Grand Larseny

When you come to a fork in the road, take it.

So there’s been some substantial news and hubbub in the coffee world that I love so dearly. Mark Prince, high priest or the people’s best friend, announced the imminent availability of a scale-driven grinder from quality home enthusiast manufacturer Baratza. This is big news.

For a long time now (at least the couple years I’ve been paying attention) the coffee world has been pushing the importance of knowing the mass of coffee and water used when brewing. We’ve heard talk of integrating scales in espresso machines, in water boilers (and has happened), and now there’s the first bit of momentum with scale-enhanced grinders.

But not all is wine and roses. Cool heads have looked to pour cold water on good enthusiasm. Steve Leighton has his eyes on the prize, wanting the industry to put its resources into grind quality:

I really wish someone would build a great grinder before producing an ok one with a set of scales built in

He’s right, of course. Sizzle sells, but the steak matters. There are other ways, many other ways, to weigh ground coffee. You can time it, grind a pre-weighed amount, or even weigh after grinding. The point is, we can get around a lack of scale-based grinding on our own. We cannot get around poor grind quality.

But this isn’t a zero-sum game. There’s more than one grinder manufacturer! So, Baratza is making a scale for their grinder. Great! Uber is making a better grind.

And that’s how a healthy industry operates. Way to go, team!

One of the things I really love about how we roll at work are server farms.  I love that term, “server farm.”  It’s very silly.  All it means is several servers that are meant to work together.  Just another way of thinking about computers.  You could have one computer in Texas, another in New Jersey, and another in Ontario setup to be a server farm.  It wouldn’t be very good (the distance between servers would make the performance poor), but it could easily be a fully functioning server farm.

The way we do server farms, however, is very different.  We just use one server and call it a “farm.”  That sounds even sillier.  How can one computer be like four computers?  Well, easy.  You just have four computer’s worth of processors, four computer’s worth of disks, and four computer’s worth of memory in one physical case.  You end up with one very beefy machine that you can optimize just like a many individual computers.  Pretty cool.

Well, at least I think it’s cool.

This is not a cat-in-bag situation, but I definitely want to start getting the word out a bit early.  I’m wrapping up an iPhone app for coffee folk out there called BrewControl.  The basic idea is to let the iPhone handle all the numeric aspects of coffee.  Well, at least as much as it can.

Right now, the app does coffee-to-water ratio calculations, as well as brew timing.  It can keep track of different brew types and their associated ratios and timer settings (countdown vs stopwatch, duration of timer, etc.).  I’m trying to get a couple of my coffee heroes to test it for me, we’ll just see how that goes.

In the meantime, I will be putting the final layer of spit-polish on and send it out to Apple.  I expect it to be in the store in the next two weeks.