Blog | Tonx

We rolled out something new today.

One of the most common requests we’ve received from prospective Tonx drinkers is a smaller one-bag-a-month option. We’ve hesitated to do this because of our commitment to freshness and not wanting to see our subscribers miss out on any of our awesome offerings. But now we’ve launched a really great solution for all those folks who don’t drink quite as much coffee – the Half-Sack plan.

Subscribers to the Half-Sack plan get a half bag (6oz) of our bad-ass subscription coffee offering every other week for $24/month, shipped first class. It’s a nice option for those who only make coffee at home a couple days a week but still want fresh and fantastic beans or as a maintenance dose for fiends who’ve held back from developing a daily habit.

In addition, we’ve turned on a sample size try-before-you-buy option for new subscribers that we hope will give more people a chance to taste Tonx.

Check it out at the ever-evolving Tonx.org!

And not just the Bodum kind. A couple of of pieces of Tonx pimpage that appeared in the press this week deserve mentioning:

First was Tien Nguyen’s nifty LA Weekly profile on the Squid Ink blog in which she opens by comparing me to Forrest Gump, captures some good sound bites, and does a nice job of explaining what we’ve got to offer. The alert folks at Sprudge also point to the article, noting that Nguyen has been doing some very good coverage of this supposed “L.A. coffee scene” we keep hearing about.

Today brought us a powerful plug from the prolific Oliver Strand over at the New York Times who sagely suggests you give the gift of coffee this season. We must agree with that wisdom and won’t argue his assessment that our coffee is “juicy”.

Your parents coffee probably sucks.

Maybe it’s that their generation was raised on canned coffee and the false promises of dubious plug-in kitchen appliances or perhaps raising you and your siblings to adulthood drained them of any zest for life or belief in pleasure – but many parents-of-a-certain-age seem incapable of providing us good coffee when we visit for the holidays.

So you need to plan accordingly.

I’ll suggest outfitting yourself with a travel rig. My personal set up consists of my Hario mini mill and a simple Hario V60 cone filter. They are light, reasonably compact, and make you a superhero when you bust them out at opportune moments (aka most mornings).

But more important than gear and gizmos by far is fresh roasted, top quality coffee. Might I suggest a particularly awesome option…

Getting your parents to upgrade their morning brew is a noble pursuit that even many seasoned coffee professionals will admit can be a hopeless struggle. I know very few coffee nerds that have succeeded in rescuing their parents from bad coffee but you hear many war stories. Buy them a fancy new coffeemaker and grinder only to find them still fooling around with Folgers a year later or stockpiling criminally crappy k-cups from Costco to plunk into some $200+ abomination of ridiculously chromed plastic festooned with blue LEDs. I think my mom still has a pound of coffee I roasted almost a decade ago back in my Seattle Victrola days that she is saving for some special occasion*.

But if you do undertake saving your family from coffee hell, heed my (admittedly self serving) advice and start with great beans. Regardless of what brew method they’ve got going or that you want to steer them toward, it will all come to naught if they lack a fresh sack. The first bag will arrive in time for the holidays with a nifty customized gift card and you won’t have to suffer stale starbucks when you’re groggily opening presents or trying to avoid unpleasant conversations.

*for the record – I got my Mom a Maestro Plus burr grinder and she is currently a Tonx coffee subscriber. She is even starting to give me tasting notes on the beans I send her!

Many of you have noticed some changes at the venerable tonx.org… like the fact that I’m roasting coffee again after a long hiatus and the fact that you can buy it here on this website and it is awesome and makes people happy. This is all very good.

But what of ye olde blog? Will there be new bloggings? Pontifications and rants? Will questions be answered and secrets revealed? What is the story? Is this thing on???

Well the experts all tell us that to succeed at this whole internet thing we need one of these “content strategies” and you need to click things and “like” stuff and share share share everything you cyber-do. We suppose there is some truth to that and at any rate we recognize that there is an install of wordpress here and there is enough caffeine in our lair to power all kinds of typing of a lot of stuff that deserves to be said and that seems like a fine place to start.

So to old friends who still have this blog in their RSS readers I say: “hey, how’s it going? wanna buy some coffee?”. And to all the newcomers landing here and checking us out I say “have a look around. sorry the place is such a mess. oh that permalink structure… yeah I’ve been meaning to fix that… wanna buy some coffee?”

I’ve never liked the term “add shot”, used by coffee patrons (and many baristas) to request additional espresso in their drink.

Firstly, it sounds like Starbucks jargon – something that maps to a button on a POS system (or a button on some superautomatic espresso machine). It belongs alongside terminology like double pump vanilla, half-caff, and skinny – relics of an eclipsed era. And it bothers me whether used as a noun – “I’d like that with an add shot“, or an adjective – “I’ll have an add shot latte.”

But more than any of this, it is the brutal economics of the add shot that earn it my scorn.

A coffeebar serving great coffee is often paying upwards of $10/lb for espresso. Even presuming that A) the baristas are very skilled at their craft, B) the equipment is good and promotes less waste (timed doser grinders for example), and (most rarely) C) the espresso bar is busy enough that the barista is remaining dialed in without dropping too many shots – the number of salable shots yielded from that pound of beans can still be quite thin.

Selling a second pull of espresso for a mere $1 doesn’t make much sense. Heck, in many shops selling a shot for $2.25 or 2.50 barely makes a lick of sense.

Ultimately coffeebars struggle to succeed with often weak margins on what (in spite of the predominant consumer impression) remains a low priced product. As the cost of green coffee continues to rise, the pressure to refine a durable model for a quality-driven coffeebar grows. As an industry we continue to move too slow in our efforts to push beverage prices up (especially in crowded coffee markets like the Pacific Northwest). I humbly submit that it is long past time to say goodbye the $1 “add shot”.

I was recently interviewed by FoodGPS about many coffee topics, ranging from west coast coffee scenes to the legitimacy of barista competitions and my thoughts on coffee common.

There are a few things I said that I’ll expand on when I have more time (or if you buy me a beer), but here is a fun quote:

More vital than us pushing our message on audiences right now is really listening to customers and understanding what ideas about coffee they’re still holding on to and how they perceive what’s going on in our industry. You can see a lot of backlash against the kind of hoity toity expertise-driven positioning and differentiation that’s happening at the vanguard of the industry. I don’t think it has a lot of buy-in. The general foodie-centric consumer perceives wine or beer or cocktail culture with a much higher degree of acceptance than what’s going on in coffee culture. It’s still feels pretentious — and I think we have a lot of pretensions — and I feel a lot of those pretensions are defensible and worth defending and I embrace them, but I think we’ve done a poor job of communicating the legitimacy of them to consumers.

Mostly I’m just proud of myself for not saying anything too inflammatory.

attempting to return tonx.org to it’s former glory. please ignore. real content will soon return.

Yesterday marked for me 10 years of unbroken daily coffee consumption.

Some glimpses of my coffee pre-history:

Maxwell House, a percolator, a kitchen with yellow cabinets in an old farmhouse in rural Indiana. My mom would make a pot every morning before going out to feed the animals. I vaguely remember tasting it on a few occasions and thinking it was disgusting. It probably was.

East Village, 1992. I’d made a hangout of a place called Cafe Limbo. They served mochas in giant bowls. doesn’t really taste like coffee.

New York City. 1995-ish. Fashion week. I’m in a tent at Bryant Park backstage at a Calvin Klein show that I have no business being at. I’m standing next to Charlie Rose and Barbara Walters and attempting (probably unsuccessfully) to look nonchalant. There is an espresso bar, I think it was set up by Timothy’s Coffee. I take a cappuccino and am surprised to find I like the taste of it. I file away this dangerous tasty drug discovery, vowing to only use it when the need is extreme.

Midtown. Rat race. I’m working at a large healthcare nonprofit. I wear a tie to work. Starbucks is nearby and they have silly espresso based beverages that I indulge in only when I’m really in a crunch and need an energy boost. I regard coffee with suspicion, addiction to a stimulant seeming like a bad path.

Amsterdam. 2000. I’m in Holland for a couple weeks visiting family, smoking and bicycling and occasionally drinking coffee because ordering juice at these coffeeshops all the time starts to feel lame.

Burning Man festival. 2000. I’m there with my close friend and roommate from Brooklyn, camped among old and dear friends. I have an enormous crush on my roommate’s sister (let’s call her Joanna) who lives in Oregon and is also at Burning Man. I almost postponed my Holland trip earlier in the year to see a Bowie concert with her. I think knowing she’d be at this event was the thing that put me over the edge to attend.

I’m not sure I can encapsulate in any useful way what Burning Man is/was like if you’re unfamiliar. Transmundane. Intensity and profundity. Excess and exhaustion. Meltdowns and Epiphanies. And sometimes just a lot of dust in your lungs, general awkwardness and the all consuming desire for a shower.

A few days into the event I was having a meh Burning Man. Babysitting other people’s dramas, struggling with the construction of my elaborate personal geodesic dome which I designed in miniature to fit unassembled as checked baggage. Turns out making a dome the size of a tent (but 50x heavier) is as much effort as making a 20 foot tall dome. There is a lesson there.

But that girl Joanna. She was camped with Oregon people clear on the other side of the “city”. I kept seeing her but we rarely had a chance for more than a few words amid all the other people and chaos. I’ll leave out a full accounting of the pharmaceutical adventurings that occured, but suffice to say by the end of the week I was feeling spent. A night of general art tourism commenced and the girl and I were part of a large posse exploring the seemingly infinite expanse of theme camps and installations. For very brief moments we could break aside, hold hands, talk – before being swallowed back into the social chaos of our group. I felt like I would collapse from exhaustion before finding any game with this dame and that would be a shame.

My options for rescuing the evening seemed limited. Option number one would be to eat a tab of LSD, gambling that its stimulant effect would outweigh its consequences on my consciousness. Clearly that was a stupid idea, but it is a testament to my fatigue that I seriously considered it. The other option was to herd cats toward center camp where coffee could be obtained.

It was a 16oz cup and I was nearly in the fetal position as I was sipping it. I drank about a third of it and was feeling nothing, ready to write off the evening and head back toward my stupid metal tent. Then I felt it. A second wind.

A few hours later everyone in our posse was dropping like flies and Joanna and I were the last ones standing. We grabbed a blanket and headed out deep into the desert and kissed and watched the sun rise. I remember a lot about that sunrise.

Bookends. The center camp cafe at Burning Man where I had cup number one in my streak (L). 10 year mark, Day 3653: Finca Vista Hermosa peaberry, Huehuetenango, roasted by the producer, the incomperable Edwin Martinez (R).

I vowed I would drink coffee everyday for the rest of my life. Haven’t missed a day since. So there you have it.

My friend Mat and some coconspirators are launching an ambitious project to produce a magazine start-to-finish in one weekend, 48hr Magazine. My buddy Andrew Barnett at Ecco Caffe is sponsoring the team with some beans to help them power through the sleepless sprint. I created the following quick video to demonstrate to them a simple technique for the Hario V60 cone filters they’ll be using…

Hario V60 pourover how-to from tonx on Vimeo.

I’ve seen fussier approaches than this one and haven’t done very much experimenting or brew analysis myself, but I’ll say that this has been working pretty well for the crew at Intellivenice and I’ve really enjoyed the results.

Compelled to put the jumper cables to this blog engine to share a quick sip of some of what I experienced at this year’s Specialty Coffee Association of America gathering in Anaheim.

I was privileged to attend day 2 of the Symposium which preceded the show. I could say a lot about the cast of characters of coffee’s old guard and new school rubbing elbows, the visible familial camaraderie that spans from genuine love to old simmering grudges, the positive vibes and the visible posturings. But for now I’ll leave you with my major take away, which is that people in the industry are beginning to discuss and debate the right things with the right stakeholders increasingly given more of a place at the table.

I will share more about the announced Global Coffee Quality Research Initiative in a future post or two.

The US Barista Competition is a whole ‘nother compelling beast of awesome. A sort of ad-hoc coverage of the event emerged spanning streaming, twitter, flickr, and multiple blogs. (I did my part via the twitternets). The gist is that in spite of the lingering absurdities of the premise of these things, the caliber of the competitors has become truly astonishing and compelling to witness. More to say about the competition for sure, probably through flickr as I sort through my mass of images. I hope to don a judges apron myself when regionals kick up again.

All of this is prelude to the point of this post which is the people. Specialty Coffee is made of people! And there are many of them, more with each passing year, amplifying and refining each others enthusiasms, digging deeper into the mysteries of the bean and chipping away at the persistent challenges of the trade. A big thanks and shout out to the many friends and allies, old and new whom I feel deeply privileged to have connected with this past weekend.