This Fourth of July weekend we will be offering affogatos at our State Street location. What better way to celebrate America's independence than by eating ice cream! We had such a great time
serving affogatos at Cayuga Street for the
Ithaca Parade that we have decided to offer them again. For those of you who missed out during the parade, an affogato is a scoop of ice cream (
Purity vanilla in this case) topped by an espresso shot, it is a delicious combination. We will start serving affogatos Saturday morning and continue until we run out of ice cream. If you aren't still in a sugar coma from the
cupcake giveaway the night before, come have one for breakfast! We hope to keep serving these through the holiday weekend, but if it's hot out they are going to go fast, so get over here! We will also be able to make little sundaes for the kids, so bring your whole family.
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An interactive exhibit created by Hallie Chase, one of our very talented baristas, has been running all month at the State Street Gimme.
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Everyday, Americans throw out thousands of paper coffee cups, hundreds at Gimme Coffee alone. Most of our
locations compost almost everything, but that just reduces the amount
of trash that heads to the landfill, it doesn't reduce the amount of
energy, water, and trees used to make these cups. Here at gimme we would
love to serve you coffee in a ceramic reusable cups, but we know that
that isn't always possible. You have places to be! That's why we sell
travel mugs and thermoses at all locations, and offer a discount for
bringing them in and filling them up with the beverage of your choice.
Bring in a reusable cup any day of the week, from our cafes or any
others, and we will give you 35 cents off the cost of your drink. This
Friday is Earth Day, and we would like to encourage you to bring in a
reusable mug, and to star thinking about reusing in general. This
Friday, April 22nd, if you bring in your reusable mug we will double the
discount that we usually give. So bring in your reusable cup for 70
cents off of any drink on our menu. We also have a few shiny new
thermoses on the shelves if you are thinking of picking up a new mug to
use daily.
Starting today all your favorite Gimme! Coffee locations are saying goodbye to cold dark days, and goodbye to shortened winter hours. We are
very excited to welcome the sun and the spring back! So come on in for a
coffee after dinner. Mott, Cayuga, and State street locations will be
open from 7am until 9pm. Lorimer street will be open from 7am until 8pm.
After spending Friday morning watching the horrifying news of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the manager of the Green Street cafe put this sign on the tip jar during his shift. He wanted to get the community involved so that he would be able to donate more to the emergency efforts taking place than he would be able to afford by himself. The out pouring of support was heartwarming. Not only from the customers at the cafe, but the other baristas working over the weekend: all of them donated their tips. I spent Saturday at green street and was very impressed with the amount of people who, after spending the cash in hand on their coffee, pulled out their wallet again to offer what they could to the cause. This simple sign also generated great conversations about ways to help strengthen our own community. Get to know your neighbors! It is always so beautiful to see how people can come together over a cup of coffee. These small donations added up to almost a hundred and fifty dollars in three days. This was mailed off to the Red Cross. It will add to all the other donations coming in and hopefully together make a difference. Thank you, Green Street Crew, for taking the initiative to do some good, and thank you to all the regulars who donated to the cause.
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Gimme! Coffee just wrapped up our first ever celebration of Good Food Month. We celebrated the fact that our coffee from Finca San Luis won a Good Food Award with a month of tastings.
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Our first ever public roastery tour was a smashing success! We had over two hundred people attend and we all crowded into the roasting room at krums corners.
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It's
Good Food Month, and we are getting ready for our third tasting: Pickles and Charcuterie!
The Good Food Awards recognize
food that is delicious, respectful of
the environment, and connected to communities and cultural traditions.
We have been hosting tastings of finalists from all seven categories
all month long,
culminating in a beer and coffee tasting at our roastery next week. Each Friday,
at every gimme coffee espresso bar, and on Saturdays in the lab at State
Street, you can try outstanding food from around the country. Last weeks' cheese and preserves tasting was a delicious success, the sweet and spicy Raspberry Habanero Jelly from
HeathGlen Organic Farm was the crowd favorite! This week we have four types of pickled foods for you to try: we have Peppered Okra from
Sour Puss Pickles, Purple Suerkraut from
Spirit Creek, Asparagus from
Tillen Farms and Dills from
Real Pickles. For those of you looking forward to the meaty part of this meal we have Sweet Potato Liverwurst from
Weeping Radish Farm Brewery.
We will also be brewing and sampling our Good Food Award winning
Finca San Luis. If you haven't tried this coffee yet, be sure to come by! It is always clean and sweet, just as fine coffee should be.
This
Friday from 5-7, stop by any of our cafes. If that time doesn't work
for you, come to the presentation and tasting in the lab at the back of
State Street on Saturday from 12-1. See you there!
Congratulations and welcome to 2011. I hope you had a lovely time ringing in the new year with style. It is the one night of the year where people are practically required by law to stay up past their bedtime. Do you know what brightens up a sleepy hungover Saturday? Espresso. Lots of espresso. Lucky for you, smiling baristas will be happy to serve you
a free shot of espresso at all gimme coffee locations on New Years Day. Upstate will be open from 9-3 and our New York City area espresso bars will be open from 11-5. This special offer is for one shot per person (no hanging out all day) and for stand alone espresso (no you may not add the shot to your cappuccino). If you love espresso, then this will be a great day for you. If you are not a usual espresso drinker, then there is no better way to start of the year than by trying something new.
Also, as an added bonus for State Street customers, the open cupping tomorrow will be replaced by open shot pulling. I will be back in the Lab from 12-1 pulling shots of
Piccolo Mondo, our organic espresso blend. Come try both shots, or just the one you don't get every day if too much caffeine worries you. This will also be a great time to answer any espresso extraction questions you may have if you are a home barista. If you are a regular but have no idea what we baristas "are doin back there" this will be a chance for you to see
all the tiny steps that go into a perfect shot of espresso.
Cheers and see you tomorrow!
This weekend at the open cupping we will be looking at ways to brew great coffee at home. It's amazing how little changes (like grinding fresh) can make an huge improvement on your morning cup. We will be focusing on how to get awesome results with the Skerton Grinder and Clever Dripper. We are offering a bundle deal on these if you buy them in our stores: the grinder, dripper and filters for just sixty bucks. So if you have been thinking about upgrading your home morning routine, or need a holiday gift, now is the time to get this set. If you are on the fence about changing how you brew, or have any trouble shooting questions, then this is a great lab to come to!
We will brew a lot with the clever, but I have many different ways to brew available in the lab, and I sure drink a lot of coffee at home. So, if you have any questions about brewing with a press pot or stove top espresso maker we can certainly make coffee that way too. We will be brewing the Las Peñitas, my current favorite coffee. Hope to see you Saturday at noon in the lab in the back of State St. Gimme Coffee.
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You all know the game we played in the lab last last month and the song that goes with it: it's the simple act of picking the one item in a group that is different. In the coffee world we call this type of tasting challenge "Triangulation" and there are both national and world wide competitions to determine who can best identify the odd one out.
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Ah, the Rosetta. That beautiful, balanced, delicate and complex design that you often see on the top of your Latte. We call it a Rosetta, not a Christmas tree or fern, and it is done with just a flick of the wrist. There are no tools, stamps, or tricks involved. Just a learned method and lots of practice. Now that you have mastered perfect milk, I'll show you how to pour it.
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At this week's open cupping we will be only tasting coffee from Indonesia. Indonesian coffees tend to be very heavy and earthly so it's nice to try a group of them all together. When you put an Indonesian coffee next to the sweeter, milder, coffees they can come across as being too intense in comparison. Also, trying many similar coffees together is a great way to start refining your palate. This week will be a great cupping to come to, especially if you have already attended one.
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Latte art is one of the fun parts of being a barista. We get to show off a little and beautiful drinks always make people smile. Latte art takes a while to learn, but once you get the basics down it doesn't take long to master the different designs.
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We've had Clever Coffee Dippers in our stores for quite a while now, and I've had one at my house for just as long. It's a great little brewer that I've come to take completely for granted. It's not the only way I brew at home, but it's become my go-to method most mornings. I've gotten so used to it that I've forgotten how truly great the design is. I recently had a lot of family in town and my father started calling my Clever the "Magic Coffee Cone." I thought this was very cute and fitting.
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Here at Gimme we recently had the pleasure of inviting local yoga teacher Rachel Bush into our lab to teach us how to better protect and use our bodies while on bar. It was a very helpful hour and a half session and I am eager to share a bit of what we learned. Retail managers Liz Clark and Emily Thompson are the gracious models for these pictures.
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It's been a little over one month that I've been hosting open cuppings in the lab in the back of the Gimme! Coffee on State Street and things couldn't be going any better. Each week there has been a different, small, very interested group of people showing up to talk about and taste coffee. We have had a diverse group of folks attend; roasters from other coffee companies, students from the universities in town and many regulars from our cafes. It's great to see how information is shared, and misinformation dispelled, when you get a good mix of people together. For many people this tasting was the first time they realized coffee can be sweet without sugar. So don't worry if you don't know anything about coffee or feel like a pro taster. If you've got a tongue you are welcome to join us.
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Have you ever looked into the back lab at state st and seen a group of Gimme folk standing around the table totally focused on small cups of coffee? You may have. We are back there several times a week cupping. Cupping is a specific kind of coffee tasting, a standardized way to evaluate coffee which is practiced all over the world. It's the way green buyers decide which coffee to buy. It's the way roasters decide on their profiles, and it's the way we baristas get to know the coffees on our shelves so that we can better describe the taste to you. Starting this Saturday we would like you to come cup with us!
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On snowy Sunday we packed our bags and headed south to Scranton. We braved the weather to do what we love: talk about and share coffee! We were headed to Northern Light Espresso Bar a Gimme wholesale account located in downtown Scranton. We wanted to get to know our comrades in coffee a little better.
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I recently took a bus trip to New York City to visit our cafes
and baristas down there. While the trip is always totally worth it, I couldn't help but grumble at the necessity of being ON the bus at 5:30am. No time for breakfast. No time to make coffee. Good thing I packed my trusty picnic basket...
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You don't understand Japanese? Are you are feeling intimidated by the Skerton Grinder instructions? No problem! I'm here to talk you through setting up this lovely grinder.
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Let talk about brewing with the Clever Dripper! Maybe you were lucky enough to receive one as a holiday present, or maybe you had a cup from the Clever in stores and couldn't resist bringing one home. Either way, making excellent coffee at home can be super easy. You will need: the Clever Dripper, paper filters (size 4), a timer (or clock), a spoon, a small plate to cover the Clever while brewing, freshly ground coffee, and I highly recommend a scale.
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When baking my holiday pumpkin pie I assembled the usual roster of spices: cloves, cassia, nutmeg, and allspice. I also added, you guessed it, ground coffee!
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For Thanksgiving dinner I made pumpkin pie. The secret ingredient? Coffee! I used our Honduras Linda Vista because I felt the sweet, spicy notes of this coffee would pair well with the spices typically added to pumpkin pie. To preserve the clean sweetness of this coffee I decided to cold brew it the night before I was planning on baking.
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Do you have a bean busting, electricity sucking, noisy old grinder at home?
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At the upstate stores, and in the lab, we've been playing the game of swirling foam too. Here's some worth showing off, starting with a rosetta in progress by yours truly.
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If you are spending some time at Gimme studying, or just enjoying the ambiance of our newly renovated State St. store, I highly recommend giving our new Pour Over Coffee a try.
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If you are a regular at either of our downtown Ithaca locations you may have noticed an abundance of new faces recently. They are all baristas in training.
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What a normal peaceful day at State St Gimme! Coffee. Everything is in its place, espresso drinks are flowing smoothly, and everyone is calm.
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Winter came to Ithaca just in time for Take Your Snowman to Work Day.
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Hello class, it's been a while since we've done one of these, but I thought it would be nice to get back to giving you helpful hints and guidelines for home brewing. Today I will be presenting Pour Over style coffee made on a Bee House dripper, and using a paper filter.
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The secret to great espresso, in fact the secret to all great coffee, is that there is no secret. No magic formula. No easy answer. The secret to great coffee is in the details and in the hard work applied by everyone involved in every part of the process. As Baristas we know that we are the last step in a long line of people working to bring high quality coffee to consumers.
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For months now this Synesso has been installed in the lab at the back of State Street Gimme, getting moderate use from the trainers and sitting idle most of the time.
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I'm an old-fashoned type of girl: I read a lot of books, prefer letters to email, and I will not vote electronically. I like paper. I like its tangible, touchable nature and the history that paper provides. However, there is one place that I cannot stand to find paper; in my coffee.
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This past week in the upstate training lab we made macchiatos, more macchiatos and then we made more macchiatos!
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This week in the lab we are deconstructing our leftist blend by pulling single origin shots of its components. The spectrum of flavors in the coffees pulled by themselves as shots was amazing. Boy did we find some gems! The
Kenya Gatomboya was by far the favorite!
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In celebration and in anticipation of our new Kenyan and Ethiopian coffees a few of us here at Gimme got together and cupped coffee, just African coffees!
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Barista jams are the equivalent to business conferences, a place where baristas gather to exchange new techniques, make networking connections, see old friends, and hone their skills under pressure behind the bar. Back in June we were excited to attend the Mid-Atlantic / North-East Jam, hosted by Troy Reynard of The Cosmic Cup.
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