Chris Keener, a local coffee geek & future cafe owner asked for a little of my time yesterday. His church has opened the doors to its new building and he wanted to do something nice for the youth league by offering espresso service at their grand opening event.
Counter Culture donated a few pounds of coffee (thanks!!), and Chris and I toted out our home machines for some labor. We almost had a serious issue when my machine wouldn’t recognize water in the tank. We did good and checked the water type, then went through all sorts of ideas including trying to figure out how to just disable the safety mechanism all together. During our darkest moment I pulled out the treo and got on alt.coffee and read one of my Oscar pals Jack Denver talking about how this could be one of only a few things. Running through that list we re-examined the water and found it to be reverse-osmosed..how’d we miss that?! Ding! Threw in some tap water, conductivity returned, and the machine was ready to go. (an hour behind schedule, and many ml of sweat later hehe)
We churned out in the upwards of 40-50 drinks within a 4 hour period. The kids and adults came at us in waves that took me back to my bartending days. We got through it with gusto. Everyone had a blast and really liked our production. I continue to grin even this morning wondering how many kids had too clear a thought last night. Sorry parents! hehe.
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