Terrett Syndrome

Why you should stop cold-brewing, and use the Japanese Iced Coffee Method.

First of all, let me say that I am predisposed towards iced coffee. My grandfather- who I idolize still- drank iced coffee starting at about 10am, and all day during the summer.
That said, iced coffee has something of a bad name among coffee aficionados. Hot coffee is seen as the natural way of drinking coffee, and iced coffee is thought of as something of an abomination; a way people choke down caffeine during the summer, or a way to make chilly coffee-ice-cream-tasting drinks and sip them with straws out of plastic cups.
I must say that early in my coffee years, I shared the idea that iced coffee was somehow “less than” hot coffee. At that time, we used whatever coffee we had at the end of the day in the urn, put it into a pitcher, and that became the iced coffee for the next day. Later on, we began using the toddy system to make cold-brew iced coffee, which at least had the benefit of not being sour like the day-old iced coffee was. Both were low-end, dead, and without aromatics. That’s just how iced coffee is, right?

Turns out, that’s wrong. When I went to Japan for the first time in 1994, I had iced coffee that was COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. Bright and clear, it had a vibrant, refreshing quality that contrasted starkly with the leaden, low-end iced coffee I was used to in the U.S. And best of all, the aromatics that I was used to smelling in hot coffee, I could taste in iced coffee. How was this possible?

I puzzled over it for years. Finally, I developed a relationship with Hidetaka Hayashi, who is a kind of specialty coffee idol in Japan. One of the first questions I asked Mr. Hayashi was how iced coffee was different in Japan. He taught me a lot over the years, but the thing I figured out was this: many of the iced coffee processes I liked the best brewed coffee hot, then chilled the coffee INSTANTLY by brewing right onto ice. The dilution from the melting of the ice can be taken account in the brew recipe, leading to proper strength and maximum happiness.
Why is this important? Why is this better than cold brew? Well, it has to do with solubility, volatility, and oxidation.
Solubility is the ability of substances to dissolve, in our case, in water. Coffee has soluble constituents; that’s why we can run water through it and the water becomes a solution of coffee solubles and water, creating the beverage we call “coffee”. Now the thing about solubility is this: substances are generally more soluble at higher temperatures and less soluble at lower temperatures. This is why sugar dissolves very slowly in cold water but very quickly in hot water. When we brew coffee, we use hot water to dissolve the coffee solids out of the coffee grounds and into the water, and as we know this happens best at 195-205 degrees Fahrenheit. You can try to use cooler water, but this means that the coffee will dissolve incompletely; many of the soluble substances in coffee won’t make it out of the grounds and into the water. This is what happens in cold brew: the technique tries to make up for the relative insolubility of coffee at cold-water temperatures by brewing for a long, long time. This creates the illusion that you have made coffee- the resulting liquid is dark and tastes something like coffee- but many of the coffee solubles have never made it out of the grounds and into the liquid. Cold-water brewing has a way of deadening flavor, since the elusive and charming elements of flavor that make coffee special never get dissolved into the brew, and remain in the coffee grounds, which get thrown away.
Next: volatility. In contrast to solubility- the ability of materials to dissolve- volatility is the ability of substances to turn into vapor, and be transported through the air. Volatility also increases with temperature: that’s why hot coffee is so aromatic. Problem is, when you’re smelling coffee, it’s losing its aromatics to the air. Cooling the coffee quickly, though, reduces volatility dramatically. This effectively locks the ephemeral volatiles (like floral and fruit notes) into solution until the coffee is warmed again. This happens on the coffee’s way down your throat (sorry to get graphic here), which sends a punch of beautiful volatile aromatics through your retronasal cavity to your olfactory receptors. And that explains the olfactory-flavor punch of brewed-hot-quickly-cooled Japanese-style iced coffee.
What about oxidation? Oxidation in food is generally bad news: oxygen has a habit of monkeying with oils to make them taste horrible, a phenomenon also known as rancidification. You know that funky taste of an unclean coffee hopper or french press screen? That’s oxidized coffee oils. Coffee kept warm takes on these same flavors, since oxidation happens much more quickly at high temperatures. This is another reason why cooling coffee quickly after brewing is essential. Don’t even get me started about chlorogenic acid degradation to quinic acid- which also happens quickly at high temperatures and causes sour bitterness.
So the science tells us: to fully extract flavor? Brew hot. To protect flavor and prevent development of off-flavors? Cool instantly. And what does the method I adapted from Mr. Hayashi’s do? BREW HOT AND COOL INSTANTLY.
Have I convinced you yet that the Japanese iced coffee method is the definitive way to make iced coffee? I hope so. I also hope you enjoy this summer.

✖ 383 notes ❖ Source: petergiuliano ⟲ Reblog

janaunplgd:

I Never Know My Lines in Dreams

At least 4 times a year, I wake up at 5:00 am with a scowling brow and a rapid pulse after dreaming that I’ve been thrown into some type of live performance without having fully memorized my lines. Some dreams involve me choking on my lines or, like an asshole, not having looked at my script at all! This phenomenon is actually widely known. It is so known that it has a name: “The Actor’s Dream.” Every actor experiences the damn thing, Christopher Durang wrote a play about it, and you can find instances from several famous performers that detail the horrible nighttime ordeal of forgetting their lines, their blocking or forgetting how to carry on on stage at all. I’m not prone to nightmares and consider myself to be generally at-ease with humiliation (I’m a chubby comedian) so when I have one of these dreams, I’m always rattled into metacognition upon waking; I start scanning bullshit dream dictionaries and assessing my own anxieties with the candied neurosis of Willy Wonka.
As a hilarious twist in the last few years, my subconscious has attempted to combat my Actor’s Dream with the nerdy, pseudo-intelligence of improv! In one dream, I was cast as a major role in a Shakespeare play and when I went on stage, I tried to sweatily muddle my way through my scenes by improvising in Shakespearean verse, a trick that gave me absolutely no relief and in fact intensified my dreamt-of humiliation! My actual skill and practice in improv comedy has made these dreams even more unbearable, forcing me to not only come to terms with my oversight in the dreams but then to try to rectify my shitty behavior by being a hugely overconfident douchebag! Why?! Why is it that every single time I have a dream about acting - my truest passion - I never remember my lines?
Most of the nonsense online psychology I’ve read on the topic discusses a subconscious feeling of fearfulness about being humiliated. But as I mentioned before, I am my least embarrassed self onstage. I’d get into a bikini on stage for a laugh if that were called for, which isn’t to say I consider myself a circus sideshow, it’s more to admit that wearing a bikini is the most humiliating thing for me. There’s also some nampy pampy online discourse about these dreams signifying a feeling of unpreparedness, and that sounds like something I can buy into, especially right now in my life. Leaving a career as an educator for a school and diving headfirst into Hollywood at age 35 feels like the most unpredictable path I could ever choose. In teaching, I know when my next paycheck is coming (in two weeks), I know how old I’ll be when I retire (55), I even know who my students are next fall (I won’t have students next fall, hallelujah). Aside from the chronic high blood pressure that comes with working in such a high needs neighborhood, it’s pretty easy to coast along carefree in this job. In the acting world, none of these perks apply. Most of my actor-friends have learned how to be glamorous hobos, only using the finest of bindles to travel between jobs. And this alarms me. It makes me question all of my decisions about transitioning into this lifestyle.
Last night’s Actor’s Dream started how most do. I’ve been asked to return to the stage of my alma mater by a trusted director, and step in as a lead in a mainstage play. All of the other actors in the production are light-footed whispers of men and women, dressed in period costumes and bustling about backstage. Last night’s dream-play was a devised piece which means the play was created by the dream-ensemble, so how the hell would I know the lines for christ’s sake, but that’s not important to the dream-director. He wants me to play a starring role as a love interest to the dream-lead male who I find looks barely 15 and does he speak English? Because he’s wearing a Sherwani and looks lost himself. Anyway, in the dream, I come on stage for my scene, halfheartedly improvise one single line, let the boy handle the rest and then scurry of stage to await my next entrance…which never comes. I never have to go back onstage! This was the best dream-news ever as I wanted nothing more than to get the fuck out of there and go on with my otherwise predictable life. But, no. The dream-director wanted me to mingle with the cast. My strange dream-celebrity status was such that these younger actors wanted to meet me even after I likely drove their play into the side of a supermarket like some kind of coked-up Charlie Sheen!
Well, I got out of my dream-costume and made my way out the front doors of my alma mater’s theater lobby and was immediately met with a crowd of smiling, celebrating young actors and their families. In my dream last night, these people couldn’t give two shits that I blew it in their play. They were just proud of their work. So my feeling that I had landed clumsily into the middle of their play on a parachute completely lifted from my conscience. In my dream, I walked through the crowd, not a single person approached me to socialize or engage with me, and my dear friend Lauren met me on the outside of the flock. She shrugged at me with a smile, I shrugged back, and we laughed!
I anticipate having several more Actor’s Dreams in my lifetime. Shit is unpredictable and god bless us all for doing our best to improvise our way through the shit storm. I’ll be training myself in the next few months to plow head-on through life’s verbose Shakespearean scenes, feigning confidence, fluency and authority. But today, I’m going to delight in my own life’s unpredictability being a hilarious shared experience between myself, my dearest friends, and every performer who has ever lived.

✖ 2 notes ❖ Source: janaunplgd ⟲ Reblog

cuteosphere:

The shopping bags are full of energy drinks and peanut butter and nothing else
Edit: people saying Reinhart and Torbjorn should be grandpas; I agree, but I also knew they would look cute drawn small, so

✖ 20,591 notes ❖ Source: cuteosphere ⟲ Reblog

katieshanahan-art:

“What Fear Said”
Written by Steven “Shaggy” Shanahan and illustrated by Katie Shanahan for the Valor Comic Anthology
(You can get this excellent 300+ pg anthology ebook for $5 here)

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Nestled in the Bosom of a Cheerleader

janaunplgd:

My first real boyfriend happened in 9th grade when I was 15. He was a meatball of a man; drove a blue Chevy pickup truck with wheels that were way too big and that required me to wear a sports bra as his passenger. Blue Truck was one year older and played on the JV football team - a completely atypical choice for a brooding young feminist. But I liked his masculine-with-a-side-of-sensitivity act. He was slightly dangerous and needy; very polite but definitely a wall-puncher. After about a month, I fell hard and fast like a regulation pigskin, excited by the unfamiliar scent of a closely breathing, desirous male teen. I was inexperienced and unflinchingly prude at the time but I did a lot of “firsts” with Blue Truck. First love, first nude-in-bed, first ridiculous christmas gift awkwardly hand-delivered by a boyfriend ON Christmas day, first mortifying breakup that the entire high school witnessed.
The mortifying breakup became a common theme in my life after him. I think that’s because I have always had very keen emotional IQ, while I’m most often attracted to men that need me (and that likely had to be pried off of their mothers’ nipples at an inappropriately old age). I’m not sure why this is my jam, but I can tell you that it’s one of the traits about myself that I absolutely abhor. I feel it important to say that Blue Truck’s parents fought often and their marriage was a constant concern of his, another pattern that I find consistent with many of my partners now, far into adulthood. It should come as no surprise that Blue Truck struggled internally with his own manhood and that I posed a problem of power for him. I was kinder, more assured, academically stronger, had more friends and, most importantly, I never gave him dat puss! As much as I wanted to at times, I always somehow knew that the second I handed him my sexual power, he would strangle me with it.
So the day I dumped him, 10 months into our courtship, his balls were probably bluer than the Great Barrier Reef. I chose to do it after his varsity football game because earlier that day, he had barged into the bathroom where I was taking a shower and screamed, “Get outa the shower and get your ass downstairs!” He was mad about a note he found that I had written to my friend Amy that said he was, “acting like a pig.” His sudden-but-not-unexpected command rattled me right out of our proverbial tree house and onto my ass, and after a pep-talk and a few pre-game shots of peppermint schnapps with my friend Amy, I was ready to rip my boyfriend’s guts out and eat them ravenously in front of his dying face.
This all happened on a game night which is a big deal because I grew up in a small, football-loving town, not unlike everyone’s favorite tv drama, Friday Night Lights. And as my luck would have it, Blue Truck had a really good game that evening, so as he exited the locker room, all of the parents waiting for their stinky sons shook his hand and batted their eyes as he walked toward me with a smile on his face. I, of course, was executing a well-organized plan, like every young lady does when she’s afraid her boyfriend has completely lost his goddamn mind and might truly beat her ass in front of other people when she tries to pull a quick on on him. Amy waited 10 feet behind me and we had a hand signal when things got hairy and I needed recon, and of course I had to do this after the game in front of parents because my father was a high school teacher and coach, so I grew up with a lot of eyes on me - a blessing/curse.
As it were, Blue Truck didn’t care about the setting of our breakup. By that point in the night, his teenage brain hadn’t remembered the part of the evening where he sounded like he was about to drag me out of my shower by the hair. So when I uttered the words, “We cannot be together anymore,” his face drained of color, his football pads fell out of his hands, and he started to pant like an emaciated polar bear, stuck on dissolving patch of ice. Hand signal. Amy stepped forward, took me by the arm. We begin to walk away. I hear him repeating my name. It all happened in slow motion but was so amazingly glorious that I remember it with the pristine clarity of someone who committed cold-blooded murder. By one arm, Amy dragged me toward a crowd of our friends, but as I glanced back, I watched Blue Truck sprint with athletic fervor out into the center of the brightly lit football field, screaming wildly, any semblance of a conscience coming completely unhinged. Parents looked on, crowds of teens turned their heads toward the field as Blue Truck yelled to the sky, “JANAAAAAAAAAAA!!”
“Holy shit,” Amy gasped as she started to urge me forward into the crowd of football-loving peers. My eyes were bright with embarrassment as hands reached out and tugged me forward. “Protect her!” My spine was tensing, hastily becoming steel in my back as womanhood thrusted me violently past any youthful naivety I still maintained. Blue Truck saw me being shuffled into the herd so he retrieved his pads and began a full sprint toward me, ready to commit a scene that would make Friday Night Lights look like Full House. How I wished I had a car then. The ability to retreat to a place he couldn’t find me so I could sob to Sarah McLaughlan and write poetry until this all blew over. But I was under Amy’s care that night and while Blue Truck’s friends halted him at the entrance of the post-game dance to calm him down, I got urged inside where I would be saved by being public.
He begged all night at that dance, at one point dropping to his knees and crying out when a Boys II Men ballad played. I felt much better about the whole thing when I saw him sobbing whilst nestled in the bosom of a cheerleader. “Good,” I thought. “She looks ready to nurse.” The chasing continued for several weeks after that. Blue Truck would stalk me after every class, pleading for me to take him back and making it very clear that this decision was one-sided. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel guilty. My soul was young and fragile then, and K-Ci & JoJo kept coming on the radio. My female peers or I didn’t have an avenue or the vocabulary to make sense of our erratic boyfriends’ behaviors. We just knew it was so. So for weeks I got chased down hallways to volleyball practice and would come in panting, ready to cry and not play volleyball. My Economics teacher - a man who also happened to be the athletic director, and on whom I had a huge crush - told me at one point that he noticed what Blue Truck was doing. That what he was doing was wrong and inappropriate, and that if I needed help, all I need to do was tell him. I batted my eyes like a dumb little tease and replied, “I’m fine. Thank you.” People were concerned but at the time just passed it off as just a regular ol’ thing that every teenage girl goes through when being in love for the first time. You just…kind of get abused. That’s what happens.
Anyway, big surprise: I didn’t really have a lot of boyfriends after that. One or two more in high school, two boyfriends in college and not much in the last 8 or so years. I can’t say that I’ve ever really felt “safe” in any of my relationships. Not that I’ve felt I was in physical danger like that time, but every relationship I’ve had has warranted some kind of emotional danger. The men I’ve been with have always attempted manipulation or seemed on the precipice of a grand emotional collapse, or they don’t know how to advocate for their mental health, with only me - their rock - to yank their rope back up. Or, as I see it, get pulled down into their crevice as it were. I don’t know where Blue Truck ended up. I think the military? He’s somewhere and with someone. I wonder if he has a happy marriage. The kind where two people just really love and support each other, unwaveringly and without pause. When I see two people that have that, I can tell that they have that. And I can’t help but wonder why it’s never happened to me.