• Beans: Locals Blend (8oz)
  • Roaster: Local Coffee Roasting Company (Roxana, DE)
  • Origin: Colombia, Guatemala, and Ethiopia
  • Roast level: Medium
  • Roast date: 5/19/2025
  • Purchase date: 6/23/2025 at 3 Blonde Bakers in Bethany Beach, DE
    First cup: 6/24/2025; Last cup: TBD
  • Process: n/a (blend)
  • Tasting notes (from web site): milk chocolate, stone fruit
• AeroPress with JX grinder:
  • AeroPress with Prismo, scoop, metal filter, and paper filter
  • 1 heaping scoop of beans (roughly 16g to 17g)
  • Around 250g of “pretty hot” but not boiling water (ratio 1:15 to 1:16)
  • JX grind setting: 16
  • Pour enough water to cover grounds; agitate; bloom until 0:45 or so; fill cylinder up to around 1/4″-3/8″ from top; stir 7x front-to-back with AeroPress paddle; steep until 02:45; stir 7x again; press slowly

I can’t let a trip to the Delaware shore go by without getting some beans from LCRC. These are a little farther past roast date than I would typically buy, but retail availability is limited, so you take what you can get (within reason), and to be honest, unless it’s a dark roast, a month old is still reasonably fresh. This was my first time trying this particular blend. I’ll be grinding most of the beans with the JX and brewing them in the AeroPress. I started at grind 16, which is the fine end of the “AeroPress” range on the JX grind chart. The first cup was very robust and nicely balanced. I’ll be happy if all of them taste like this. Stay tuned!

• Beans: Beans of Summer (blend)
  • Roaster: Zeke’s Coffee (Baltimore, MD)
  • Origin: Indonesia, South and Central America
  • Roast level: Medium/Light (3/8)
  • Roast date: unknown
  • Purchase date: 6/15/2025 from Zeke’s at Baltimore Farmer’s Market
    Freeze date: 6/20/2025; Thaw date: TBD
    First cup: 6/17/2025; Last cup: TBD
  • Process: n/a (blend)
  • Tasting notes: none noted on bag
• V60 with Ode grinder:
  • 19g coffee / 300g water (1:15.8)
  • Ode: 4
  • Water at 100°C
  • Recipe: Single Cup V60 Pourover with size 2 cone, 40g bloom water and 50g pulses – finishes 02:40-02:45
• AeroPress with JX grinder:
  • 16g to 17g coffee (I weighed out 50g of beans and split them into roughly equal proportions to yield 3 cups of coffee)
  • Around 250g of “pretty hot” but not boiling water (ratio 1:15 to 1:16)
  • AeroPress with Prismo, metal filter, and paper filter
  • JX grind setting: 16
  • Pour enough water to cover grounds; agitate; bloom until 0:45 or so; fill cylinder up to around 1/4″-3/8″ from top; stir 7x front-to-back with AeroPress paddle; steep until 02:45; stir 7x again; press slowly
• Previous bag: late July 2024

Well, I guess it’s summer again. On one hand, it doesn’t seem like that long ago that I had my first bag of these. On the other hand, it was before I had my Ode grinder, and it seems like I’ve had that for a long time. I bought the Ode last September, and a lot has happened in life (both good and bad) since then.

We bought these beans (as well as a bag of Zeke’s Tell-Tale Decaf) at the Baltimore Farmer’s Market, directly from the roaster. Strangely, while the bags of Zeke’s I get at the grocery store have roast dates printed on them, these bags didn’t. Typically, though, when buying directly from the roaster, I just kind of assume the bags are fresh. Of course, the $50,000 question is, would I be able to tell the difference between freshly-roasted beans and 6-month-old beans? I’d like to think I would, but you never know. 😀

According to my notes from last year, I had a hard time getting a good cup with the V60. Different story this time around, as my first two cups have been excellent. Granted, I have only brewed two cups so far, and I noted last year that the first two cups were also good, after which I started having issues. We will see how it goes with the rest of the bag. The differences so far have been: different grinder, much lower ratio (1:16 vs 1:14), and 50g pulses instead of 60g. The 50g pulse technique tends to keep water in the cone longer, which I suspect helps with extraction. My technique is probably a little better and more consistent now, as well, but who knows.

I likely will not use this entire bag up before heading to Delaware next week, so I think I may take some with me to brew in the AeroPress, and freeze the rest to brew after I get back. It will be interesting to see if there is any difference in taste between the frozen/thawed beans and the non-frozen beans. Stay tuned!

6/23: My more recent pour-over cups have been serviceable (other than one that was on the bitter side) but overall, not as consistent as, say, a typical single-origin roast like Zeke’s Colombia-Huila (which is fresh in my memory, as I just finished a bag). With blends, it’s impossible to get the exact same proportion of each type of bean in every cup, and I have occasionally wondered if that’s why I sometimes get inconsistent results brewing blends. However, I’ve learned over the past couple of years that brewing good filter coffee is not as subtle an art as I had originally thought, so my gut tells me that that theory is probably wrong. To that point, as of this writing, I have brewed two cups with the AeroPress and 1Zpresso JX hand grinder (see above), with no scale and no water temperature control. The first cup at grind setting 20 was OK (maybe slightly weak), and the second cup at setting 16 was very good.

I froze about half of this 1-pound bag on or around June 20, and the current plan is to thaw and brew those in early July, although that could change depending on how much coffee I buy (or don’t buy) in the meantime.

• Beans: Colombia (Huila) – single origin
  • Roaster: Zeke’s Coffee (Baltimore, MD)
  • Origin: Colombia (Huila)
  • Roast level: Medium/Light (2/8)
  • Roast date: 4/1/2025
  • Purchase date: 4/7/2025 at Green Valley Marketplace in Elkridge, MD
    Freeze date: 4/8/2025 or 4/9/2025
    Thaw date: 6/2/2025
    First cup: 6/5/2025
    Last cup: 6/16/2025
  • Process: Washed; Varietals: Caturra, Castillo
  • Tasting notes: Orange, caramel, milk chocolate
• V60:
  • 19g coffee / 300g water (1:15.8)
  • Ode: 4
  • Water at 100°C
  • Recipe: Single Cup V60 Pourover with size 2 cone, 40g bloom water and 50g pulses – finishes around 02:50
• AeroPress with Prismo:
  • 17g coffee / around 250g water (roughly 1:15)
  • JX: 20 (2 rotations)
  • Metal + paper filter
  • Pour enough water to wet grounds / stir / bloom until 0:45
  • Fill cylinder to about 1/4″ from top / stir 6-7x front to back
  • Steep until 03:00 / stir again / press slowly
• Previous bag: May 2024

I bought and froze this bag in early April, so I would have some coffee in the house when we got home from our trips in April/May. I put all of the beans into a gallon freezer bag, got as much air out of it as I could, and put the bag in the basement freezer. It stayed there a little bit longer than planned, as I ended up buying a bunch of coffee in the meantime.

My first two cups were somewhat roasty and low in acidity. I brewed cup #1 at grind setting 3, and it tasted a little bit over-extracted. Setting 4 was better balanced. 1:15 was on the strong side, so I will try 1:15.8-1:16 tomorrow. Interestingly, I see that last year, I was brewing these beans at 1:14. I can’t imagine why I would want it that strong, but it could be that I’m getting better extraction using 6 pours of 50g water (vs 5 pours of 60g water), which keeps water in the cone a little longer. I was also using a different grinder then (JX), so it’s hard to compare grind sizes. My tastes have probably evolved over the past year, as well.

Final note: As of today, I am using a new scale. For the past year or so, I have had a cheap coffee scale from Greater Goods, which I liked just fine, until the tray started wobbling and giving inconsistent readings. You get what you pay for, I guess. After doing a bunch of research and comparison, I narrowed my choices down to the Timemore Basic Mini and the Mx. Cool Katze. I ended up going with the Katze. It was about twice the price of the Timemore (though still a good bit cheaper than Fellow Tally or Acaia Pearl) but the deciding factors for me were (1) it’s made in Taiwan vs China; and (2) it has a unique retracting control panel which protects the scale during storage. It seems solidly built, has some weight to it, and has a metal tray. Feature-wise, the only thing it has over the Greater Goods scale is an automatic timer for pour-over, which I have yet to try out. One of the Timemore’s selling points was a flow rate indicator, which the Katze lacks, but I’ve somehow managed to get by without one up to now, so it wasn’t a show stopper (and, surprisingly, the $190 Fellow doesn’t have one, either). The Taiwan-made Acaia would have been a strong competitor, but it had extra features I didn’t need (Bluetooth/app) which added $30 to the price tag. Overall, the Katze seemed like the best combination of price, features, and build quality. It has worked well for one cup of coffee thus far, hopefully with many more to come.

6/6: As I had suspected I would, I liked this better at around 1:16, so I’ve updated the recipe to 19g/300g.

6/11: I brewed some of this in the AeroPress at the office (see above), and it turned out pretty good, in spite of my not using a scale and not having the grind dialed in on the hand grinder.

6/16: Finished the bag up today, and once I got it dialed in, it was very consistent from cup to cup. Except for today, I brewed a little over 38g of beans per day, and used the 1lb bag up in 11 days. This morning, I had a little over 42g left, so I made the cups a little larger so I could use all of the beans up.