This sunflower @roosroast is 10′3″. This barista is 5″2′. The flowers rule over all! [photo]
Stories indexed with the term ‘coffee’
Stadium & Packard
Hot tip: Due to a permit issue, Peet’s coffee trailer offers free coffee every morning til Nov. 17.
Rosewood & Industrial
Stranded rock star John Roos challenged to chess match by grade-schooler in big hat.
Nickels Arcade
Two graduates in full cap and gown sipping coffee outside Comet Coffee.
In the Archives: As the Coffee Grinder Turns
Editor’s note: In Laura Bien’s first local history column written for The Chronicle, she told the tale of a cigar maker’s son, who invented a combination device that would roast coffee and heat irons for pressing clothes. This week, she returns to the subject of coffee roasting … and grinding.
At a recent antique show at the Washtenaw Farm Council Grounds, my husband and I bought a cute wood and copper coffee grinder. “Cool – I can do it like they did it in the 19th century!” I thought.
At home, I poured store-bought roasted beans into the grinder’s cup and turned the handle. Fifteen minutes later, I was still turning.
The following morning I tried to Huck-Finn the kitchen chore onto my husband. “Try it! It’s pretty fun!” I enthused, while sidling back to the still-toasty bed. Within a week, the grinder was occupying a space in my collection of copper kettles atop the fridge, and we’d returned to using the good old can of ground coffee from Meijer. We gave up on the related idea of attempting to home-roast the beans. Phew.
Yet between 1867 and 1882, 13 different home coffee-roasters were patented in Michigan, seven of them in Ypsilanti. One Ypsilanti manufactory shipped several different models nationwide, and employed a traveling salesman to sniff out new markets.
The popularity of coffee roasters around the 1870s could be attributed to the coffee providers’ greed, ingenuity, and deceit. [Full Story]