Call Your Coffee, Call Your Brew Method in Baltimore

Our pal Jay Caragay has always talked about how he wanted to take coffee up to a five-star restaurant service level.  And he just might as his newest shop in Baltimore.

We're mentioning it here because as you guys know, we've played around with every single brew method Jay is using.  And some of us (OK, TWO of us) know how to use them all.  But having the nads to not only use seven brew methods (Abid, Aeropress, Cafe Solo, Chemex, Press Pot, Pourover, Siphon), but also to make recommendations on which method each of the nine coffees being offered is the "best" for that method is pretty out there for a city not heretofore known for much more than crabcakes and red sauce Italian.

Clearly Jay is pushing the envelope with this new project. Baltimore and Pittsburgh are not too dissimilar demographically so it's going to be interesting to follow Jay's progress once he opens in January.

Funny thing is, we highly respect Jay, but just looking at his initial recommendations we'd already disagree on the El Injerto Pacamara, which to us is clearly better in an Abid (as are all our current Stumptown offerings).  Then again, we don't have his press pot recipe and he doesn't have our Abid recipe.  So it could easily be a matter of how the coffee is dosed and prepared.

His recommendation on brewing the Santuario on an Aeropress means we'll be dusting ours off this weekend to give it a go with our Santuario stock.  Sad to say although we've demoed the Aeropress a hundred times and sold a few dozen, we rarely consider it for a production brew at the shop.  Good to know someone is out there doing it.

The thing is, coffee is that flexible.  And at the same time, it isn't.  Jay and Baltimore are about to find out how elastic coffee can be. We wish him success and can't wait to get down and visit.

Comments

[Michael]

My one regret about my visit to Baltimore was that we didn't get to Jay's (old) shop. We did, however, serendipitously run into the man at Woodberry Kitchen. He was nice enough to chat with us for a while. What a nice guy. Can't wait to try his wares the next time I'm in Baltimore.

[Michelle]

Thanks Rich :)

[Jay C.]

Thank you Rich and Melanie for the very kind words.

In many ways, it serendipitous to find both this post and the tweet that spurred our earlier discussion. I'm not out trolling the Internet very much and, at the constant and insistent urging of some tech savvy friends, was setting up my twitter to feed to facebook and came across your tweet about the aeropress.

Anyway, I'm not touting our default brew to be the "best" method to try any of the coffees we will be offering. To be quite honest, that "best" brew is probably impacted by a variety of factors: age of bean, accuracy of roast, accuracy of the baristas doing the sample brews - all of these are fallible factors that could easily skew the results.

Then there's the question of how accurate will next weeks' roast be to this weeks'? How many days out of the roaster is that default method accurate? Maybe we'll discover that aeropress is great for X days and then the clever is better after Z days? Who knows - in many ways, it's just a crapshoot.

Which is why we're offering the coffees brewed via any of the brew methods. There's still so much to work out and to learn. Offering all these coffees with these brew methods by the cup to order is going to be a monumental task. Compound that with baristas who will be taking their first shift the day we open and I'm expecting it to be a tough couple of weeks as we work out the kinks and find our groove.

But I'm excited to have these great baristas along for the ride!

And Michael - it was a pleasure meeting you and spending some time chatting at Woodberry.

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