All posts by Brent Seehafer

Good coffee

New coffee, old coffee

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Finished up the last of my 49th parallel Guatemala Los Espiritus and was sad to see that last bean fall into the grinder burr. This was one of the most delightful coffee finds in some time. I’m definitely keeping 49th parallel roasters in rotation, they roast a damn fine bean. I do wish that they’d sell in 1lb bags though, but I’m sure that it’s a decision to save shipping costs.

Ordered from Ritual Roasters:
Hacienda Carmona, Guatemala
Sweet Tooth Finca Yara, Colombia

Went back there to order this year’s cup of excellence winner, as I do remember seeing some available there last time I visited the site, but it’s not there anymore. Either way, I’m excited to try their beans, as this will be my first time with them. Also, if I do come across a spare $12,000 some time in the near future, I’m buying one of these:

Life

Kurt Cobain

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I learned a good lesson from Kurt Cobain. It wasn’t something that he did directly or indirectly that led to the lesson, more that my reaction to the life (and ultimately, death) of Kurt Cobain brought on what I would later discover as one of the most important lessons in my life.

From early on as a teenager I decided, for one reason or another, that I was going to be a judgmental, intolerant jackass. My mom initially identified it as snobbery, and I think in the beginning it was to some extent, later I think it was just a pattern of thinking I made for myself. At the time, I thought that conviction of your beliefs meant that one must shun all things that don’t mesh with them. Along with that, I was convinced that I was open-minded, cultured and educated. Looking back, I know now that I was purely sophomoric in a good many of my opinions, ignorant to the history that ultimately leads to popularity in not just popular music, but a good amount of culture that I thought I knew about. I was, as are most self-important youth, angry, opinionated and ignorant.

When it came to Kurt Cobain, I wasn’t particularly quiet about my distaste for him. Although I do clearly remember being much more angry about the mystery of his popularity and why everyone considered him to be such a genius than picking on the man himself, but as an educated musician myself—and by educated, I mean there was a time I could read music; now it’s just a bunch of dots, so take from that what you will—I took offense to mainstream garage rock and unleashed my undeserved vitriol on poor unsuspecting Kurt. It was wrong to do, and to this day I feel bad about it. Mostly because later I discovered that Kurt was pretty much the embodiment of angry, troubled youth and finding that out made me see him as a person—not just a musician whose work I wasn’t all that fond of.

The lesson learned from shedding my hypocritical (did I mention that I owned ‘Nevermind’ all while crapping all over it?) former self is that, yes people like different things, a lot of art out there is crap, (thank you Patton Oswalt) like what you like and drive on.

I have actually developed a decent collection of Nirvana that I do listen to from time to time and I serves as a reminder to make sure that I’m really looking at things before I decide that I don’t like them, and if indeed I do decide that I don’t like something to just simply leave it alone and save my energy for something more productive than hate.

Food + Wine + Beer, General, Music

More things that are fun

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Half Acre beer

49th Parallel Coffee Roasters

Spencer Product

Kiehl’s Facial Fuel

In no particular order, these things have made me happy recently in one way or another. I encourage you to check them out. Half Acre beer has a store in Chicago where you can buy most excellent beer in good sized bottles or even bigger bottles if you so desire. 49th Parallel Coffee Roasters I just can’t say enough good things about. I’ve just finished up my first order of three bags and recently took delivery on my second three bags. They do not disappoint.

Spencer Product is an old college friend who made it big in the DJ biz. He released a full-length mix CD awhile back that is in constant rotation on my iTunes and released a single in the middle of last year that has some juicy remixes that are fun to blast in the car. Kiehl’s products I discovered at one of their stores out here in Woodfield mall. I’m prone to razor rash and since picking up some of their Facial Fuel wash and scrub, I’ve had very little problem whatsoever. Recommended.

Happy times!

Design, Web development

New WordPress Book

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Just picked up a copy of Smashing WordPress by Thord Daniel Hedengren. I’m looking to see what more I can do with WordPress and this book looks like a good start. I chose WordPress for this site because my former host had an easy install option in the dashboard setting and it turned out that I liked the backend of it pretty well. It’s easy to use from an organizational standpoint and there are lots of plugins available.

Lots of people have strong opinions on what platform is best for a blog, and since I’m no expert on the subject—I’ve some experience with WP and limited experience with Drupal—I’ll not stretch to comment on the topic. I hear that there are some fun things in the upcoming release of WordPress 3.0, for that I’m excited.

It seems that this new WP book has a good amount of basic information on how to get started on developing themes, plugins and how WP itself is structured. It just made it to the top of my—now very large—’to read’ pile of computer-related books beside the bed. Will report back with findings once I’ve gotten further into it.

Good coffee

First impression: 49th Parallel, Guatemala Los Espiritus.

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As this is my first time experiencing 49th Parallel roasters, I made sure everything was perfect as to give them a fair shake against my darling Intelligentsia. Right out of the bag, I could tell that there was love in the beans. They were roasted to what I’ve come to know as that fresh buttery brown one gets when beans are roasted to near perfection. I poured the beans in the hopper last night and cleaned everything in anticipation of what I expected to be somewhat of a difficult tasting. While I did expect excellent coffee from the beans that awaited me this morning, I was a little bit skeptical since everything else that I’ve tried recently fell short when compared to Intelli. I’m proud to say that this coffee does not fall short of any expectation and they deserve every bit of recognition they get for being excellent roasters.

In comparison to Intelligentsia, the overall cup isn’t as bold. I really try to avoid using expected words like that when I talk about coffee because they are just so general and don’t really tell much, however, in this case it actually fits. There’s an underlying strong flavor to the Intelli that I brew at home that wasn’t present with 49th Parallel. It’s almost like an aftertaste, beforehand, or even as you drink it. Both coffees are brilliant in flavor and full of the kinds of tastes that one expects from serious coffee. I won’t go as far to say that I’m tasting coffees for the flavors noted (e.g. chocolate, orange peel, etc.) cause I’m drinking it to relax and not deconstruct into some kind of experiment. As I continue through this current batch I’ll try to keep an eye on how it might change, if at all. Some coffees that I’ve had in the past change dramatically over as little as a few days. I’m not expecting a change but in fairness it only makes sense.

As far as the Intelligentsia most recently drank, it was Agua Preta, Brazil. I know that there are regional considerations to take in account when comparing two coffees directly, but I state the most recent brew from Intelli as a point of reference and not as a means for direct comparison. Also, seeing as I’ve been drinking Intelli pretty religiously for the past six years or so, I’ll hold off on final judgment comparing the two roasters together until I’ve spent more time drinking. And even then I don’t really expect to declare a favorite, just finally accept that excellent coffee doesn’t come from just Intelligentsia. Cheers!

Nonsense

More from the mustard king

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A little explanation: In college, I developed an alter-ego writer that I called The Mustard King. Really it was a way to just let go of anything I called sensible and write in a style that fit my mood, which was mostly ridiculous. I did a lot of writing in snippets but never anything that amounted to a real story of any kind, in other words I’m a great starter but bad at finishing. So, here are a few of the random starts and stops from the archives, enjoy!

The look on Ursula’s face turned to disgust as she took the turkey flatbread sandwich off the serving tray and as she began to hurl it towards the wall Marge then realized that she had indeed used the imported Norwegian mustard and NOT the Big Bird yellow store-bought kind.

Had he realized what he had done before he entered the convenience store, Todd might not have asked the clerk for change in Drachmas-the national currency of Greece-when he purchased that pack of Hostess mini-gems, he might still be alive.

Further angered by the fact that he was wearing light colored clothes, Marla asked Greg to step further towards the curb allowing the cab’s broken mirror to fatally cut him right in his femoral artery, a sight that the townspeople of Hingsburg hadn’t witnessed since Jim Thomas had that horrible run-in with the public park grill in 1986.

As far as haircuts go, Stan’s was bad…but not too bad. Kind of like when you have a Caesar salad that is just a few minutes old.

When she ordered the Croque Monsieur Fatima forgot about the one she was carrying in her purse. It was angered so terribly that it exploded in a violent rage so extreme the thin lining between space and time was completely destroyed creating the chaos that we now know as, reality television.