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.