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update: Car Wash Coffee

update 5/30/2021: permanently closed

It’s been a little over a year since my friend Rachel and I visited Car Wash Coffee in Kensington, MD. I just added the coveted Asterisk of Quality (I just made that up, I think it has legs) to Car Wash in my guide, because in the times I’ve visited since it’s improved.

baristas performing at a higher level, including milk art
more variety and quality in food, both to eat in and to go
more use of their logo, car-themed decorations, and running videos of a car wash in operation on the big-ass tv, all of which serves to tie the place better to the its namesake car wash

Still a giant pain to get in and out of when there’s traffic, but it’s always got a good crowd and is definitely the kind of place its town needed. Wishing them continued success.

you meddlesome kids and your interwebs

I’m very much in favor of this. It’s a bit deflating to go into a beautiful coffee shop to find it filled with people on their laptops, making you think you’ve wandered into a library. I’m not one to chat up strangers in cafes (baristas excluded), but I’d rather be around a conversational buzz than quietude interrupted by fingertips dancing across keyboards.

single scene, take 2

Following my recent dip into single serve pourover pouches, I’ve been trying the Counter Culture singles I received at Christmas.

So far, a success. I’ve found I like the bolder flavor profile of the Big Trouble blend more than Forty-Six, but that’s just a personal preference and both are certainly good. I also like that, unlike pourovers or drip coffee, there’s a much greater depth of flavor and a really nice caffeine jolt. Using the bags is simple, and on whole a much easier portable process than the pourover pouches or using the aeroPress.

happy 2020!

Here’s to a year of sunshine, great coffee, cool music, friendly baristas, and treating your baristas well.

the Salt & Pepper Diner Essential Song o’ the Day for Dec 26

Just visited the Johnny Cash Museum in Nashville. The tour ends with an exhibit dedicated to one of my favorite songs, with the video playing on a loop. I definitely could have watched it 21x in a row.

merry christmas!

Wishing you the happiest of holidays, my friends. I’m grateful for every and any for take a look here – maybe even you, you bots and spammers.

A lovely gift pack of single serves and a mug from Counter Culture were under the tree for me this morning, can’t wait to try them out.

trying out the single scene

As I mentioned in my recent holiday gift guide, there’s a nascent market for single serving convenience formats in quality coffee. In addition to instant coffee and teabag-like steeped coffee, there are some inventive, self-contained mini pourover products on the market. My buddy Rob travels to Ethiopia frequently on business, and he recently brought me back a local example of the latter to try.

Peet’s is getting hitched

Peet’s Coffee is merging with European coffee company Jacobs Douwe Egberts. It’s a combination of siblings, as both companies are owned by German holding company JAB, whose other investments include pieces of Krispy Kreme, Pret A Manger, and Keurig Dr. Pepper. JDE’s portfolio of brands are found mainly in Europe with some outlets in Asia, aimed toward mass-market rather than highest quality, so it’s a good marriage in that sense. The move prepares the combined unit for a potential IPO, possibly next year.

I wouldn’t expect to see operational changes in individual Peet’s outlets, but the combination and the potential IPO could give them a war chest for expansion with an eye toward eating into Starbucks’ dominant market share. Both also slug it out on grocery shelves for bags of beans, and this may mean we see more Peet’s branded pre-made drinks in retail coolers.

moving away from plastic & paper

Blue Bottle Coffee is in the news this week (h/t once again to my friend Karen), as it announced that it is undertaking a series of operational changes with the goal to be zero waste by end of 2020.

The drive starts with pilots in two San Francisco Bay area shops to eliminate single use cups, which they hope to roll out throughout their entire chain.

A company blog post from their CEO announcing the changes contains some frank comments, including an admission that current efforts just aren’t cutting it:

We recently woke up to the fact that our beautiful bioplastic cups and straws were not being composted even though they were 100 percent compostable. Too many ended up in landfills, where they couldn’t break down at all. So we switched to paper straws and sugarcane-paper cups. But that’s still not enough. We still go through on average 15,000 disposable single-use cups per cafe per month in the US alone, which adds up to 12 million cups per year.
-Bryan Meehan, CEO, Blue Bottle Coffee