Listen & Be Heard Weekly Archives

By the time you read this column, we will already be well into 2007, but please, allow me to send you my best wishes for this new year. I hope you had a wonderful time during the holidays. Most importantly, I wish you good health. With this in mind, I decided to review the effects [...]

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With the holiday season upon us, it is a time for most people to reflect on the past year, and to try to make the most of time gone by. I visit almost 1000 coffee places a year (after all, I have been in this business for 17 years?), so it is rare for me [...]

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We all know what we are talking about: caffeine, the legal drug of this century. It is a central nervous system and metabolic stimulant, and is proven to reduce fatigue and boost mental alertness. The quantity of caffeine necessary to produce these effects will vary from person to person, depending on their body size, gender, [...]

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Ask me, and I’ll tell you where to get the [tag]best coffee in town[/tag]. Now I might just be a little bit biased because I work for the same people who own and run the Listen & Be Heard Poetry Caf?, but one of the true perks (pun intended) is the free coffee (and half-price [...]

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Throughout my numerous conversations with coffee drinkers, I always try to define what makes their cup of coffee taste better or worse. The answers are as diverse and as varied as the people with whom I talk. But usually those answers fall into one of several categories. The first and most often cited is the [...]

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Each morning you enjoy a cup of coffee at your local (this is very important?) [tag]coffee[/tag] shop. But can you imagine the months of hard labor that went into producing your cup of Joe? It all begins with the ?green beans?, which are like any other natural crop that have been cultivated through good farming [...]

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[tag] Wine [/tag]and [tag]coffee [/tag]have accompanied humanity forever and the two present more than one similarity. Both of their origins share a mix of legend and history. We have all heard the tale of the discovery by Kaldi, a goat herder, of the properties that the red berries from a bush had on his ?dancing? [...]

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How many times have you been disappointed when ordering an espresso? For me, well I stopped counting a long time ago, having been overpowered by so many cold, bitter, espressos, with little or any crema to speak of, served essentially as a muddy cup of burned coffee. I am starting to feel like, what Seinfeld [...]

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Coffee beans are the second largest traded commodity after oil. However, the comparison between coffee and oil stops here, as many coffee farmers live below the poverty level, even by third world country standards. One of the contributing factors to this sad fact is that often coffee trades far below the cost of production, resulting [...]

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Sixteen years ago when we installed our first espresso machine, prospective baristas used to ask us how to pronounce the words ?mocha? or ?latte.? At the time, if you had asked me what I thought of coffee chains and especially the one from Seattle, I probably would have anwered that I thought they were promoting [...]

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