Small working with small I remember the very first roast production Nate and I did for Luna. We were both working day jobs at the time, and the arrangement with our roaster friend down the street from our East Van apartment meant starting our 'Luna shift' after hours,
Three days is all it took. 72 hours. The time it takes to ferment mucilage off coffee seeds in Ethiopia, transmuting all the valued and savoured flavours that result, is the time it took for the dock workers union representing all along the East coast of the US to arrive
A coffee is always more special when you know more about what that thing is and where it comes from. I'll never forget my first washed coffee from Yirgacheffe, now decades ago. It was so distinctly soapy and dripping with stonefruit (in my mind anyway) and I can
If you go looking for information related to the producing side of coffee, usually you'll be met with all sorts of language about the farms themselves - The scents of jasmine fireworks as you pass through a farm in full flower; The grounding wet earth smell reaching out
When I opened the Tyee this morning, an article about the nearly failed stone fruit harvest in BC stopped me cold. How could there be no peaches this summer? We take the annual stone fruit availability for granted here on the coast - First come cherries, then the tiny underripe
Originally published in our subscription zine for June 2024 Rattling around in the corners of the drawer of our front entryway are chive seeds saved from last year. I meant to plant them to expand the chive patch outside our apartment window in East Van- currently the only thing in
Crickets are the backing track to our zippy inhales through the door, cracked to the street. A motorbike zooms by while dogs start a muffled song from across the block. Each last zip in the room is a gasp, as if aspirating will liberate the whole story cradled in the
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A mineral smell of wet soil kicks up into the dewy air and occasional wild glassy pink raspberries blur past as our sweet stubborn truck insists its taken this trip hundreds of times, with hundreds more to come. The navy 90's toyota pickup tires defiantly slipping and gaining
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Whenever I'm on instagram, I usually find myself pavlovian-ly tapping over to David Zilber's profile to see what he's reading, or what fermentation project he's up to. In one post, the (once head of fermentation at Noma) juggernaut forms the Venn diagram
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It's funny that we tend to expect immutability out of coffee, the most mutable thing around. We're obsessed with replicating a taste experience. There are countless permutations, decisions (often amounting to a spit second) while roasting that inevitably impact the end result. Maddeningly, many of you
fungi
Coffee industry folk say remarkably little about fungi. Is Big Ag influencing us? Multinationals hold a seemingly deep dependence on selling synthetic fertilizers and fungicides to large cooperatives, who sell to smallholder farmers at a discount. This arrangement suits these powerful actors, assuming producers uphold multi-year fixed-price contracts. These are
originally published November 2021 Our human tendency is to separate science and art as different modalities – But let’s explore this challenge – Are they not singular? Swiss naturopath and somewhat of a mystic, Emma Kunz, would work in secret with pendulum in hand, creating kaleidoscopic visions from the ‘blueprints’. After