Big woop. here in New York, some restaurants deliver booze by bicycle.

Wedgewood oven that seems to include ashtrays for today's modern cook.

I usually just ash into the pan. Y'know, for flavor.

Your stove sounds awesome! I'd love to see a pic of it. And I need a man on a bike to deliver piping hot beverages to me whenever I like. SO jealous.

You're not appreciating the locally roasted, fair-trade certified aspect of this, jon. :)

I put it in my kitchen with my locally grown, organic produce delivery box, and just felt like rays of sunshine and bluebirds and butterflies would swoop in through the window and twitter (yes, even the sunshine) pro-environment songs.

Oh he doesn't deliver drinks, he delivers the beans. Still cool idea tho.

I will have to eventually figure out where ikkyu's camera is, and then how to use it. And then you shall see the stove in all its glory.

You're not appreciating the locally roasted, fair-trade certified aspect of this, jon. :)

Oh, that I dig, even if as a typically lazy stupid American, I'm perfectly happy with my microwaved morning cup of store brand instant laced with a generous belt of Calvados. Which is all stored in my kitchen next to the fridge filled with frozen dinners made out of extinct animals processed by illegal immigrants from Kajagoogoostan. ;>

I can't wait to see your stove Occhiblu.

The only delivery we have around here is pizza, by car.

jonmc, instant coffee? You've gone beyond the beyonds. :)

I, too, come from Kajagoogoostan.

So we have that in common.

I, too, come from Kajagoogoostan.

You people need to work on the salisbury steak.

have them deiver the raw beans and roast them in your oven. organically.

Roasting coffee beans has never really appealed to me. Not sure why. I think it's partly that I have a limited tolerance for caffeine, and once I hit it, the smell of coffee tends to turn my stomach. Going into a cafe or roaster at the wrong time of day can be a bad bad thing.

Roasting? Grinding? Brewing? The convenience food industry has gone through a lot of trouble to make your morning cuppa joe a simple exercise, you ingrates.

Some of us think that taste matters!

Sure. When I'm out in a cafe, I love a cup of freshly roasted, freshly ground gourmet coffee (provided they don't charge me an arm and a leg for it), especially since someone esle is doing all the work. Otherwise, too labor intensive for a caffeine fix.

Hee, yes, see, that's my initial glee. Someone else does all that work, and then delivers it to me. It is truly a wondrous thing!

occhiblu: that really is too cool! the only thing cooler than bike couriers is bike couriers delivering yummy goodies.

and yes, your stove deff needs pictures.

SFO seems like it'd be a pretty decent place to be a courier. no, wait, i know it's hilly but so was cincinnati (viciously steep hills there, tho not so long as SFO). you adapt to the hills, believe it or not. what i mean is the reasonably temperate climate.

warning, major long reminisce / thread derail ahead:

on valentine's day i was taken right back to my early 20's when i was messenging back east by the appearance of one of these guys at our front door - he was delivering candy for one of the gals at our office. mind you it snowed 6" on valentine's day here in boulder and it wasn't our typical light, dry fluffy mountain pow-pow, either - it was howling wind and snowing horizontal, hideously slushily horrible wet snow. so as i grabbed some cash to tip him, i asked dude if he was on a big rush for his next drop, and when he said 'no, it's been dead slow today', i invited him to warm up a bit, and gave him some hot coffee. the poor guy looked like a half-drowned puppy standing in our lobby but his face lit up like a kid on xmas when i handed him that hot cuppa. only thing that would have made it better would have been some hooch on hand to spike it with.

i have humped so many packages in wretched weather. sure, there are sympathetic customers who tip more on those days, and so on. however i found that shitty weather days tended to average out worse especially in the big metropolitan areas. not only does it suck to ride around in hypothermia-weather all day long, plus the drivers are ten times more hapless, dangerous and inconsiderate, but somehow the assholes manage to find you even more subhuman than usual. things like the usually snobby security guards in certain office towers not even letting you bring the bike with in the feckin *freight* elevator, meaning you have to lock it outside to both risk theft and completely waterlog your saddle -- o and don't you DARE lock that thing in front where it's convenient, cos they'll be out there in thirty seconds flat with boltcutters. no you get to go halfway 'round the building, lock it wheels-deep in dumpster juice and homeless piss in the alley, then walk allaway back round to the front. feh. receptionists who shudder theatrically and take the parcel like the fact that you're soaking wet is some horrible disfiguring communicable disease, despite that your messenger bag and shoes cost four times what that ridiculous looking jc penney shit of theirs did. i had drops on the thirty-somethingth floor tell me 'i'll come get it from the lobby, i don't want you dripping on my carpets...' like it's their job to shampoo the rugs or something, then they make you stand around for fifteen minutes and run late for your next drop while they answer calls and piddle around. bleah.

i don't have much idea of the going rate these days for cycle couriers but tis not a lucrative gig, and one gets paid by the drop, not by the hour. sure it's fun to spend all day on the bike, but it gets stressful and some of the corporate serf types really can be toads.

Well, you still have to grind it and put it in a coffee maker and whatnot? Still too much work. yes, I'm that lazy. If there was a to go to the toilet by remote control, I'd use it.

jonmc: No, he delivers it ground. You can get the whole beans, but I'm with you on the "messing with grinding" thing first thing in the morning.

lfr: Gah, I know. My ex was a courier, and his stories about how people treated him were simply atrocious. (He worked mainly in Boston, so plenty of shitty weather.) Which means that I try to be overly considerate of the couriers I see -- partly just by making sure I'm not hogging trails when I'm walking downtown -- but I'm sure I still look exactly like the stuck-up bitch who's going to harass them when they get where they're going.

My ex did work for a while in SF, and hated the hills. He won a ton of alleycat races in Boston and NYC, and was a strong rider, but he just hated the hills here. He did say the people (including the other couriers) were much nicer to him here, though.

Oh, and also, the guy who bikes me my coffee is actually the owner of the coffee roasting place, not a separate courier. Which I find totally charming.

Oh, and also, the guy who bikes me my coffee is actually the owner of the coffee roasting place, not a separate courier. Which I find totally charming.

OK, that ups my opinion of the whole enterprise considerably. I had this vision of your typical warm-and-fuzzy-yuppie-activism/capitalism thing where the free-trade coffee is delivered by some poor Mexican guy making two bucks an hour plus tips.

Heh, no. He rang the doorbell and introduced himself and shook my hand and told me a bit about the coffee. I get the impression he's a former courier, maybe, or something? Their website seems to indicate strong ties to the courier community (one of their blends was done specifically for a messenger group).

Kajagoogoostan

Ah -- so that's where these dudes were from. Too shy shy hush hush eye to eye.

Coffee's not coffee unless it's pooped out a monkey's butt.

(lfr, I think you've had enough ; )

Otherwise, too labor intensive for a caffeine fix.

That's why I love my Keurig Single-Cup Brewer.

ericb: that band is a perfect illustration of absolutely everything that was wrong with both the '60's and synth-pop.

Heh, no. He rang the doorbell and introduced himself and shook my hand and told me a bit about the coffee.

Don't mind me. I've just dealt with so much faux-activist posturing that my cynicism will never thaw. and coffee is a special sore point. I even wrote about it 5 years ago.

No, I'm a total anti-Starbucks snob. Which is annoying, because I just moved from a neighborhood of many cafes to one whose major cafe is a Starbucks. Hence the coffee delivery.

anti-Starbucks snob

I love that, because there are so many ways to interpret it.

Indeed :)

It's not just the Starbucks thing that gets to me. It's the people who are all puffed up about sipping from their free-trade rainforest-friendly coffee as they step over a homeless guy on their walk back to their gentrified neighborhood. But as I said once: Either you're part of the problem, or you're a damn liar.

Either you're part of the problem, or you're a damn liar.

Well, exactly. And every little bit helps.

I believe I've passed the age
Of consciousness and righteous rage
I found that just surviving was a noble fight.
I once believed in causes too,
I had my pointless point of view,
And life went on no matter who was wrong or right.

that band is a perfect illustration of absolutely everything that was wrong with both the '60's and synth-pop.

I think you mean the '80's. ;)

Yes. That is correct, since I spent a good chunk of the '80's wishing it was the '60's.

(completely unrelated: The Addams Family just came on. Has it ever occured to you that Morticia was the original hot goth chick?)

You fucking filthy infidels. You're not even fit to remain on the same continent as good coffee. I spit out Turkish grind at you all through my blackened, Levantine teeth.

I have the ripest, fattest, freshest beans flown in from Ethiopia, hand-picked by traditional nomadic goatherds, and then bathed and washed in the tongue saliva of virgin unicorns.

The delivery company parachute-drops just enough beans for a small carafe of French-pressed coffee in the morning, and again in the evening.

Each bean is then individually hand-roasted on site with a creme brulee torch to a nutty, chocolately medium-dark by a team of dozens of Tibetan monks who train for a twenty years in the arts and sciences of coffee before roasting their first individual bean.

Next, the beans are ground one at a time in a diamondoid mortar and pestle specifically designed for the task of individually grinding individually roasted coffee beans that have been bathed in virgin unicorn spit and picked by nomadic Ethiopian goatherds. The beans are ground to a fine espresso powder, and placed in a sapphire and titanium french press.

After the coffee has been placed carefully in the press, the collected - well, this part really deserves a story and some explaination.

I've tried many things for brewing coffee. Glacial water from the Andes. Genuine potato vodka. The blood of the ancients and mystics. Brillo pads. Genuine baby sweat. Genuine baby tears. Hexaflouride. Civet-cat musk, terribly expensive, that one.

But the best, hands down, is the crocodile tears of an unwed Republican fundamentalist-Baptist welfare mother. I'm not sure if it's the acrid bitterness of perpetual loathing or the extra salt that offsets the sweetness of truly good coffee, but it is indescribably delicious. Ambrosia, truly.

Um, yeah ... thanks ... I'll have what this dude loquacious is having.

*boggle*

loquacious, dude, that was eponysterical. we are truly not worthy.

Coffee. Meh.

I don't fill my head with this anti-Starbucks/pro-Starbucks, pro-roasting/anti-roasting, fair-trade, pooped-out-of-a-monkeys-butt nonsense.

My feet hit the floor in the morning and I fill my pipe with crack.

Fire it up and I'm good to go.

If there was a to go to the toilet by remote control, I'd use it.
jon - it's called a texas catheter. :P

He rang the doorbell and introduced himself(...)
occhi - it's nice to see someone (the owner) actually give a crap about what they're doing enough to come out and do something like that. That's why if I buy coffee when I'm out, I'll hit one of the Italian places on the Drive and buy coffee off of them, as they're not only in it for the money (it is a business), but mostly the social connection. I know Elizard was all over them more than I have been when she lived in Vancouver.

Actually, truth be told all we have here right now is two filthy beat up manual Braun espresso machines that tend to reside amidst a pile of spilled grinds and beans. It's all very Gibsonian, what with the broken off handles on the cups with random scrap bolted to them for handles and shit.

The technique is basically thus: You grind whatever you've got somewhere between espresso and turkish and pack it in the biggest filter cup, and then you run about a cup and a half of water through it to make about 8-12 oz of brutally strong but generally criminally hideous espresso. It's fine if you like espresso, and I do, and good beans make good espresso, but the way we make it it really doesn't matter what you use. And it gets a little tiresome drinking grade A jet kerosene all the time, to the point that even vietnamese or turkish style or even instant is a welcome change.

Good stuff, loquacious. It reminded me of this Lore Sjöberg piece.

Metafilter: you can taste the tedium in every sip. And it tastes best when served in a Batman mug.

That was pretty awesome. I swear I haven't read that before.

That's Lore? Man, I had this picture of a little, skinny, blond Dane or Swede or whatever he is in my head.

PS: Y'all almost make me want to take up drinking coffee.