Flea market wonders
I found a new flea market today (of course, a lot of people already knew about it, so this was not a significant achievement), and checked it out. Among all the other stuff people try to get rid of, there was something that requires some effort to top:
Empty coffee packages, i.e. the metalic/plastic bags the coffee grounds usually come in. 0.50€ for 10 bags. Some people use that package material for making “recycled” shopping bags. Mass producing them requires a lot of coffee drinking, so maybe they find buying them empty from fleamarkets easier.
There was also something actually interesting – a Sega Megadrive II console. Sadly without power supply and A/V cables. The A/V connector in Megadrive II is pretty exotic.
The darkest coffee
A while back I started using only dark roast coffee when making coffee at home. Paulig’s Parisien is good, but it’s not available as beans and it is ground very fine, not a good thing when using a french press. A couple of weeks ago I noticed a tea & coffee shop in Kauppahalli, stopped by and asked if they had any dark roast beans. “French roast or Vienna roast?” All right, sounds like my kind of place.
French roast is my favourite. It’s very dark, darker than Italian (espresso), very close to black. Vienna roast is medium, or a bit more; much lighter than French or Italian. The darkest roast beans are very oily, they clog up my kaffeemühle so easily that it needs cleaning at least daily, as opposed to light “classic” Finnish roast beans, which can be milled for a week without clogging.
The coffee the shop sells is roasted and packaged by Mokkamestarit, who import “ethically produced” coffee. They have quite a nice selection, too bad the shop in Kauppahalli won’t be carrying the whole selection.
A few days ago I went back to get some more. I had tried two of the French roasts (King Creole and Cuba Serrano) and one Vienna roast, and wanted more of the same French roasts, since they were on sale. The salesgirl warned me that King Creole is very intense. She made it sound like it was one step away from needing a buying certificate. Perhaps it’s the coffee equivalent of Laphroaig?