organic – Observations and Misunderstandings

What is life without a little experimenting along the way. I have spent the last couple of months drinking freshly ground coffee beans, and while I was content at that level of coffee depth events have forced my hand. Coffee is one of those consumables which we really should have the organic version of. It absorbs a large quantity of the chemicals sprayed on it which then enter us through consumption, more so than many other foods. While searching online for big bags of organic coffee beans then, I discovered that the green unroasted version was ten pound cheaper, a little spark was born.

The internet is the font of all knowledge and I love it for it and with only twenty minutes devoted to this I discovered it is seemingly quite easy to roast your own beans. It isn’t necessarily easy to roast them well or with accuracy, but to do a rough job and get started is pretty straightforward. And this is what I’ve done.

I was pretty calculated about it too which is not my usual haphazard wing it style. I timed the first crack, which is when they are starting to dry and nearly at the first level of ready. Taste dependent of course. I timed when I shook them about in the pan so they mixed and roasted evenly. In the end I actually roasted them longer than most online articles suggested. There were some saying five to ten minutes and some ten to fifteen minutes but considering nothing had happened by five minutes and I didn’t even get my first crack until twelve minutes, the twenty two minutes I gave them felt right in the moment. Felt right in a moment of inexperience however is not always the most reliable of barometers but well I had to wing it at some point.

I say all that with the confidence and bravado of someone who has successfully roasted and brewed his first coffee but the truth is they’re still cooling off in the freezer and I have no idea how successful I have been. Apparently I should still leave it over night before brewing so it can continue to de-gas but for the sake of this piece I’m just going to brew myself a coffee and report the outcome before publishing. What is life without risk.

Like a good whisky I have added a touch of water to stretch the flavour.

My first cup of home roasted and ground coffee

It smells like coffee. And it tastes like coffee, if somewhat a little bitter. Definitely going to be adding some milk. It’s a start, not as bad as it could have been but certainly could be better. Good fun this coffee roasting.

The challenge of an experiment or a learning experience, or whatever is best to describe my attempts at learning discipline and practising writing at the same time, is that there will be days when nothing really comes to mind about what to talk about. There is a list of things written down in a notebook somewhere, a notebook unfortunately out of reach in the next room, on various topics that could be worth writing about. This list was written down about six months ago though when the idea of writing this first arose and bar What would Henry Rollins do no other topic on the list comes to mind. That is however not the point because so far nothing that I have written about has been from any list or pre planned. That may be pretty obvious, mostly each piece seems off the cuff and I have preferred that to planning as seeing something evolve organically is enjoyable, and let’s be honest having a little ramble for four hundred words is far less effort than writing about a particular topic.

Do people enjoy reading a little ramble that’s the thing. There are plenty of blogs, opinion pieces or editorials in which if you look carefully it is pretty clear they’re not much other than a little ramble dressed up as serious journalism. Todays piece certainly doesn’t even reach those levels as it threatens to drift off to sleep in the gutters of nothingness but that doesn’t mean it’s existence has no value. We never know what is born out of any event, cause and effect if you will, it isn’t alway the moments which appear great that holds a true sense of enormity in a lasting sense. Sometimes things are born out of the most inconspicuous of events and this may just be one of them. It equally may not, that is for future us to discover. What is clear though is that if every moment has the possibility of creating something whose significance is not immediately obvious, then we should not dismiss any moment. Another way of putting that is that we could attempt to be conscious of all we do at all times. Be the Buddha, be enlightened he says, be human also but don’t dismiss something because on first glance it appears to hold no immediate value. Today though, the task of rambling with an obvious conclusion is complete, but we never know what tomorrow will bring.

Tag: organic

A Real Roasting

Tomorrow