Okay, so I’ll cop to roasting my own coffee. Mostly because the stuff you get from the market is old – in some cases, really old – and with coffee, freshness makes such a huge difference. Not to mention that most of the stuff you get from specialty coffee shops still isn’t that fresh, and the style seems to be towards over-roasting (hey folks, real espresso isn’t burnt black and oily so that all you taste is carbon. Unless, of course, you’re a big chain trying to disguise the taste of less than premium coffee beans), and over charging. Premium greens are a couple bucks a pound at most in the quantities that big chains buy, roasting doesn’t cost them that much, and then they charge you $15/lb because they put a mermaid on the front of the bag. Greens cost me about $4-5/lb on average. The occasional, really special lot that would be well over $20/lb in the fancy coffee store might run as much as $7/lb from the greens supplier I most often buy from. I’d say that roasting coffee has actually saved me money over the long run, as well as getting me much better quality coffee than I’d have otherwise.

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Advice from Monk Advice to musicians (and others) from Thelonious Monk.

Ran across this and had to share. Words to live by.

Vacation Reading Just a quick thing. Was thinking about turning this into a screen print (but it will take 7 screens, and that's a lot of work).