This weekend was good. It was full. It was a mix of work and trying to avoid work. It was a lot of thought even when in downtime thinking of our new coffee establishment. Jeff needed some help on Saturday so we did lunch and stopped by Caribou to remember why we didn’t like them. We’d like to give thanks to Caribou for giving us said reminder. You still suck. No whole milk on the grounds, a taste of slightly scalded or old milk with an espresso histogram that was peaking in odd places. Thaaaanks. Its amazing how much we are surrounded by the mediocre. People have little to no reference its sad.
Sunday Robin and I drove around East Blvd in Charlotte. I needed to canvas the area to see if it could handle a real coffee shop. In a mile stretch, maybe more like 500yds there was a Dilworth Coffee House, Starbucks, and Caribou, all on one side of the road. The Caribou in this region has won Best Coffee in Charlotte by [Creative Loafing](http://charlotte.creativeloafing.com) which is really really sad. They have a superb location with a shitty product. Again the idea of an uneducated Charlotte audience sits there in front of us. The Starbucks on this street is also larger than normal. My gutt says that we could do it. There is a nice space available and we could fight a good fight, but common, this is Charlotte, there is enough room for us to not start a fight yet. We had a pretty good pizza at [Brixx](http://www.brixxpizza.com/) and then began to look for my Sister’s jewlery store [Dilsey Coal](http://www.dilseycoal.com/). We found the street sign, and also found an empty storefront with out a sign, but thats as good as it got. With overcast and a damp cool day, we packed back in the car and went to sit at Dillworth Coffee House. This is the original one. I was hoping that their first store would offer more than one of the knockoffs experienced in Matthews. It was better than before but still not the best. Their Barista at least knew a bit of quality in his milk steaming. It was thick and lush, almost cream like but a little off. Then the shot itself, I’m not sure if I disagreed with the bean or with the preperation something though was off. They had a wifi hookup which was oddly behaving. Robin couldn’t get her connection working and my old TiBook was doing just fine. Of course till my battery expired on me. That’s when we headed home. There were also some notable locations at Park & Woodlawn and a possible Office to Retail conversion on Providence and Wendover.
The rest of the day I spent in between watching some television and working on a presentation exercise that Jeff and I agreed would be good of us to vision on our own so we could merge for a great idea. Robin made an excellent bacon, sundried tomato, cheese quich. Jeff and I spoke from about 8:30 to 11 hashing ideas, concerns, basically idea wrestling coming away with some very fertile ground and a passion to see this thing move forward.
Here I am though. Its monday. I’m a bit tired. I could use another few days in a hypnotic state but this will do.
-a