time to work on it.

I recently upgraded my notebook to Ubuntu's Edgy Eft, their current development version. It includes new versions of many software, most notable (for me) the current Gnome development version. I expected lot's of crashers and bugs, and stumbled over a few, of course. When Evolution began to crash, this nice little "Bug Buddy" program told me that it has collected crash information and was ready to send that to a bugtracker. I know how to use most bugtrackers, of course, but I thought "why not, this little program is very nifty and handy" and clicked "send" - and guess what? Ever since then I get about 2-10 mails a day notifying me that some other bug has been marked as a duplicate of my bug. It must be pretty frustrating for the gnome hackers to get loads of crash-reports that were already reported, where a fix is in the works and it even is not the fault of their software (evolution), but of the new beta version of firefox (evolution uses the nss-library from mozilla). So, is this bug-buddy thing useful or does it just help to spam the anyway overcrowded bugzilla with new bugs for every crasher it encounters?

I drink my coffee way too fast. Just recognized (again) how lovely a slightly cooled down cup of Yrgacheffe can taste. Left it alone for a few minutes, came back, and all the heavyness was gone, left in the cup was this slight sweet fruitiness, light but lovely body and generally nice taste. ~100g of greens left now ... need to place an order soon.