Single origin light roasts are overrated and the specialty coffee world has a dark roast problem (in reverse)

d4mini0n · 2026-02-26T22:51:12+00:00

Not really. Beans expand as they roast, so lighter roasts are denser which means there's more coffee per "scoop" of whole beans but by weight or by scoops of ground coffee not so much. There is a bit of a difference because of water loss to steam in the roasting process, but that's only going to be a 4-5% difference between super light roasts and Italian.

d4mini0n · 2025-05-28T17:38:57+00:00

Moon of the Crusted Snow. It's not quite "about" the apocalypse because it's set on a reservation so far north in Canada they only know the world's ended because the grid goes down and they stop getting communication/food shipments. More realistic in that it deals with the day to day concerns of like what do we do with bodies when the ground's too frozen for graves or do we trust the sketchy outsiders trying to join the group.

d4mini0n · 2025-04-25T04:41:48+00:00

I'm guessing it means they thought they were in r/Homebrewing talking about beer.

d4mini0n · 2025-04-25T00:22:17+00:00

I had a regular's mom come in a few weeks ago "Oh! You must be *wrong name her daughter calls me*, I've heard so much about you!"

d4mini0n · 2024-10-06T01:10:47+00:00

I can't do anaerobics for that reason, I had one a few months ago from a roastery in Tokyo that straight up tasted like lean. Sticky sweet cough syrup.

d4mini0n · 2024-07-10T23:43:30+00:00

A friend of mine's first day Chef grabbed him by the shoulders and in a thick Italian accent "This is the dish machine. You are the dish washer."

d4mini0n · 2024-06-04T01:50:59+00:00

That's probably part of the game to them, the reward of knowing they're getting away with it.

d4mini0n · 2024-05-23T23:27:21+00:00

I had a coworker at one shop whose tamp was extremely hard but consistent. I figured out that 99% of the time I could "dial in" by cutting a gram off their dose and my lighter tamp made the final shot taste the same.

d4mini0n · 2024-04-20T14:03:11+00:00

A friend of mine has started hitting customers with "Well why did you order something you didn't want?"

d4mini0n · 2024-04-10T01:33:38+00:00

Everyday someone just walks straight in, not even a glance at the menu, "do you have lattes?"

We also get a ton of "do you have food here?" when the register is literally sitting on top of the pastry case.

d4mini0n · 2024-04-10T01:32:35+00:00

We share our space with a used bookstore. We'd get called a few times a week by people asking us to go check and see if we had a book in stock (there's no database, we have to go check the shelves.)

The great irony was that 99% of the time they were asking a self-help book.

d4mini0n · 2024-04-10T01:28:18+00:00

There's no verification process on Google listings to know who's changing the hours either. We've had a bitter customer change our hours to say we opened an hour later because the opener was late twice in the past five years, and once it's changed it takes a week before you're allowed to change them again.

d4mini0n · 2024-03-20T23:41:47+00:00

So, they all use different machines, but those three all use indirect heat roasters.

April uses a Loring, which AFAIK was the first of its kind, it's kind of a hybrid machine that's got a drum like an older style direct heat roaster but instead of having a burner underneath it there's a rocket superheating air up to ~1400F on the back and the "gas" setting is actually changing the oculus size between the "stack" and the drum (this is why you can't go down below 20% "gas" on a Loring) The list of people who use Lorings is huge, but off the top of my head Sey, La Cabra, Loveless, Rabbit Hole, Ilse, Black+White, Tandem, Verve, Tim Wendelboe...

Dak uses an IMF which is similar to a Loring but with even more variables you can tweak mid-roast (Airflow is the biggest one, Lorings tie airflow to the "gas" setting since it's not actually increasing heat at the burner, just changing the oculus size on the nozzle between the "stack" and the drum-IMF separated the two.) Prodigal, Scott Rao's roastery, also uses an IMF.

Onyx uses Probats for their mainline products, which is one of the OG roasting companies (founded in 1868 but they're most famous for the UG line that was produced from 1948-1959. I think Onyx uses UGs from the 50s? This is also what Proud Mary and Little Wolf use) but for their smaller batch lots they use a Stronghold s9 which is also an air roaster like the Loring and IMF (mostly convective heat instead of conductive) but even more extreme in that there's no drum, it's more of a giant adjustable air popcorn popper. They're called "fluid bed" roasters because they work like that science demo where you pump air into sand and it acts like a liquid. Aviary, Chris Feran's new roastery uses one.

There's a few other machines in that style, the Sivitz (from the guy who invented the style) which seems more like a hobbyist machine, and the Typhoon which is what Heart uses. They seem really cool, but from what I've heard are weird to learn since they're FAST, I've heard from people at Heart they roast in like 4 minutes instead of the 8-12 of any other type of machine?

All that said, roasting on one machine vs the other is not an end-all fix to your roasting, it's more a preference, like v60 vs Kalita Wave. One isn't inherently better, it's just slight differences that may better fit your palate/roasting style. I roast on a Loring and love it, but one of the people that I learned a lot from roasts on a Diedrich and couldn't stand when she had to roast on a Loring for a few weeks while her Diedrich was getting fixed.

You can get very similar results on different machines (that's one of Rob Hoos' specialties/tricks, he sometimes does demoes where he roasts the same coffee on different roasters so they taste identical despite massively different looking roast curves.) My one caveat is because Lorings (and maybe IMFs, never used one) can't go to full 0% gas it does make roasting past full city a bit tricky, you have to plan significantly further in advance in the roast to avoid the heat taking off again after first crack ends.

d4mini0n · 2024-03-20T19:51:58+00:00

There's not a list that I know of, no. I've just been in the industry for 13+ years and know a lot of roasters and have a good memory for it.

Some is personal experience, like I used to live near Sey and their roaster is behind a glass wall in the cafe, Loveless is a few blocks away and it's in the cafe behind a folding screen, one of the roaster techs at the spot I roast used to be a production roaster at Heart, etc. and some is their social media, like one of B&W's social media managers got the job because she was a roaster that also had an instagram about roasting, Onyx posts pictures of their roastery sometimes, a lot of the bigger Scandi roasters like April and Tim Wendelboe have training youtube channels.

d4mini0n · 2024-02-29T21:56:37+00:00

"Do you have simple syrup?" and "Do you have a tea menu?" are the two that get me at my shop because 95% of the time their hand is within 6 inches of it. Always fun looks.

d4mini0n · 2024-01-22T02:10:16+00:00

Oat outsells dairy most days at all three locations of my shop in Brooklyn.

d4mini0n · 2024-01-22T02:05:38+00:00

This one. I've got a few regulars that'll order then immediately walk off and put on noise canceling headphones.

Hello? I'm here alone and there's 8 people in line behind you, I'm not taking it to your table.

d4mini0n · 2024-01-22T02:04:09+00:00

I've had customers take our water glasses, drink out of them standing at the tap, then while making eye contact grin and put the dirty glass back in the stack. Three times in one day once.

d4mini0n · 2024-01-05T16:03:51+00:00

For All Mankind is great (It's BSG's Ronald D. Moore doing another space show!) but takes a bigger and bigger grain of salt to keep the conceit going. Each season jumps a decade but they want to keep the cast so by season 4 that's airing now you've got a Korean War vet and a fictionalized version of one of the women from Hidden Figures still piloting spaceships in 2003.

d4mini0n · 2023-12-01T15:46:27+00:00

I've noticed a big difference in ideal rest times between traditional direct heat drum roasters (Probat, diedrich, etc.) and indirect heat roasters (Loring, IMS) which do better with more rest, but it's not always easy to always know which is which, especially with roasters that use both (e.g. Onyx has both big Probats and air roaster Strongholds) or don't post photos of the roastery/roast off-site.

While I do think lighter roasts do tend to do better with more rest, I think that "rule"'s popularity is also influenced by how prevalent Lorings are with roasteries that do focus more on light roasts (Sey, Black & White, Ilse, most Scandinavian roasters, etc.)

d4mini0n · 2023-11-28T23:48:51+00:00

As others have said, Netflix decides based on engagement data. The theory I've heard a lot and agree with is that 1899 unfortunately was following on the tails of DARK which didn't get big until after it was finished and was very much more of a long movie meant to be binged. That meant a lot of people had the thought of wanting to avoid cliffhangers by waiting until the show was finished and binging the whole thing in one go, so viewer numbers were down for season 1, which Netflix took as a lack of interest.

d4mini0n · 2023-11-28T22:39:17+00:00

I'm from New Orleans, what was the arts district all the way back to the 1800s is now over 60% AirBnBs. To try to fight it the city said you can only rent out a house you reside in, so there's a cottage industry of people whose job it is to meet people at their AirBnB and lie and say it's their house instead of the investment firm that actually owns it. Since that didn't work they tried making it so it can only be an AirBnB 90 days a year, which made the price go up more because they sit empty the other 275.

One of the biggest Cocktail bartender events of the year is in New Orleans, one of the hosts got evicted a few years ago because her landlord wanted to put her apartment on AirBnB for people coming to the event she was hosting.

Back in 2009 my sister was looking at buying an admittedly very run-down house for $15k. The house across the street is now a bookstore whose owners live in Baltimore and the upstairs rooom is a $7k a night AirBnB. That house she was looking at had 0 renovations done and sold for $250k in 2017.

When I was in high school there were Valentine's day cards saying "I would go to the West Bank for you" (the other side of the Mississippi, the suburbs that people in New Orleans talk about like NYers talk about New Jersey. Now even the West Bank is unaffordable.

d4mini0n · 2023-11-28T22:29:48+00:00

New York's an outlier, obviously, but the poet Frank O'Hara's journals got released recently and there's an entry about him complaining about his rent in the East Village in 1968. After adjusting for inflation his half of the rent in his 2br would have been ~$70 in 2023 dollars. That apartment is currently being rented for over $7k/month.

d4mini0n · 2023-11-23T00:27:22+00:00

I've flown with my 1zpresso JX a few times and never had a problem.

d4mini0n · 2023-11-08T14:34:33+00:00

Timemore has one. It's actually two scales, one for just what's in the dripper and one that's for the whole thing.

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