USA Trip 2009 - Day 3

A picture's worth a thousand words ...



Mild, inoffensive. Surprisingly good, actually.

Gibraltar + Idido Misty Valley from the lever machine.

Pourover bar for Fleur.

Lever machine. Tasted like it burnt the coffee a bit, but, still, nice coffee.

Kyoto brewer + syphon bar.

Syphon of the IMV.

Right, so great coffee from Blue Bottle, but missed out on Ritual. I am currently writing from Waterbury, Vermont, taking the Coffeelab course with Ben and Jen from Five Senses. One of the questions that I'm hoping to answer is exactly how much Australian coffee in general sucks compared with what's possible. The first day has proved to be a great calibration with the SCAA calibration form ... and I'm pretty zonked ...

November = Events

Don't ask me, why, but there seems to be a bit on this November.

Barista Comp Wrapup

The Victorian Barista and Latte Art Championships were held over the weekend. I did the judging calibration purely out of interest, but intended to study rather than judge. Turned out that there was a bit of a shortage of judges, so I sidelined studying to get the opens judged and happening. The obvious changes this year were the new machines and the new faces - who, without exception, displayed a very good level of technical competence. It would be impossible to remember or list all of the home runs that the competitors hit, so I'll just mention one - Simon James absolutely nailing the description of his espresso. It was nice to see Nim step up to judge, adding another experienced palate to the Victorian pool of judges.

Talor judged by HJ Ross, Myself, Mel, Tom and Jeff.

As usual, Syd has put up his amazing photos of the events. Emily Oak's idea to fly him up to Atlanta to be the official WBC photographer is brilliant.

I was furiously footnoting an essay on Sunday, but it was nice to see a well-deserved latte art comp win from Erin, who I am sure will win the Australians and the Worlds, but might lose the Intergalactics to the seven-handed Florgostillians and their legendary 'galaxy of rosettas.' Big props to Kirby from Maling Room and Dave Seng for their placings. Jesse 'Iceman' Hyde took out the Barista comp, leaving the press with the immortal one-liner:

"I used to play guitar full-time for a living," Hyde said. "Coffee geeks will never be rock stars. Slash (former lead guitarist of Guns N' Roses) is way cooler than David Makin."

Golden Bean

So I've got a 5am flight tomorrow to the Equal Golden Bean conference + coffee roaster competition. Should be fun; really looking forward to tasting the best that Australia has to offer. Many thanks to Mr Makin for the lift and Cafe Culture for the whole thing.

Drinking?

Why yes, yes I am drinking coffee. I have a nice drip roast kenyan coffee generously sent down to me by the boys at Mecca in Sydney. Thanks guys!

Siphon: With a high dose, surprisingly full-bodied, with apple-juice like acidity and mouthfeel. Relatively low on the classic winey/raspberry flavour - for a Kenyan - but definite orange overtones. Wierd. Dry finish, owing to the hot weather that the parcel has been exposed to.

Seriously. Lightish roast kenyan coffee, for brewed methods, has to be as close to shooting fish in a barrel as you can get in coffee. It's usually very impressive and this one is no exception.

LucaTech Industries Unveils the GhettoMax 2000 and Filter Coffee in Australia

Enter Mr Callahan

A few months ago, Adelaide espresso savant Ian Callahan threw down the challenge during conversation:

So here are the rules. Who can find the best/funniest/cheapest/most ingenious piece or pieces of crap to either
A) Chuck Norris (read, brake beat or crush) or
B) McGuyver (read, manipulate or engineer in some way) into a Drip station.

Single drip is okay, bonus points awarded for multiple cup drip/pour-over station, as well as practicality or sheer impracticality.

I feel that we need to set important boundary on the competition - you have until, say, December 14 to enter and you may enter as many times as you wish. (Selected so that my exams will be out of the way and I can have another go.) Your entry must disclose everything necessary to make your pourover station in such a way as to spoil the prior art base for anyone who might wish to patent such a device in future ;P Once all entries have been rounded up, Ian will collate them into a post on his blog and we can vote for a winner, to whom Ian will forward a prize by Xmas ;P

Given that Ian has a blackberry, I expect that he will be aware of what he has signed up for slightly before I publish this blog entry.

What the heck-a-roo?

So, if you're not up to speed on the uber-glamorous world of professional pourover brew stations, you might want to check them out:

4 Cup Station truBru from Taylor Maid Farms - $330 USD

4 Cup Station from the genius tinkerers at Espresso Parts $595

The latest Cafe Culture also features a 4 cup station called the 'terror bar' from Factor Design. Looked expensive - does anyone have a price?

The LucaTech Industries GhettoMax 2000 2 Cup Pourover Filter Station (EXXXTREEEEME)


As you can plainly see, the GhettoMax 2000 has a number of features unparalleled by any filter station on the market:
*Portability (TM) - suitable for catering, you can take the action to your customer and you can save valuable bench space when not in use.
*BrewGuard (TM) technology - owing to the wire guard on the side opposite the brewer, customers cannot touch the streams of filter brewing coffee
*Adjustulon (TM) saucer stands to get the brew vessels at the height of your choice
*PrecizoSize (TM) - the entire modular unit can be washed in a standard commercial dishwasher
*IKEA friendly (TM) - by utilising componentry from IKEA, this station will naturally blend in with the decor of any cafe ... that also uses a lot of stuff from IKEA

And the total cost is ... drumroll ... $5 per unit for the GORM clip on basket and you probably have everything else lying around anyway. To assemble, just buy one of the cheapass baskets, pull out the tin snips and make the necessary bends and cuts to get this:


OK, so it's a total piece of crap. But at least it's a cheap piece of crap.

Part II: Filter Coffee in Australia

Compared with the rest of the world, Australia is truly upside-down when it comes to coffee. We are close to unique in having a retail brewed coffee market that is almost 100% espresso. Until recently, that 'almost' was the nasty drip brewers at McDonalds. You know, the ones where the coffee would sit in glass carafes, baking on a hotplate for days because no Australian would actually buy it? The irony is that standard coffee scoring systems rate coffee for use as brewed coffee. Many is the time that I have had an 80something pointer outperform a 90+ coffee on the espresso machine. That said, brewed coffee is a fantastic way to appreciate the best that the world has to offer. The USA and Japan seem to buy a lot of the world's top coffee for consumption as brewed coffee. We could do worse than develop a fantastic brewed coffee culture in Australia to sit alongside espresso.

Enter the Clover. A few years ago, no-one in Australia had the slightest inkling of interest in brewed coffee aside from roasters, ex-pat yanks and random nutcases. A few brave cool kids bought a machine that produced coffee with a similar taste profile and - bam - people start to show some interest. Never mind the control that it gives you over the brew; people seemed to be more interested in the price tag and the fact that it was a complicated machine more like an espresso machine. Interest continued to gather for a few years and some of the cool kids overseas praised it to high heaven and built up the buzz. It looked like we were at a tipping point.

Out of the blue, checkmate - Starbucks bought the whole friggin' company, patents, kudos and all! A very clever move on their part. Starbucks has phenomenal buying power and reports are that they have been starting to snaffle up a lot of lots that specialty coffee roasters would otherwise like to buy. Is it possible that we could start seeing great coffee coming out of Starbucks? I can't see Clovers being rolled out in Australia for quite some time, if ever. It looks like Starbucks are doing OK, but not brilliantly with their Clovers overseas, with part of the problem being an inappropriate roast level. Still, it's only a matter of time until they get it right ...

Meanwhile, the snapping up of the Clover by Starbucks makes it unavailable to specialty roasters and cafes who might be interested in it. A similar level of control is offered by siphon brewers, but they are a total PITA to clean. You would have to be nuts to try to use one in a cafe ... how do the Japanese do it? Commercial filter brewing machines can produce a great result, but brewing two litres at once probably won't go down well with a public where those that are interested in coffee expect it to be brewed on demand and those that are not won't order it. French press/plunger is gritty and hard to clean. Aeropress doesn't have the clarity of flavour of filter. So, funnily enough, we are left with a renewed interest in single cup, pourover filter brewers - originally laughed out of the room as an alternative to clover. And why not? It's easy. Wet the filter paper, grind coffee, pour over water at the right temperature, serve up the brew and dump the leftovers in the bin. The amazing thing is that pourover filters actually do a much better job of brewing at a decent temperature than some crappy filter machines.

With a nice article in this issue of Cafe Culture, it looks like Toby is trying to take up the charge for pourover filter in Australia. Frankly, I was surprised. I have always pigeon-holed Toby into the high brew ratio, slow dripping, gloopy, chocolatey ristretto camp. After all, legend goes that Toby was critical in helping PB to develop the high brew ratio technique known as 'updosing', which has become as intertwined with the Australian identity in international coffee circles. Everything that I have tasted from Toby's Estate has been consistent with this approach and the TE stores seem to be kitted out with equipment geared towards it. This style of coffee is about as far from the light brewed cup as you can possibly get. Well, in recent years PB has been experimenting with 'downdosing', so maybe this is Toby's equivalent? Maybe Toby's interest simply arises from the similarity between filter brews and the cupping that all roasters enjoy? I'm looking forward to Toby's session on filter coffee as part of the Golden Bean and will endeavour to find out the answers - if I remember!

The Emerald in the Coffeebloggosphere's Crown, or not so Special?

Eliminating The Suspense

Esmeralda = emerald in Spanish, OK?

The Esmeralda That Was

Esmeralda is one of the coffees widely regarded as one of the world's best; its reputation is that of a modern-day Jamaican Blue Mountain. Last year, my curiosity got the better of me and I arranged to procure some from Paradise Roasters. In blogging about it, I introduced it as follows:

I probably don't need to write too much about this one. If you have been living under a rock, or if you just happen to be one of the few people who doesn't follow the coffee auctions, you might not know that this is currently the world's most expensive coffee. Previously, that dubious honour went to kopi luwak. (I'll spare you the jokes - google it if it's news to you.)

Esmeralda has an impressive back story; in a nutshell, the gesha varietal that makes up the Esmeralda Especial lot seems to have basically gone extinct except for a few random rediscoveries in Panama. It just so happens that this particular farm's gesha offering has won something like four Best of Panama auctions and every single other cupping competition it has been entered in. In terms of scores, the consensus seems to be that it's a 92 at a minimum, with some tasters going as high as 97!

The 2007 Paradise Roasters lot displayed a predominant and intense mandarin flavour in all brewing methods, backed with hints of bergamot and a slight astringency.

The Esmeralda That Is

Last year's, as far as I can tell, the correct name for it was "Hacienda Esmeralda Special." Flash forward a year and all of a sudden, the Petersons decided to shake things up by sorting the crop into different lots, all of which were auctioned under the "Hacienda Esmeralda Special" moniker. Again, the auction was blogged about widely. Readers are encouraged to post links to other relevant posts in the comments field. If you have to choose only one (other) blog post to read on the subject, remember the old saying - "in Hoff we trust." James' points about dilution of their own trademark and the effect on the market struck a chord with me, particularly seeing as trade marks was one of my favourite subjects.

The auction itself always reads like a who's who, so you might like to imagine Joan Rivers delivering the commentary. Stumptown was wearing batch one, hailing from "north of the creek," but the heavy hitter shared the most expensive batch, two, with Sweet Maria's. The dashing duo deftly devoured batch three, the peaberries, whilst 49th snapped up the sole double pass lot. Though the Petersons didn't credit Mountain Top for their technique - as I understand it - one wonders if the Piccolo clan's decision to purchase wasn't influenced by best buddy, Australian Mountaintopophile and coffee guru, Instaurator, who has done some consulting for them. Batches six through ten were bought by a wide spectrum. For the readers of this blog who I know follow the Japanese CoE buying circuit, it looks like crowd favourite Kentaro Maruyama didn't even contest the Esmeralda auction against big dog Wataru Nishibayashi. Presumably this means that Wataru will edge ahead of Maruyama in the awesome coffee purchasing league tables, but I would still want a several Watarus for my mint condition Maruyama trading card.

Competition results also deserve a mention. This year, the Petersons gave the Best of Panama competition a miss, presumably in order to give someone else a chance at winning. They also failed to place first for the fourth time in a row at the SCAA cupping pavillion (perhaps one of my kind readers could provide the link; I can't seem to find it). Fortunately, though, they did at least manage to walk away with first place in the rain forest alliance cupping for quality competition.

Anyhoo, that's enough background.

Having had spectacular success with the Mamuto, I decided to place an order for Esmeralda with Terroir, along with a few other goodies for various people:



Nim's care package; two packs of Esmeralda, a pack of Mamuto, Coffee Trail book, Hacienda La Minita book and a pack of the AWESOME filtropa pourover filters to go with his filter cone.

Let's take a closer look at that label ...


Where's the trademark Howell photo?

It was interesting to note that last year's batch from Paradise was comprised of unusually long and thin beans. This year's lot from Terroir looked considerably shorter and rounder ... perhaps a consequence of the decision to separate Esmeralda Special into different lots.

Anyhoo ...

Siphon/Vac Pot/Clover: These brews varied from being excellent to OK and I found the coffee difficult to work with. Several tasters agreed that there were Earl Grey tea (bergamot) notes, but differed to the intensity that they perceived. Sweetness was not as high as I had hoped, there was a good measure of acidity and the coffee was dry. The best brews had hints of peach.

Espresso: As I felt that the coffee was slightly too dark for siphon, I took it into the big V, borrowed one of their grinders and treated everyone to some Esmeralda espresso. The espresso had the kind of astringency that I usually associate with a roast that is slightly too light for espresso, but displayed a tiny amount of sweetness and some tannic tea type flavours.

This lot was interesting, but not the mind-blowing experience of last year's lot. Differences could have been due to (a) the separation of the Esmeralda Special lots this year, (b) the roasting of the coffee and (c) the shipping of this coffee, and attendant two week delay from roasting, compared with the last lot being brought over in carry on luggage. It would be very interesting to try out the various lots from the various sources that bought them, but that would probably end up being an expense to rival Krusty the clown's addiction to faberge' eggs.

The Esmeralda that will be ...?

It will be interesting to see if anyone actually does the work of tasting all of the various Esmeralda lots and working out how big the spread in quality is. Who knows how Esmeralda Special will be divided up in future? I am also very interested to find out how 49th's lot will go and whether this processing method might take off in Panama.

Digression - Siphon - Again


Siphon continues to be a learning experience, though brews are usually pretty good nowadays. I thought that the butane burner warranted a quick post. Frankly, I can't see how you can really use a siphon without putting it on the stove or using a butane burner. I bought mine off ebay from Jack Grieve. A similar burner is available at a very reasonable price through Jack's web store, along with some pretty cheap siphons.

When used in conjunction with a thermocouple, the butane burner makes it possible to get repeatable and adjustable brew temperatures. A marathon session of three siphon brews (and three cleaning runs) showed that the burner seems to emit more heat immediately after it is filled with gas. Good practice would be for the first use after refilling to be in a cleaning run.

So far, adjustments to the water temperature, dose and grind for the siphon have had eerily similar effects to doing the same thing for espresso.

One final tip - remember that every siphon brew is diluted by the water that doesn't make it into the top chamber to start off with and, as this is a fixed amount, the proportion of each brew that is made up of water that has never been in contact with coffee will increase if you try to brew less than the maximum amount for any given siphon. This lead to the experiment and realisation that if the brew is slightly on the strong side, dilution with hot water can sometimes save it.

Minita and Mamuto Mumblings

Introduction

I'm a firm believer that the quest for coffee excellence requires tasting a lot of different coffees with an open mind. For my purposes, I try to taste a lot of different stuff purely to build up my own palate, as well as to get an idea of what others are writing about and what is possible in the world of specialty coffee. All of the good roasters that I know also believe in tasting a lot of different coffees - they view it as an exercise in benchmarking, without which they will quickly be proclaiming the virtues of utter crap; emperors with no clothes. Conversely, I don't think it's a coincidence that the very few roasters who I have heard of who don't taste widely do not produce a good product. (That applies equally to home roasters as it does to commercial roasters.)

The USA

Several years ago, I never would have imagined ordering coffee from the US of A. Over the past few years, coffee from the US has made regular, but infrequent, inroads into my usual rotation - fuelled in part by the prolific writings of the US bloggosphere and other coffee web pages.

It would not surprise me if the USA's coffee mainly does live up to the stereotypical Starbucks ashy espresso or the pot of drip coffee that has been sitting on the burner for a week, but they have a lot of good things going for them. As the world's largest economy, they have considerable buying power and they are conveniently placed near south and central america; two great producing regions. Their roasters appear to have developed against a background of a drip coffee culture, in which single origins are appreciated for their unique characteristics ... even if only because of the forehead-slappingly obvious contrast between a smooth colombian and a winey kenyan. In comparison with Australia, their espresso roasts have developed in the vacuum of Starbucks' shadow. Finally, they have an active specialty coffee association and are home to various programs such as the cup of excellence and the coffee quality institute. The USA has well and truly emerged as a big player in both the worlds of espresso and brewed coffee - one that leads the charge in many respects.


(Unfortunately, I appear to have misplaced my bag of Mamuto. I have taken a page from the book of barismo and borrowed this photo from Steve Ford. Steve ran an excellent project where he took a photo of the first cup of coffee that he drank each day over a year. You can check out 'First Cup' here.)

Terroir and George Howell

This particular coffee comes from Terroir in Massachussets. Terroir is run by George Howell, the man who founded the multi-site roastery 'Coffee Connection,' which he later sold to Starbucks before co-founding the Cup of Excellence and winning the SCAA's lifetime achievement award. Avid PQ readers will note that this is not the first time that Howell has rated a mention on this blog and I reiterate that his Long Road To Coffee Quality is a must-read.

The lovely thing about the prevalence of e-commerce in the USA is that the person on the other side of the web site is usually quite responsive and adept at getting around all sorts of problems, which included the difficulty of getting the coffee sent out as soon as it was roasted and correcting for an incorrect credit card number on my part. Nonetheless, postage is still a significant problem, with my package taking about three weeks to get here. Ugh. This activity is also not for the faint of wallet.

Costa Rica La Minita

La Minita has a reputation of being one of the great coffees of the world. It is also a model of quality and ethics working hand in hand. In a nutshell, my understanding is that they are very stringent on their picking and processing, to the point where they pay the pickers a premium to ensure that under-ripe fruit is not harvested. In turn, this means that their product is consistently good, justifying the premium for the roaster. This is a delicate, washed coffee that is really ideal for brewed coffee (drip/filter/siphon/clover). However, I first tasted this coffee in Klaus Thomsen's 2006 WBC winning blend, where it was paired with Daterra Sweet Collection to create a light, clean, crisp and sweet blend.

Siphon/Drip: Bright, slight apple flavour. Slight bitterness emerged on cooling.

This particular coffee simply didn't stand up to the battering that it received in shipping. I have no doubt that it would be better if it were fresher. That said, it wasn't exactly bad, but this struck me as a relatively subtle coffee that was always bound to be overshadowed by the Kenyan powerhouse. Read on.

Kenya Mamuto

The Mamuto has gained notoriety due, in part, to the ridiculously high scores that Kenneth Davids has awarded it over the years. Again, this coffee also demonstrates that quality and ethics can happily coexist at the pointy end of the market - when I bought it, Terroir's web page said that $2USD per 12oz went back to the farm, which is a helluva lot of cash in the world of green coffee.

Siphon/Drip: Bright, sweet, smooth, ribena, coffee cherry, tomato.

This coffee was simply fantastic. I turned off the espresso machine for a week and gladly scrubbed my siphon out. If it was that good after its shipping ordeal, it's kind of scary to imagine what it would have been like earlier. Simon James was of a similar opinion:

Well I’ll cut to the chase! The Kenyan Mamuto was STELLAR! No wonder it scored a 97 at Coffee Review. I can’t say that my description of the flavours I experienced was the same as those of the Coffee Review, but it was certainly sweetly powerful, with a smooth balanced finish. But I got blackcurrant aroma with stewed apricot in the cup. A very tasty coffee!

Needless to say that this coffee stood up to its trip a lot better than the Minita did. I actually took both the Minita and the Mamuto along to a cupping at BBB. The Minita fared well, but was not a standout. The Mamuto was the absolute stand out; it was everyone's pick, regardless of their level of experience.

From my description above, you can see that this cupped up like an exceptional, but classic, Kenyan coffee - very different to what one would expect from a Colombian, for example. It's worth pausing to reflect that perhaps it is the fact that these coffees tend to have the least 'classic' profile that makes them so clearly special. Coffeecuppers deal with the distinction between classic cups and unusual coffees in their short coffee tasting primer. Howell that this consistent and unusual cup profile merited the title 'Grand Cru' - on his fondness for wine analogies, see CG podcast 63 (link directly to 29 megabyte mp3 file).

Teaser

Yeah. I admit it. I have some different stuff on the way from Terroir - readers with less respect for their wallets are invited to taste vicariously through future posts. I'm also keen on getting some stuff from the outstanding Ecco Caffe if anyone wants to split postage at some stage.

Hacienda La Esmeralda Especial

About the coffee:

I probably don't need to write too much about this one. If you have been living under a rock, or if you just happen to be one of the few people who doesn't follow the coffee auctions, you might not know that this is currently the world's most expensive coffee. Previously, that dubious honour went to kopi luwak. (I'll spare you the jokes - google it if it's news to you.)

Esmeralda has an impressive back story; in a nutshell, the gesha varietal that makes up the Esmeralda Especial lot seems to have basically gone extinct except for a few random rediscoveries in Panama. It just so happens that this particular farm's gesha offering has won something like four Best of Panama auctions and every single other cupping competition it has been entered in. In terms of scores, the consensus seems to be that it's a 92 at a minimum, with some tasters going as high as 97!

So how much of it is hype? How much of it is mystique? How much of it is actually in the cup? Recently, a very generous person coming to Melbourne from the US of A offered to drug mule some coffee over for me. So naturally I asked for some Esmeralda. (Before you ask, no, this was not the auction lot stuff - it was the pre-auction stuff that sold for exorbitant but comparatively sane prices.) As fate would have it, the coffee arrived right in time for the first of this year's Melbourne Barista Jams, which I was running. (Perhaps I will blog quickly about that in the future; for now, you can take a look at my crappy photos and Syd's rather better photos.)

Strange shaped beans. Reminds me of a Harrar Longberry.

Tasting Notes:

Syphon/Vac Pot: Dominant and unnatural mandarin. This is a definite shock to the system. In Peter's words, "coffee shouldn't taste like that." Dry finish. Hints of Earl Grey tea (is this what they call "bergamot"?) in the first few days after popping open the bag, but these subsided. I didn't get the cornucopia of subtle aromatics that many others have waxed lyrical about, but I put it down to being ten days after roasting and having travelled half-way around the world. Most of the US coffee that I have tried just gives up the will to live on the plane trip, so the phenomenal coffee that we were producing really is a testament to either, or perhaps both, the inherent quality of the bean or Miguel's roasting and packaging.



French Press: Mandarin. Dry finish from the syphon wasn't really there. Creamy finish (I usually associate "creamy" with "vanilla," so I hasten to add that there was no vanilla flavour.)

Espresso: Yes, I couldn't resist the temptation to pull two shots with some of the remaining coffee. No, none of them were perfectly dialled in. The better pair had a fair whack of orange, but a slight astringency that I tend to associate with coffee being roasted a bit too light for espresso. This coffee has gained notoriety against a backdrop of Americans who drink drip, so it is unsurprising that it was more suited to preparations other than espresso. Indeed, a lot of the commentators online say so quite explicitly.

The Wrap Up:

A sensational coffee for anything except for espresso. Espresso is unique and interesting, but I didn't feel that it showcased the coffee as well as the brewed methods. Perhaps it would make a good foil to a rich, heavy style of espresso as a small component in a blend.

More Information:

Many of these people have tasted the coffee under fairer conditions ... ie. without it having travelled half way around the world. It is interesting to read their taste descriptors.

Hacienda La Esmeralda - the farm's webpage; quite a bit of info on gesha

Stoneworks - final auction results

CoffeeCuppers.com - tasting notes for green Esmeralda roasted by Jim and Bob

Coffee Review - Kenneth Davids tastes Esmeralda from multiple sources

Sweet Maria's - tasting notes from Tom

Paradise Roasters - where my lot came from

Digression 1: Syphon coffee - dryness + bitterness

The dryness of the syphon coffee warrants more investigation. To my mind, there were three possible causes:

(1) a taint inherent in the coffee;

(2) contamination from past brews in the hario cloth filter;

(3) the sunbeam grinder that I bought for non-espresso use not cutting the mustard.

Number 1 was eliminated with the french press preparation. However, I used the ditting at work to grind the coffee, so numbers 2 and 3 are still on the cards. I am now storing my cloth filter in a solution containing cafetto and doing a cleaning brew with just water before brewing, following some tips from Toshi. We'll see how things turn out.

Digression 2: Back to Basics

Well, it has been a while since I started this blog and I can't say that I have been prolific in generating a set of tasting notes for me (and others, I guess) to refer to. I will endeavour to correct this in future. This might entail me just putting up some basic posts; just the notes, with a minimum of chat and without photos.