Living in Red Hook, Brooklyn is awesome, but one of the many cherries on top of it all is that it is home to the new Stumptown coffee roastery. You'd think that there would be the most wonderful scents of coffee floating through the air at all times, but there just so happens to be some sort of weird food packing warehouse around the block, which equals shit smell. Well, too bad I guess.
So, today I ran out of coffee, Stumptown of course, and I was in a state of panic. If you came by, you would have found me curled up in the fetal position in the corner of my kitchen hugging my coffee grinder with the last remnants of my precious drug stash. You would have gotten bitten if you came near me, trust me. Due to my love of free shit, I went over to Stumptown's Red Hook roastery to inquire about some burlap sacks in the trash and just as I imagined, they were there. In all their burlappy greatness, there they were, just chillin' in the trash. What does a good ol' nature loving whore do... he takes a few, to do what with, I don't know. I took them nonetheless.
So the Quince and I get home and I freak out at the rattling noise coming from a couple of the burlap coffee sacks. HOLY SHIT, it must be coffee! What do you know, it's a handful o' coffee beans. They were green, unroasted, raw berries. Awesome. Another experiment to be done.
I've now become some sort of super-urban coffee farmer. I'm not picking the beautiful berries off a tree. Instead, I'm dumping what little crop I can harvest from a trashed burlap sack, then digging through it to get every last forgotten morsel, and finally picking the dropped berries from the ground. Look mom, I'm a farmer!
From there, it was cleaning the berries of any dirt and dust, most likely gathered from our apartment's floor and not the trashed burlap sacks.
Into the cast iron they go!
Make sure you stir every so often. They might burn if you don't. I just picked up the cast iron pot, with pot holders of course (don't be stupid), and gave it a few tosses. That was done every ten minutes or so.
After an hour or two, the berries were transformed into something very recognizable... coffee beans of course. What were you expecting? It's not like they were going to just turn into a pot roast or even worse, Carrot Top.
Remember when he looked like that. Still kinda freakish, but in a non-horrific way.
The coffee went through various colors, from green to your average dark roasted beans. Take a look.
Ain't thems purdy.
Check back tomorrow for how the cup of coffee from these beauties comes out.
you're the greatest whore i know
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