Less Is More

There is a rather pervasive myth about coffee, namely that the darker the roast the stronger the brew. The truth is that there are two different and sometimes competing flavors, one inherent to the bean and the other a product of the roasting process. From a roaster’s perspective, I want to taste the coffee, not the roast. Much of what makes coffee interesting to me is in fact the complexity of the coffee, some or much of which gets lost the darker you roast and delicate flavor oils are broken down by excessive heat.

I strongly suspect that the myth of the dark roast is driven more by market realities than consumer taste. While light roasts have a lot of flavor within the first couple of weeks of roasting, the flavor oils are delicate and begin to oxidize outside the window of time, rendering the beans largely tasteless. By comparison, the burnt outside of dark roasted beans have a much more enduring, if less interesting, flavor that outlasts light roast coffees. Since most roasters can’t get their coffee beans on the shelves, much less put them in consumers hands, within a week or two of roasting, it doesn’t make much sense to sell light roasted coffees that are only really good for a couple of weeks. So, instead they sell dark roasted or artificially flavored coffees, both of which don’t reflect the beans natural depth and complexity.

Hello Sun

It may be awhile before our hearing returns, but Qualia’s staff survived our first Caribbean Festival, a parade along Georgia Avenue that includes a stream of flat bed trucks loaded with oversized sound systems turned up to 11. It’s actually a very lively event with deep cultural roots and exotic fanfare. Here are some pictures from in front of the shop.

A Fresh Experiment

A couple of folks from the Washingtonian Magazine stopped by this morning for an informal coffee tasting. I wanted to impress upon them the true meaning of freshness. So last night, I ran a little experiment. I ground three batches of the same bean an hour apart, so that I had one coffee brewed from just ground beans, one with beans that had been ground an hour previous and another 2 hours previous.

Three cups of Kenyan, fresh ground, one hour old, and two hours old.

I was a little disappointed that I could not tell much of a difference between the three cups. Luckily, just then my girlfriend stopped by the shop. Unaware that the cups were all the same coffee, I asked her to try them and tell me what she thought. She identified a distinct brightness in the fresh ground cup, a creaminess in the one hour cup and thought the third tasted relatively flat.

I decided to go ahead and test it out on my visitors this morning. Interestingly, the one who was a seasoned coffee drinker had a hard time telling much difference between the cups while the other, not a big coffee drinker, noticed more differences. The result was a mixed bag, but I hope that I got my point across, namely that the flavor of coffee is dynamic and noticeably affected by its freshness.

The Qualia Chorus

Qualia Coffee is now listed on google maps, yelp and and menupages. Feel free to add your, uhhmm, rave reviews…

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Qualia Reopens

Qualia reopened today to little fanfare. If you haven’t stop by yet, come check us out. I have been working hard to create a unique and gratifying coffee experience. All coffees are served within a week of roasting, most just within days. Qualia is also the only coffeehouse in the world to feature the Brew-O-Lator 5000 one-cup-at-a-time hand-poured coffee maker.

The Owen-ater on the Brew-O-Lator

This past weekend we even brought in the big guns, a couple of coffee spokesmodels all the way from New York.

Amanda and Lauren handing out free cold-brew samples in front of Qualia

Qualia Opens April 24

Qualia Coffeehouse officially opens on April 24.

3917 Georgia Ave, NW Washington DC

The New Exercise Drink

More good scientifical news about coffee.

Coffee Lessens the Pain of Exercise

livescience.com – Tue Mar 31, 1:37 pm ET

That cup of coffee that many gym rats, bikers and runners swill before a workout does more than energize them. It kills some of the pain of athletic exertion, a new study suggests. And it works regardless of whether a person already had a coffee habit or not.

Caffeine works on a system in the brain and spinal cord (the adenosine neuromodulatory system) that is heavily involved in pain processing, says University of Illinois kinesiology and community health professor Robert Motl. And since caffeine blocks adenosine, the biochemical that plays an important role in energy transfer and thus exercise, he speculated that it could reduce pain.

So the researcher, a former competitive cyclist, divided 25 fit, college-aged males into two distinct groups: subjects whose everyday caffeine consumption was extremely low to non-existent, and those with an average caffeine intake of about 400 milligrams a day, the equivalent of three to four cups of coffee.

Unexpected results

After completing an initial exercise test in the lab on a stationary bike to determine maximal oxygen consumption or aerobic power, subjects returned for two monitored high-intensity, 30-minute exercise sessions.

An hour prior to each session, cyclists – who had been instructed not to consume caffeine during the prior 24-hour period – were given a pill. On one occasion, it contained a dose of caffeine measuring 5 milligrams per kilogram of body weight (equivalent to two to three cups of coffee); the other time, they received a placebo.

During both exercise periods, subjects’ perceptions of quadriceps muscle pain was recorded at regular intervals, along with data on oxygen consumption, heart rate and work rate.

“What we saw is something we didn’t expect,” Motl said. “Caffeine-naïve individuals and habitual users have the same amount of reduction in pain during exercise after caffeine (consumption).”

The results are detailed in the April edition of the International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism. Co-authors included Steven P. Broglio of the University of Illinois and Sigurbjorn A. Arngrimsson of the Center for Sport and Health Sciences, Iceland University of Education.

“Clearly, if you regularly consume caffeine, you have to have more to have that bigger, mental-energy effect,” Motl said. “But the tolerance effect is not ubiquitous across all stimuli. Even brain metabolism doesn’t show this tolerance-type effect. That is, with individuals who are habitual users versus non-habitual users, if you give them caffeine and do brain imaging, the activation is identical. It’s really interesting why some processes show tolerance and others don’t.”

Regarding the outcome of the current research, he said, it may be that tolerance to caffeine plays no role in the way it diminishes pain during exercise.

Motl said one of the next logical steps for his research team would be to conduct studies with rodents in order to better understand the biological mechanism for caffeine in reducing pain.

“If we can get at the biological mechanism, we can begin to understand why there may or may not be this kind of tolerance.”

Will it help you win?

Motl previously has conducted other studies on the relationship between physical activity and caffeine, and considered such variables as exercise intensity, dose of caffeine, anxiety sensitivity and gender. A future research direction might be to determine caffeine’s effect on sport performance.

“We’ve shown that caffeine reduces pain reliably, consistently during cycling, across different intensities, across different people, different characteristics. But does that reduction in pain translate into an improvement in sport performance?” he said.

Meanwhile, the current research could prove encouraging for a range of people, including the average person who wants to become more physically active to realize the health benefits.

“One of the things that may be a practical application, is if you go to the gym and you exercise and it hurts, you may be prone to stop doing that because pain is an aversive stimulus that tells you to withdraw,” Motl said. “So if we could give people a little caffeine and reduce the amount of pain they’re experiencing, maybe that would help them stick with that exercise.”

The Name Has Landed

Perhaps the only thing more difficult in the process of opening the coffee shop than navigating DC’s bureaucracy has been settling on a name. With the help of numerous people and a lot (I mean a lot) of soul searching, I have decided to call the shop…

A philosophical term, Qualia are the subjective experiences of the human senses, such as the feeling you get from seeing a rose or savoring a delicious cup of coffee. At Qualia, we will strive to create a whole new experience in fresh coffee.

So look for our grand opening in April. Yeah!

www.qualiacoffee.com

Coffeehouse Gets Press

The Washington Business Journal featured me in their Top Shelf column published yesterday. Here’s what they had to say:

“Caffeine High » Joel Finkelstein has been selling his home-roasted coffee as a hobby for years now. Soon he will be in the caffeine business full time.

Finkelstein has decided to rent a commercially zoned row house at 3917 Georgia Ave. NW in Petworth to sell his coffee line, Fresh Off The Roast. The former freelance journalist also is opening a full-service coffee shop. His coffee was previously available at the now-defunct Western Market, an open-air market in Adams Morgan.

Finkelstein says he approaches coffee as a connoisseur’s drink (he can talk for hours about roasting beans yourself and the freshness and flavor it brings), and he plans to distinguish his product by roasting and selling beans that he knows the exact origins of — often right down to the farmer’s name.

Finkelstein is aiming for a March opening for his yet-to-be-named store. He is brainstorming with some George Washington University marketing students on ideas for names. Talk about low overhead.”

Construction Is Complete

It’s been awhile since I last posted, but now without good cause. I have been very busy overseeing (getting in the way of) the final construction. I think it came out really great and once again I have to give a lot of the credit to my contractor David Robertson of Something Different Contracting. I still have to get through three more DC inspections (fire, health, ummm fire again?) and a lots of bureaucratic red tape. There is furniture and supplies to buy and lots of small details to address. But I am finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. So this might be a good time to update you on some of what I have been doing this past month. For one, I have settled on a name for the coffeehouse, which I will announce soon. I also have been meeting with some students from GW’s business school who are helping me define a comprehensive marketing strategy for Fresh Off the Roast. In an unexpected development, buzz about the shop has helped me make some new relationships in the industry that will enable me to offer a number of new direct-from-the-farm coffees. And finally, I have been working on a unique brewing apparatus for the shop that will expand on the success we have had brewing one cup at a time at the market stands. So stay tuned.