Tuesday, March 26, 2013

COFFEE POWER!

Coffee: Is there anything it can’t do?
A tweet from coffee guru Jack Groot mentions a coffee-powered car breaking a world record and that led me to an on line article in TIME by Yue Wang.
In addition to providing a morning energy boost for millions of under caffeinated people and reportedly helping lower stroke risks, coffee can also be used to fuel a Guinness World Record–breaking car.
Martin Bacon converted a Ford pickup truck into Coffee Car Mark 2 — the world’s fastest coffee-powered vehicle.  Bacon installed a charcoal stove on the car, which breaks down coffee-bean chaff (a by-product of the roasting process) into carbon monoxide and hydrogen.  The gas is then cooled and filtered, and the hydrogen is used to power a modified gasoline engine.  The coffee car hit a top speed of 65 m.p.h. in the presence of a Guinness adjudicator at Woodford Airfield in Manchester, England, on Feb. 19.
Starting the machine is no easy task. Instead of simply turning the ignition key, Bacon has to load the coffee pellets to the boiler and wait for enough pressure to build up. After two test runs on that chilly morning and some tinkering with the machine that generates fluffs of white smoke when started, he successfully broke a world record.
Bacon has long been fascinated with coffee-powered vehicles. According to BBC, he converted an old Volkswagen Scirocco into Coffee Car Mark 1 and drove it 210 miles from London to Manchester in 2010. The Car-puccino, which reportedly reached 60 m.p.h., claimed the Guinness World Record of the longest journey by a coffee-powered car.
Now, Bacon and his team are driving the Mark 2 on a tour across the U.K. to promote Co-operative Food, a British fair-trade brand.
The Kona Cowboy Coffee Company’s four brands of gourmet coffees are certainly too good to power your car!  You’ll get a great cup of joe with PANIOLA 100% Kona Cowboy Coffee, grown on Hawaiian volcanoes and roasted in the Rocky Mountains … the one with no bitter aftertaste and no acidity.  CAFÉ PINON de Nuevo Mexico is the Southwest’s favorite with pinion nuts and a perfect way to improve your coffee experience during the day.  And our MOKA-JAVA is a medium dark roasted blend of Indonesian and Ethiopian coffees that just might be high octane!   We also make COWBOY ACTION COFFEE, the Official Coffee of the Single Action Shooting Society! 

The purpose of this blog is to unite Kona coffee lovers and perhaps learn a little about coffee and all the benefits of coffee at the same time.  Join up, become a member, comment and have fun!  You can find the Kona Coffee Fiends group on Facebook and we’d appreciate it if Facebook users would “LIKE” the Kona Cowboy Coffee Company page at www.facebook.com/pages/Kona-Cowboy-Coffee-Company/222070817858553.  Just copy and paste to your browser.  You can also find us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/jackshuster.  And on the web at www.KonaCowboyCoffee.com to order your gourmet coffee and coffee products.
You know you’re a coffee fiend when Starbucks owns the mortgage on your house!  So enjoy your coffee, make it Kona, and remember, Kona is the home of the Hawaiian cowboy…and we had cowboys in Kona before there were cowboys in Texas!

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

MORE ANNOYING COFFEE


No one wants coffee that has passed through an animal and costs $13 per defecated cup!  Jack Groot recently tweeted a story by James Mulcahy and Anne Roderique-Jones on the ZAGAT website about the ten most annoying coffee trends.  They rounded up the most frequent complaints, from fatty Frappucinos to ultra-pricey espresso machines and we’ll continue to talk about the top annoyances.

Animal defecated coffee is made from coffee beans eaten by a civet.  Once nature takes its course, the bean is roasted and you have Kope Luwak, a concoction coffee houses charge a fortune for.  I can see why folks would be turned off by this but how did someone figure out how to do it in the first place?

Stay away from any drink hat requires more than four syllables to order.  I love descriptions like coffee from a single-farmer owned estate on the shady side of the mountain under dwarf palm trees picked by a left-handed singing troubadour on a sunny Tuesday afternoon during a lunar cycle while an asteroid was approaching.

Many of the mega chains call it coffee when it's 95% fat and sugar.  Inhaling a milkshake for breakfast and calling it “coffee” is a direct ticket to fat camp. Coffee should just be simply made, full aroma and taste, not with a whole bunch of other flavors and sweeteners to cover the bean.

Another annoyance is ultra-expensive one-single-cup-of-coffee-at-a-time machines that are popularized every Christmas buying season.  There’s one that costs a cool $1,200 but unless you’ve set your sights on being an amateur barista, you might find a cheaper way to DIY.

And last but not least, blond roasts.  It is just under-roasted!  The coffee is weak and some pretend that it is like fine wine!  Coffee should not be a tall blonde.  That’s a woman, not a beverage.

The Kona Cowboy Coffee Company’s four brands of gourmet coffees are certainly not annoying!  You’ll get a great cup of joe with PANIOLA 100% Kona Cowboy Coffee, grown on Hawaiian volcanoes and roasted in the Rocky Mountains … the one with no bitter aftertaste and no acidity.  CAFÉ PINON de Nuevo Mexico is the Southwest’s favorite with pinion nuts and a perfect way to improve your coffee experience during the day.  And our MOKA-JAVA is a medium dark roasted blend of Indonesian and Ethiopian coffees is one that just might knock your socks off!   We also make COWBOY ACTION COFFEE, the Official Coffee of the Single Action Shooting Society! 

The purpose of this blog is to unite Kona coffee lovers and perhaps learn a little about coffee and all the benefits of coffee at the same time.  Join up, become a member, comment and have fun!  You can find the Kona Coffee Fiends group on Facebook and we’d appreciate it if Facebook users would “LIKE” the Kona Cowboy Coffee Company page at www.facebook.com/pages/Kona-Cowboy-Coffee-Company/222070817858553.  Just copy and paste to your browser.  You can also find us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/jackshuster.  And on the web at www.KonaCowboyCoffee.com to order your gourmet coffee and coffee products.

You know you’re a coffee fiend when people get dizzy just watching you!So enjoy your coffee, make it Kona, and remember, Kona is the home of the Hawaiian cowboy…and we had cowboys in Kona before there were cowboys in Texas!

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

ANNOYING COFFEE


No one wants coffee that has passed through an animal and costs $13 per defecated cup!  Jack Groot recently tweeted a story by James Mulcahy and Anne Roderique-Jones on the ZAGAT website about the ten most annoying coffee trends.  They rounded up the most frequent complaints, from fatty Frappucinos to ultra-pricey espresso machines and we’ll talk about the top five each week for this week and the next.

The Number One complaint was rude baristas.  It seems that people want to order their drinks without snobbery.  That attitude seems to prevail in some coffee house “laboratories” that act that way just to up prices.

Burnt offerings from the big boys was Complaint #2.  Burning the bean and calling it “dark roast” is not impressive.  While the big chains will dominate the world they’ll never have the lower prices and unique menu items found in the small coffee shops.  They know how to roast the beans there, too. 

It ain’t 20 year old single malt scotch!  You know there’s a problem when you are charged more for a shot of espresso than for a gallon of gas!

And coffee is a drink not a life style!  It’s coffee, not some holy communion.

It may look pretty but taking ten minutes to make pretty latte art does not equal a good cup of coffee.

We’ll talk about more annoying coffee trends next week.  The Kona Cowboy Coffee Company’s four brands of gourmet coffees are certainly not annoying!  You’ll get a great cup of joe with PANIOLA 100% Kona Cowboy Coffee, grown on Hawaiian volcanoes and roasted in the Rocky Mountains … the one with no bitter aftertaste and no acidity.  CAFÉ PINON de Nuevo Mexico is the Southwest’s favorite with pinion nuts and a perfect way to improve your coffee experience during the day.  And our MOKA-JAVA is a medium dark roasted blend of Indonesian and Ethiopian coffees is one that just might knock your socks off!   We also make COWBOY ACTION COFFEE, the Official Coffee of the Single Action Shooting Society! 

The purpose of this blog is to unite Kona coffee lovers and perhaps learn a little about coffee and all the benefits of coffee at the same time.  Join up, become a member, comment and have fun!  You can find the Kona Coffee Fiends group on Facebook and we’d appreciate it if Facebook users would “LIKE” the Kona Cowboy Coffee Company page at www.facebook.com/pages/Kona-Cowboy-Coffee-Company/222070817858553.  Just copy and paste to your browser.  You can also find us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/jackshuster.  And on the web at www.KonaCowboyCoffee.com to order your gourmet coffee and coffee products.
You know you’re a coffee fiend when you’ve built a miniature city out of little coffee stirrers!  So enjoy your coffee, make it Kona, and remember, Kona is the home of the Hawaiian cowboy…and we had cowboys in Kona before there were cowboys in Texas!