In the Dog Days of Winter, Roasting Coffee on a New York Farm

Coals from the stove. To spark a little campfire.

A spring-loaded seat for your weary bottom.

And some beautiful beans from the birthplace of coffee...

Alan pours in the greens with a clinkety clink. Stephen commences a lazy stir. Snowflakes sizzle the skillet. Ssssss.

Come on, Zorro.

You, too, Tundra.

Let's get this party started!

The beans are a-browning. This might actually work!

Keep them moving around like a stir fry. Spread the heat evenly. More uniform than this would be ideal. Live and learn.

Out of the pan fast! Stall the roast! O, glorious aromatics. You can see chaff on the plate, too. No room for that in a hearty cup.

While Alex tilted the plate, and beans fell into the cooling pot, Steven blew the chaff out into the snow. It's hard to see the flaky husks in mid-air, but the process worked pretty well. We dechaffed the batch three times. Some chaff stuck to the plate rim, which had been wetted by falling snow.

Meanwhile, the dogs went deep with their vole habit.

Clean beans! We roasted two batches, one light and one dark. In the middle you see our 2:1 blend. You could call it Deep Disco, loosely speaking.

Time to grind. A crucial step. So when Stephen fetched an axe and a concrete block, I could feel Jeremy, Erin, Mike, Alexis, and every passionate Gimme barista cringing. It was an abomination, unfit for the eyes of a coffee lover. So I'm blocking it out with a dog picture.

No way to hide it – the grind is uneven. Big shells mixed with pulverized grounds. That spells trouble. But you can't click Undo. So we power on...

Into the press pot! At this point, pleased with our dubious ingenuity but fearful of a cranky brew, we stuck to the official French Press instructions. Alex, a Gimme regular, knows them by heart. Customers, you have your role model.

Fill it up, wait four minutes...

...which is 28 minutes in dog years. So we had enough time to airband Stairway twice in a row.

Plungeroo!

No time for regrets. It's in the cup, my friends.

Terrific! The blend was the best by far. The dark brew was roasty with smoke and char. The light batch was grassy and damp. The blend was the quaffer and champ.

We slurped 3 pots on an empty stomach. Then we found some walls to bounce off. Next we suppered on chicken with vegetables grown here on the farm.

Dinners will taste even better soon. Alex is a winemaker and his new vineyard, still unnamed, is on the plot next to Stephen's farm. The first grape harvest is "in the tank" and will be bottled this spring! Good luck, Alex.

"One time, at coffee camp..."

Fireside chat. I'll spare you that. But let's give three cheers to Colleen, Gabe, and Kevin for sourcing the Sidamo. And to the Ethiopian farmers, half a world away, who cultivate those brilliant beans.