Rise Up Pura Vida

lpaulriddle
  • Beans: “Pura Vida” from Rise Up Coffee Roasters (Easton, MD)
    • Roast level: Light
    • Origin: Costa Rica (Finca Las Gravilias)
    • Tasting notes from web site: Complex and very well balanced; bright with hints of honey and orange citrus. Light roast, sweet cup
    • Roast date: 6/18/2024
    • Purchase date: 7/8 or 7/9/24 at Green Valley Marketplace in Elkridge, MD
  • V60:
    • 21g to 22g coffee / 300g water
    • JX: 18 (54 clicks)
    • Water at 99°C
    • Recipe: Single Cup V60 Pourover with size 1 dripper; slow pour

I’ve been starting most of my new bags out at grind setting 20, but may switch to 18 going forward, as I seem to end up there regardless of what I’m brewing. The exception has been a couple bags of Zeke’s beans that seemed to work better with a coarser grind.

I have managed to get myself a workable pour-over setup at my office. I bought a plastic size 1 V60 cone for the office and a new coffee scale for home, and brought our old OXO food scale to the office. A couple of coworkers have electric goose-neck kettles they’ve said I could use, and we also have a cheap communal electric kettle that boils water, so there was no need for me to buy another kettle. In lieu of a grinder, I’ve been grinding the beans at home and bringing the grounds to the office. A true coffee snob might not approve, but the extra few hours between grinding and brewing doesn’t seem to make much difference with the finished product.

That all brings me to my experience with these beans: I started out at grind setting 20 and used my size 2 plastic V60, and the result was good, but not awesome. Same thing with grind setting 19. Then, I brewed a cup at work with the smaller cone (also at setting 19) and the cheap kettle. It has a regular, non-goose-neck spout, which makes it more challenging to regulate the pour rate. In spite of that, the cup tasted much better than the cup I made at home with the larger cone. So, I decided to try using my size 1 cone at home. The big difference is that it’s ceramic vs plastic, so I preheated it to avoid cooling the coffee too much during brewing. I also adjusted the grind to 18. The result was another really good cup. In general, I’ve noted that with all else equal, the size 1 V60 drains a lot faster than the size 2. These beans are no exception: with the larger cone, they finish at 2:40 to 2:50; with the smaller cone, they’re done by 2:30. With other beans, this has been a recipe for thinner-bodied cups, but these beans seem to work better with the faster drain-down. This is good to know, as it will give me something else to try with beans that I have a hard time dialing in.

Summer MTB Commute

lpaulriddle

Historically, I have not done much mountain biking in the summertime. The main reason is that the slower speeds and shorter bursts of exertion tend to get me extra hot and sweaty. Conversely, with road biking, there’s a consistent cooling breeze from air resistance, and the amount of exertion is more uniform, allowing for better regulation of body heat. The other issue I have with mountain biking in the summertime, particularly commuting to work, is poison ivy. My usual route takes me through a few exposed areas where the trail is narrow, with dense growth on either side that includes poison ivy.

It has always bugged me that there are so few days each year that I consider viable for commuting to work by MTB. In the winter, trails are frozen in the morning, but a muddy mess in the afternoon thanks to the freeze-thaw cycle. In spring, winter melt-off and rains make everything too muddy. Summer has the aforementioned issues of overheating and poison ivy. That leaves autumn as the only season where conditions are “ideal”, and now, it’s hard to ride in PVSP in the fall without getting coated in seeds from the wavyleaf basketgrass that is slowly taking over the entire watershed.

I would really like to do more mountain biking, but if I’m not getting my MTB time in while commuting, it’s tough to fit it in along with other activities like paddling (which I’m looking to extend into the colder months eventually), climbing, road biking/geocaching, etc. It seems like the answer is to stop waiting for ideal mountain biking conditions, and learn to adapt, kind of like what I’ve done with my road bike commuting over the years. To that end, today is not a day I ordinarily would have chosen to commute by MTB. It started off in the mid-70s and humid, and there is a heat advisory for the afternoon (a near-daily occurrence lately). I suited up with my usual summer biking garb, including a double-thickness Sweathawg helmet liner (one of those things that I wonder how I got along without for so many years). I rode Belmont Trail, Garrett’s Pass, Grist Mill Trail, and Soapstone/Starstruck. The shortcut trail that connects Rolling Rd to UMBC Blvd always gets too overgrown in the summertime, so I avoided it, opting instead to ride Rolling Rd to Wilkens Ave and then into UMBC via Hilltop Rd. The route had a few miles of pavement to help cool me off, and avoided areas with large amounts of PI (with the exception of a short stretch of Belmont/Morning Choice). The trails were dry (but not too dry) and fast.

On the way home, I usually enter the park via the Soapstone Trail, but the top of it is a veritable forest of poison ivy this time of year. Today, I think I’m going to try taking Foxhall Farm Rd to Vineyard Spring Trail. Another option would be to skip the Baltimore County side altogether, ride down Gun Rd, and enter the park at the railroad crossing. The former seems like it would be a better ride (other than the start along Wilkens Ave). It will be a lot hotter than this morning, so this will be a good litmus test of whether this will be a viable option in the summer. Another barrier to commuting in the summer is afternoon thunderstorms, but that hasn’t been an issue with the current heat wave, as it’s been exceptionally dry recently.

LCRC Delaware Blend

lpaulriddle
  • Beans: “Delaware Blend” from Local Coffee Roasting Co. (Roxana, DE)
    • Roast level: Medium
    • Origin: Guatemala/Colombia
    • Tasting notes from web site: smooth/chocolatey
    • Roast date: 5/27/2024
    • Purchase date: 6/17 or 6/18/24 at Three Blonde Bakers in Bethany Beach, DE
  • V60:

I bought an 8oz bag of these along with an 8oz bag of Beach Blend. I started them off at grind setting 20, but ended up at 18 mostly by accident — I forgot to change the setting after brewing the aforementioned Beach Blend, it was still pretty good, and when I’m working on two bags at once, I always prefer when I can use the same grind setting for both. Initially, it was kind of a toss-up which of these I liked better, but as the beans have aged a little bit, I think I slightly prefer these. My recent cups have had pretty good flavor and body, while the lighter-roasted Beach Blend seems to be getting a little flat. I should probably play around with the settings a bit, but the beans are almost gone. I suspect I’ll use up both of these by the end of next week. Looking forward to next year’s Delaware trip so I can get some more.

LCRC Beach Blend

lpaulriddle
  • Beans: “Beach Blend” from Local Coffee Roasting Co. (Roxana, DE)
    • Roast level: Light
    • Origin: Ethiopia/Colombia
    • Tasting notes from web site: milk chocolate/strawberry
    • Roast date: 5/27/2024
    • Purchase date: 6/17 or 6/18/24 at Three Blonde Bakers in Bethany Beach, DE
  • V60:

I bought an 8oz bag of these and an 8oz bag of “Delaware Blend” in Bethany last week, but waited until I was home to open them so I could use my pour-over setup. Nice, strong cup this morning with low acidity for a light roast. There’s definitely a slight hint of fruit. When I brew my next cup (likely tomorrow) I’ll pay more attention and see if it reminds me of strawberries as advertised. 😀

Delaware Paddling Report

lpaulriddle

I managed to get out paddling 3 times during my recent trip to Bethany Beach, DE, all in under 48 hours!! Here are some quick notes.

Delaware Breakwater East End Lighthouse: Launch is in Cape Henlopen State Park right next to the fishing pier. Need to go early-ish in the morning to avoid bad traffic through Rehoboth. $10/vehicle entry fee for out-of-state tags, paid at an automated kiosk (credit card only). We put in around 8:00am, near high tide. Total paddle was only around 2.5 miles, but lots to see along the way: dolphins, horseshoe crabs, an osprey with chicks, Lewes-Cape May Ferry route a short distance away, and (of course) the lighthouse. Water was nice and calm behind the breakwater, with occasional minor chop from boat wakes and breeze. There were a fair number of people out on the water: a few fishing boats, a whole bunch of kayaks (a few people fishing, and what appeared to be a sightseeing tour). We were able to disembark on the breakwater, walk up to the lighthouse, and find a geocache that was hidden there. It’s not for the faint-hearted, though: there is nowhere to easily tether the boats, so we roped them together and took turns. All in all, a very memorable outing. It would be a great place for sea kayaking.

Savage Ditch: This is north of Bethany about a mile past the Indian River Inlet Bridge. We came here in the evening. This is also $10/vehicle for out-of-state, paid at an honor box. I missed the launch at first and tried to follow the trail past the picnic pavilion, which was a mistake. It does go to the water, but it’s several hundred feet, and the bugs were fierce. I was swatting them the entire way, and picked up two ticks. My son found the actual launch, which is a much shorter carry and somewhat less buggy, but the put-in is on the muddy side. Once on the water, though, it was quite nice. We saw tons of gulls, lots of water turtles, and a few egrets, terns, and ducks. We didn’t paddle too far since it was close to dusk. The sunset was very nice, as was the near-full moon. Next time, I won’t forget the DEET.

Trap Pond State Park: After years of hearing people rave about this place, we finally decided to check it out. It is about a 40 minute drive from Bethany with light traffic, or 45-50 minutes with heavy beach traffic. Unfortunately, the trip was kind of a bust, as the water level was extremely low to accommodate emergency repairs to the dam. As a result, most of the really cool places to paddle were inaccessible due to shallow water. Had I done my homework ahead of time, we probably would have taken a pass this year. All the same, we did get a couple miles of paddling in, and we saw some really cool bald cypress trees. We will come back here at some point when things are back to normal.

Amity Costa Rica (Terrazu)

lpaulriddle
  • Beans: “Costa Rica (Terrazu)” from Amity Coffee Roasters (Greenwood, DE)
    • Roast level: Medium (wet process)
    • Origin: Costa Rica
    • Tasting notes from bag: clean sweetness / floral
    • Roast date: 6/11/2024
    • Purchase date: 6/16/2024 at T S Smith & Sons in Bridgeville, DE
  • AeroPress:
    • 20-21g coffee / 250g water
    • JX: 18 (54 clicks)
    • Hot water from Cuisinart machine (pretty hot but not boiling)
    • Prismo with metal and paper filters
    • Pour to 250g and stir 6-7x; steep until 2:45; stir 6-7x; press slowly, finishing up somewhere around 4:15

I have brewed this recipe 5 or 6 times now at our beach house, and the cups have been pretty consistently good. I’ll almost certainly be bringing some home, so I’ll try it in the V60 next week and see how that compares.

6/28: At home, I’ve been using the same recipe with my gooseneck kettle and 95°C water. The past few cups have been very slightly bitter. I tried dropping the temperature to 90°, but it still was not quite as good as last week’s cups. I only had about 30g of beans left, so today, I brewed all of them with the V60 (size 2) and 450g of water at 95°, and I also backed the grind off 6 clicks to setting 20. The result was a very good, smooth cup. Seems that making the grind slightly coarser is the ticket with these beans as they start to age. They were only 17 days past roast date when I used them up.

lpaulriddle.com re-architecting

lpaulriddle

I needed to get lpaulriddle.com moved off an old EC2 instance running Ubuntu 16.04, which has been EOL since 2021. About a year ago, I started the process by moving all of the services to Docker containers. Then I moved all of the persistent data (web pages, images, etc) to a EFS filesystem, and I moved my MariaDB database to RDS. After that, I kind of forgot about it until just recently. I saw that AWS was doing a promotion for its new t4g.small instances for 750 free compute hours per month through 2024, so I spun one up and worked on moving the services over. It went more smoothly than I had expected. This is what I did:

  1. Installed Docker and docker-compose on the new instance
  2. Tweaked AWS security groups to allow the new instance to mount the EFS filesystem and connect to the RDS database
  3. Copied my Github ssh credentials over to the new instance
  4. Cloned my Git repo to the new instance
  5. Copied secrets (.env) into the git tree
  6. Built all of my images (docker-compose build)
  7. Started containers (docker-compose up -d) – I actually did these one at a time, but this would have worked as well
  8. Tested everything out by modifying my /etc/hosts file
  9. Disassociated my elastic IP address from the old EC2 instance and assigned it to the new instance

This all went off without a hitch, and everything seems to be working. Functionally, the new instance is ARM vs x64, and the OS is Amazon Linux 2023, which is yum based, vs Ubuntu, which is based on apt/dpkg. This post will serve as a test that I can create blog posts using the new infrastructure.

Next, I think I’m going to move my database off RDS and back onto a MariaDB container with the database in EFS. RDS has turned out to be a little bit pricier than I had expected, and I think it’s overkill for my rather modest needs (basically a single WordPress blog and a MediaWiki instance).

Zeke’s Market Blend (second bag)

lpaulriddle
  • Beans: “Market Blend” from Zeke’s Coffee (Baltimore, MD)
    • Roast level: Medium (5/8)
    • Origin: Central and South America
    • Roast date: 5/13/2024
    • Purchase date: (TBD) at Green Valley Marketplace in Elkridge, MD
  • AeroPress:
    • 18-19g coffee / 250g water (1:13 to 1:14)
    • JX: 25 (75 clicks)
    • Water at 90°C
    • Prismo with metal and paper filters
    • Pour to 50g, stir to wet, and bloom until 0:45; top up to 250g and stir 5-6x; cover and steep until 3:00; stir 5-6x; press slowly

This is my second bag of these. I previously bought them last October, and I settled on kind of a convoluted V60 method where I used hotter water to bloom the grounds and then diluted the water to cool it before brewing. I didn’t want to go to that much trouble, so this time, I just tried V60 with 90°C water and grind setting 20(?). This was similar to what I did the first few times with the last bag, and the results were similar, too — it was on the bitter side. Since the beans are ever so slightly on the darker side of medium, I decided to try the AeroPress, which I don’t believe I had used at any point with the last bag. After an initial bitter cup at grind setting 20, I settled on the above, which was smooth and chocolaty. Rereading my first linked post from October, it looks like I ended up at a slightly finer grind setting (23) with V60, which is interesting, because I usually end up grinding finer with the AeroPress than with pourover. However, every bag is different, and taste always wins out over what seems logical on paper.

5/27: For the past couple of cups, I have reverted to a similar technique to last fall’s, using the AeroPress instead of V60: Heat water to 99C; pour to 50-60g; stir to wet; cool kettle water to 82-86C; bloom until 0:45; top up to 250g and stir 5-6x; cover and steep until 3:00; stir 5-6x; press slowly. Today’s cup was the best so far, and I used 20g coffee at grind setting 22 (2 turns + 6 clicks). It was a nice, smooth, rich cup. This brewing technique seems to work well with Zeke’s Market Blend, but I’ve never tried it with any other beans. I wonder if it would be worth trying with some other medium to dark roasts. The only downside is that it adds an extra step to the process, and sometimes (particularly first thing in the morning) I’d rather just keep things simple.

Second and third paddle outings of the season

lpaulriddle

So far, I’ve done well with my informal New Year’s Resolution to get out on the water earlier in the season. I’ve been out the past three Tuesday mornings, each time launching from Solley’s Cove Park. Last week, I paddled most of the way down Marley Creek, which is the longest creek upstream of the launch. Cathy came along as well. The last time I paddled here was early November 2022, and that day, I identified several potential hiding places for a geocache series I’m thinking about putting out. I checked each of the sites last week, and all but one still seemed viable. I have yet to paddle all the way to the headwaters of Marley Creek, which looks like around 6 miles round-trip, or a little bit farther if I check out all of the side channels along the way. Today, I paddled Furnace Creek and Bell’s Cove, which lie to the north of Marley Creek. I am pretty sure I did the same paddle last year — it’s a shorter creek than Marley, so I paddled all the way to the headwaters. My somewhat meandering route ended up being 5.4 miles round trip. I identified a few geocache sites along here as well, though there aren’t as many good ones as there are along Marley. A lot of the shoreline is severely eroding, a huge amount of it is developed (as is the norm in Anne Arundel County) and some of the more natural areas have posted private property signs.

I am working on trying to find a good setup to haul 2 kayaks plus our new SUP on the van at the same time. It looks like I can fit J-hooks for two kayaks outside the rack towers on either side of the van. The SUP mount should then fit in the middle. I have a love-hate relationship with J-hooks, as it seems like about 50% of the time, I don’t get the kayak side-on enough when I’m hefting it up there, and it ends up partially horizontal, requiring me to “finesse” it back and forth until it slips into the J-hook, all the while hoping it doesn’t fall. If I can get my loading technique down, I suspect the hooks will work OK on the van, though, at least for the short term. The Thule Hullavator loader looks nice, but I don’t think I’d be able to get two of them up there in addition to a SUP mount (and they cost $900 each). A trailer is another option, but most of them can’t accommodate a 16-17′ sea kayak. So, at least for now, I’m back to the J-hooks.

Also on the subject of kayak loading, as often happens this time of year, I’ve managed to tweak my lower back. My back is in remarkably good shape for all the abuse I’ve put it through over the years, but I’m not in my 20s any more, so I have to be more careful with it, which means not bending over and lifting heavy stuff (the old “lift with your knees” cliché). I’ve found that when my back is acting up, it doesn’t like me picking anything heavy up off the ground at all, whether I “lift with my knees” or bend over at the waist. That presents an issue with loading kayaks, as they’re heavy, and they’re usually on the ground. For today, I took the J-hooks off the Honda Civic and put a set of cradles and rollers on that had been on the van. Then, I used a rope extension on the kayak’s pull handles, so I could lift the boat up one end at a time without bending at all. Finally, I used my trusty boat loader extension that slides out of the crossbar and supports one end of the kayak while I lift the other side up. The combo worked out pretty well, and I managed to do my loading and unloading without aggravating my back.

Zeke’s Colombia Huila

lpaulriddle
  • Beans: “Colombia (Huila)” from Zeke’s Coffee (Baltimore, MD)
    • Roast level: Light (2/8)
    • Roast date: 4/20/24 or 4/28/24 (second digit of day hard to read)
    • Purchase date: 5/2/24 at Green Valley Marketplace in Elkridge, MD
    • Process: washed
    • Tasting notes: Orange, caramel, milk chocolate
  • V60:
    • 21g coffee / 300g water (1:14.3)
    • JX: 18 (54 clicks)
    • Water at 99°C
    • Recipe: Single Cup V60 Pourover with slow pour

I started these at setting 19 a couple of days ago, and it seemed like it needed to be a little finer, so I went with 18 today. This was a good cup. It will be interesting to see how I need to adjust things over the next couple of weeks. Some of it depends on the actual roast date. If it was 4/28, I expect I’ll need to tweak things quite a bit; if it was 4/20, probably a little less so. A couple of the bags on the shelf clearly read 4/28, so I’m wondering if mine is actually 4/28 also, with the bottom half of the 8 chopped off. But, it could also be 4/20. Who knows?

5/11: I have settled on setting 19 for my most recent several cups, and they have been fairly consistent, with some slightly better than others, but overall pretty good. I can definitely taste a hint of orange, as advertised, and the overall roastiness balances the acidity out nicely.