Round II

[plumtreeblossom]

Last night’s round of auditions went smoothly, and over all we had a very successful draw. I won’t say much more until those cast have accepted their roles, but lillibet is in the process of contacting them. I’ve got a strong Greek Chorus of women with plenty of the voice diversity I wanted. I’m performing as Chorus too, and if all goes well we’ll have a Chorus of 12 with possibly an understudy/alternate. E had her pick of some outstanding male actors for the other roles, and the selection was both agonizing and exciting. At the end of the night we were exhausted but happy with the lineup.

****
Apropos of absolutely nothing, but have I told you how much I hate dark roast coffee? I can’t stand when I accidentally get it from the cafeteria, like right now. Every sip has me making that cat-with-hairball noise. I’d like to know who came up with the idea of incinerating perfectly good coffee beans and making a nasty charcoal broth out of them. The lighter the roast, the more caffeine, you know.

Comments

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

Yes -- so few people seem to know that about coffee beans. The more you cook them, the more caffeine is lost in the process. The only reason espresso has a lot of caf is because the brew is so concentrated. Make the same thing in a standard American coffee concentration, and you're getting very little caffeine at all.

Conversely, munch a few powdered raw coffee beans and you'll levitate. At Java Joe's in Rochester (where I was a coffee roaster and gleened all this knowledge), we made a kind of friends-only roast where we roasted the beans only to the yellow stage. Then you had to crush them in a mortar -- they would break the grinder because they were so hard. Put that in a French press and let it steep a while... WHOA BABY. I have the highest caffeine tolerance I know of, but even I would have to sit down and shake for a while after one tiny demitasse of that stuff.

Roast 'em lightly.