Tag Archives: specialty coffee

Episode Nine: The Double R Coffee House

Coffee Canon Episode Nine: The Double R Coffee House

Coffee’s history includes examples of shops and cafes that didn’t fit their historical context.  On this episode of Coffee Canon, we deep-dive into one of these; a shop that was opened in 1919, but bears a striking resemblance to modern artisan coffee shops. The Double R Coffee House was ahead of its time, and its owners bear a familiar, American name – Roosevelt.

This episode contains references to a wealth of sources and articles, which I’ve linked to below. Most notably, I ordered scans of the Library of Congress file titled “Double R Coffee House.”  You can download the PDF here.

Below are a couple of images from The Double R Coffee House, some of which are discussed in this episode (click for full resolution versions):

Interior of the Double R (portrait of Voltaire on the right wall)
Interior of the Double R (portrait of Voltaire on the right wall)
The Double R Menu showing two locations on the bottom
The Double R Menu showing two locations on the bottom
The Teddy Roosevelt family (1903, colorized)
The Teddy Roosevelt family (1903, colorized)

Final note: Coffee Canon is now available on Spotify! Click here to listen, and make sure to click the “Follow” button!

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Episode Eight: Modern Coffee Culture

The way we drink and experience coffee has changed drastically. To many people, it’s become a specialty beverage where taste not only matters, but is decrypted using a multi-tiered tasters wheel consisting of 73 individual flavors. Cafes today focus not just on profit margins, but on growing standards and fair wages for farmers. Baristas take their craft seriously, competing against each other for trophies shaped like espresso tampers and portafilters. So…how’d we get here?

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Episode Three: Fermenting Coffee

For thousands of years humans have used fermentation to preserve food, leaven bread, and brew alcohol. In 19th century Belgium lambic beers were brewed using the yeasts and bacteria naturally found in the air. Fermentation is an integral part of the way we process coffee as well, but because of function – not taste. What can history teach us about fermentation, and how can we use that to create even better tasting coffee?

This week’s episode relied heavily on the article, “Looking beyond Origin for flavor diversity” by Lucia Solis. Read the article here. Also, here’s a link to the BuzzFeed video referenced at the beginning of the show. Links to the rest of the sources for this episode are below. Also, don’t forget to sign up for the Coffee Canon email list. A special gift is going out this week to those on the list! You can sign up here.

Colin

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