Loud Cups

This time on your favorite once-every-eleven-weeks coffee podcast, we discuss travel brewing — making coffee while you’re on the road, or in an unfamiliar kitchen, or in some other situation where your gear arsenal is out of reach and you just have to wing it. We also defy the laws of space-time and travel into the future (which is now the less-distant past) to tell you about Mercy Corps’s “support a coffee grower” holiday gift promotion, which can help you give back to an economically suppressed farmer who may have cultivated the very beans in your bag. Other topics broached: Malia Obama; peach rotgut; the maple-tinged smell of dusty window blinds; why we haven’t done a show in a while. Links: Cuvee Coffee, Heart & Soul Tea Shop, Support a coffee grower through Mercy Corps. Music: The Alan Parsons Project – Sirius, Noriyuki Iwadare – Godot ~ The Fragrance of Dark Coffee, Miles Davis – Summertime.

In this brief and bittersweet paean to summertime, we brew Kuma’s Sumatra Tano Batak two ways over ice, talk about the S Filter Kickstarter campaign by Kaffeologie, and plead shamelessly for your glowing iTunes review. Links: S Filter Kickstarter, Kuma Coffee. Music: Vena – Party Rock.

Connor just got back from a vacation to Italy, the country where espresso was born, and apparently the country where it’s pretty hard to find a good shot of espresso. This week the Loud Cups duo is joined by Stefan Nickum (a.k.a. Tenderman) in a discussion of national identity, innovation, tradition, elegance, mouthfeel, and the anthropology of food and drink. We also confuse the Pantheon with the Parthenon, and compare two very different Ethiopian coffees, one by Portland’s Heart Roasters and one by San Francisco’s Sightglass Coffee. Links: Heart, Sightglass, Tenderman. Music: EXO-K – “What Is Love”.

What happens when you use a Chemex brewer and a Clever dripper to do up the same bean two different ways? What kind of coffee would you recommend as someone’s very first specialty coffee experience? Does Guatemala Bella Carmona from Kuma Coffee taste like beef broth, cake batter, or both? Stick our brand new flavor in your ear to find out the answers to these questions and more.

We headed down to Portland, Oregon in a rented Nissan Versa with a terrible sound system to take in the Specialty Coffee Association of America’s 2012 Expo, where the nation’s coffee elite vied for the USBC titles of best barista and best brewer in the nation. It was a debauched weekend of coffee, beer, food, blue skies, golden sunshine, and fine dessert sherry. The experience was ours; now, through this podcast, let it become yours. TIME.