Away to the Mountains

One of our dearest friends and for many decades our most trusted veterinarian, who cared for our cows and other animals with ever so much heart and skill, invited us to visit a historic Adirondack camp the other day.

It was stunning.....I won't even try to describe it. If you have ever visited such a place you will know....magic.....

As were the lakes, bays, and back roads she also took us to visit. Such a happy time and such fun to put "faces on the places" we have talked about for years. I never got farther into the 'Dacks than Pine Lake until I was out on my own. My first Adirondack trip was to camp out in the rough at Tirrell Pond. That was like coming home to something I had never seen before. Deja vu and all. (We were the crazy ones who packed in butter, potatoes, and butternut squash to cook in foil in the coals for a feast. They were heavy but worth it.)

Anyone know what these giant birch-like trees might be?

Another time we went just after dusk on a shockingly cold winter night and heard frozen trees exploding all around us. Something else you would never forget.

This time we went up the other way through Old Forge and Inlet....

And fell in love all over again, with a fresh and different aspect of the Adirondacks than where we usually visit, tending more to the Speculator, Indian Lake, up to Tupper side of things, having always gone there for no particular reason.

Also touched heads and exchanged greetings with one of the sweetest kitties I have ever met. Way to go Norman.

Thanks Kris, for a day we will remember for a very long time....now to arrange that warbler watch morning...... 

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Fifteen Years on the Erie Canal

A bit of Erie Canal history we visit several times a week

Or at least that's how the song went in my head last night as we listened to the High Kings play it at the Egg in Albany. They sang a slightly different, but also correct, version mentioning fifteen miles instead.

Can you believe that according to George Murphy they learned it just for our enjoyment at the show last night as they had made the trip from Albany to Buffalo so many times? How awesome is that! I sure enjoyed it, having learned the song in grade school and loved stories of the canal as long as I can remember. One of my favorite books when I was a kid was Molly's Hannibal, which you might enjoy if you like kids' historical fiction. The boss's great grandparents worked on the canal at one time.

There was plenty of other new-to-us material, as well as enough older favorites to get the whole crowd out of their seats, clapping, singing along, and downright enthusiastically at that.

Great fun, with the added treat of some lovely young Irish dancers from a local dance school performing to the rousing Whiskey in the Jar.

Thanks Becky for the tickets, and the boss for driving, especially for the trip home in greasy, gleaming rain that made it hard to see the road. I realized last night how many times these guys' songs are featured on the jukebox which plays pretty much continuously in the back of my mind. Not a bad thing.

Taken looking down at the water in one of the remaining locks on the canal

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Happy Birthday

To Amber, our very dear new daughter-in-law. We love and miss you guys and hope you have a wonderful day and a great weekend.

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More Is More: LA’s Dayglow Coffee Maxes Out The Multi-Roaster Cafe

Dayglow Coffee could only exist in Los Angeles. Opened in Silverlake on Sunset Boulevard in late 2017, the cafe from Tohm Ifergan, formerly of Portola Coffee Roasters in nearby Costa Mesa, is a neon-bright beacon not so unlike the city itself. A multi-roaster that sources coffees from some of the world’s most notable roasteries, Dayglow is, like LA, at once itself and a component of its parts.  

Ifergan founded the shop to not only provide customers with unique coffees but a side of information as well. Its interior has a clean aesthetic, with the seating and bar arranged in such a way as to encourage customers to interact with baristas as much as with each other, facilitating conversations about individual coffees, their roasteries, and means to prepare them at home.

Tohm Ifergan of Dayglow Coffee

Dayglow’s menu is intended to be simple and approachable, whether you’re familiar with specialty coffee or not. It’s divided into 10 different categories, written in relative plain-speak: espresso, milk, sweetened, signature, tea, filter, handbrew, tonic, funk, and cold coffee. 

Ifergan’s experience crafting coffee cocktails is on full display here. One recent run of Signature Series menu items were all named after Wes Anderson movies, and included the Hotel Chevalier, which combined distilled coffee, fresh lime, and coconut cream, all garnished with mint and grated nutmeg. Another option, the Darjeeling Limited, was a mixture of distilled juniper berries, Tanzanian coffee from King State Coffee Roasters, Darjeeling tea, tonic, thyme, and sweet lime. Having a director’s cut menu is quintessentially Ifergan.

The Hotel Chevalier

In addition to the Signature Series, at any given time Dayglow carries coffees from between 10 and 20 roasters, half international and half domestic. Ifergan and his staff blind-cup samples to determine their specific offerings for the week, and stock their shelves and online marketplace with a dizzying variety of options as well. 

They have a robust coffee subscription program that allows customers to sample from the Dayglow stable of roasters, and offers varying tiers depending on how much coffee you go through each month. And these are the coffees you want. They’ve already featured the likes of Koppi Coffee Roasters, The Barn Coffee Roasters, Little Wolf Coffee, Color Coffee Roasters,  The Coffee Collective, Drop Coffee Roasters, Hex Coffee, and Madcap Coffee Roasters, to name only a few. 

But subscribers have access to more than just amazing coffees. Instead, subscribing to Dayglow gives access to in-house training videos, brewing blogs, and a community on Dayglow’s website who share educational materials on topics ranging from coffee-specific brewing methods to theories on extraction and much more. Dayglow’s online presence feels more like a publication than a marketplace and acts as both a library for home-brewers as well as a feedback medium for Ifergan and Dayglow’s use. By sourcing the opinions of their community, Dayglow can alter their menu, brewing techniques, and coffee selection to suit customer taste.

This kind of customer feedback loop is second nature for Ifergan, who built his success at Portola’s Theorem bar on direct interactions between himself and the people he served. Tasting his coffee there was to have an experience in your taste in coffee, but Theorem itself was intimate and dark and comprised of a handful of seats, a black bar, and a sliding glass door.

Dayglow is an evolution of that experience. One that embraces the city it calls home, holds its doors wide open, and lets the light rush in.

Dayglow is located at 3206 Sunset Blvd, Los Angeles. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

David Palazuelos is a freelance contributor. This is David Palazuelos’ first article for Sprudge.

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ARIIA by Azora in the Norquay Village

ARIIA by Azora Group is a new townhouse development located in the Norquay Village, East Vancouver. This project will offer a collection of 10 two and three bedroom beautiful townhomes for the modern family, situated in a serene tree-lined setting. ARIIA offers a stellar location with easy access to other cities from the nearby skytrain station, or arrive at Downtown Vancouver in just 15 minutes by car. Recently there have been community enhancements, including bike routes and public spaces such as Slocan and Norquay Park, as well as the community fruit orchard.

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Finally!

A half-way decent shot of a Black-throated Green Warbler. I have several embarrassingly awful shots of them. However, today the yard was full of them. I swear every third bird was a BTGW. This one was foraging in the Winesap apple tree and held still for at least one whole second....just enough...

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In Defense Of Diner Coffee

In a recent Chicago Tribune article reporter Nick Kindelsperger and Ipsento Coffee founding partner Tim Taylor visit an undisclosed diner to once and for all determine the objective quality of diner coffee. Using a refractometer, National Coffee Association and Specialty Coffee Association TDS recommendations, and some “[scribbled] down equations,” Kindelsperger and Taylor determine that diner coffee is weak—powerful weak—and terrible. And they couldn’t be any more wrong.

The thing is, they aren’t wrong. By all quantifiable specialty standards, even at their most generous, diner coffee just doesn’t measure up. But I’ll be DAMNED if I let anyone besmirch the good name of diner coffee. Yes, according to specialty coffee rubrics it isn’t as good as specialty coffee, but doesn’t quite seem like a fair test, now does it? According to the Zac scale, none of you jabronies are as Zac as I am, so I must be better, right? No? Sounds like an unfair “test” everyone who isn’t me is doomed to fail at, you say? I never thought of it that way.

And here are some more “facts” for you: diner coffee has brought more people into specialty coffee than any specialty coffee has, maybe all specialty coffee combined. And when I say diner coffee, I mean specifically the stuff that has sat on the heating element for at least two hours, served at 3:00am in an 24-hour greasy spoon where everyone still smokes inside—including the grizzled septuagenarian server with the heart of gold—even though it’s waaaaaay illegal, the sort of place where you leave you smelling like death and with a stomach ache from drinking at least eight cups of coffee. THAT is diner coffee. And if you want to get really real about which is “better,” the number of times diner coffee has met or exceeded my expectations far FAR FAR exceeds that of specialty coffee.

There is a whole generation of coffee professionals—of which I consider myself one, assuming coffee journalism falls under the coffee professional umbrella—for whom drinking diner coffee was “being into coffee.” That was our starting point. It wasn’t Instagrammable eight-tier tulips or being a barista because it was now the “cool” job, or hell, even because your favorite shop home makes their own vanilla syrup for their lattes. It was diner coffee. Burnt, crusty, loaded with more and more cream and sugar as the night progressed to gird the stomach, diner coffee. Mwah. Perfection.

I weep for the next wave of coffee professionals, whose introduction to the whole show are shops that close at 7:00pm. Coffee doesn’t stop when the sun goes down. For many, that’s when it all gets started. Yeah, maybe we all have that a-ha! moment with a natural that really turned us on to specialty coffee, but you know what started that whole journey? It was probably a cup of blueberry flavored coffee at the “fancy” diner, the one with like 20 different options that you could mix and match and everyone had a “favorite,” probably a blend of no less than three different flavors. Half vanilla, quarter Irish cream, quarter cinnamon, and juuuuust a splash of hazelnut for me.

I understand the point of the article. Kindelsprenger and Taylor are trying to show the “coffee is just coffee” crowd that there is, in fact, a difference between pre-ground commodity grade coffee and specialty coffee, and to do so in a quantifiable and scientifically repeatable way. It’s a laudable goal and I don’t begrudge them for it. But once you start calling diner coffee “terrible,” well, now we have a problem. So just remember, if specialty coffee is seeing more devotees than ever before, it’s because it is standing on the shoulders of giants.

You’re not as tall as you think you are.

Zac Cadwalader is the news editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.

Image © Adobe Stock

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More Things

Tall tall trees

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The Things you See

Question Mark

Winterberry

A Fluffy butt

Wilson's Warbler

A cutie heading off to school

Carolina Wren

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New City, New Problems: St. Louis’ Sump Coffee Finds A Home In Nashville

Though the cafe celebrated it’s one year anniversary on September 18, the story of Sump Coffee’s arrival in Nashville started more than three years ago. Their involvement in the striking oneC1TY development was, according to owner Scott Carey, a case of “dumb luck.” The developers mentioned the idea of including a coffee shop in the complex to Gerard Craft of Italian eatery Pastaria, who opened his own location within the development. Craft suggested Sump as a candidate, and a representative was dispatched to St. Louis to check out the brand and the coffee. They liked it, and hands were shaken.

But the coffee climate in Nashville changed a lot in the intervening years. New cafe after new cafe opened, leading Carey to question more closely how his cafe should fit into the growing community.

“The market here is very mature and so we have to ask ourselves what are we doing? Who are we? And how do we communicate that to people?” says Carey. And like many business owners have found before him, even the best-tested practices don’t always translate city to city.

Sump owner Scott Carey

At first, Carey expected that what worked in St. Louis would also work in Nashville. “But that’s not what the market wants or what the location is dictating,” admitted Carey after Sump Nashville’s first year. Though Carey tried to bring the “slow bar” mindset of his St. Louis location to Tennessee, demand forced new methods. His team has had to quickly adapt in ways they hadn’t previously planned—like implementing a Ground Control II batch brewer. Other issues, like finding a consistent quality milk supplier, have taken time to perfect. However, just as the cafe has changed over the course of the year, so has its surrounding neighborhood.

As the area has thrived, Sump Nashville has come to draw an early-morning crowd of commuter-regulars—hence the batch brew. This part of Midtown Nashville has drawn restaurants and grocers that are themselves magnets, allowing Sump to fit right in as a coffee destination. “How we’re thinking about the model and how we’re thinking about the coffee goes hand in glove with how this part of the city is growing,” Carey says.

To that end, a stage has recently been added to a grassy area just outside Sump’s doors for live music, movie screenings, and other events. And in the coffee-specific realm, Sump hosts brewing classes and other coffee events, like open sessions for customers to bring in coffee from any roaster and learn how to brew it better. “We don’t sell a finished product,” Carey says. “We have to do a better job, without being pedantic, of providing accessibility and a doorway to go home and have a good experience.”

Functionality and volume were at the heart of the equipment choices for the Nashville location. They eschewed the Slayer espresso machine that is used in St. Louis for a Kees van der Westen Spirit, which boasts volumetric programming capabilities. This promotes consistency while freeing the barista up to engage with the customer. A Poursteady automated pour-over coffee machine fits this mindset as well. “If you’re manually brewing, you can’t really create that engagement,” says Carey. “It’s more like being a sommelier. They don’t make the wine, but they know a lot about it. So their goal is more engagement.”

Opening a shop five hours southeast from his original location brought about unseen challenges and insights, Carey says, but he appreciates the challenge. “It adds so much depth to how I think about the coffee and the business that I didn’t have before,” he says. These insights, although hard-earned, have been rewarding. He’s committed to the two existing Sump locations, but still has his eyes to the future. “The goal is just to figure it out, and if we get this figured out, I’d like to open up in another market.”

For now, Carey is focusing on what’s already in front of him and learning everything he can. “Opening here has definitely broadened my worldview and caused me to reevaluate some thinking and maybe some of the absolutes I have.”

“It’s still an exploration,” he says. “Maybe I was more naïve than I thought… but I think sometimes being naïve and not completely digesting all the details allows you to do something risky. And now I’m figuring out what that means.”

Sump Coffee is located at 8 City Boulevard, Nashville. Visit their official website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Josh Rank is a freelance contributor based in Nashville. This is Josh Rank’s first article for Sprudge.

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