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Coffee and Me – 2011 year in review

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Partly inspired by Brad Feld’s recent blog post “My 2011 By The Numbers” and of course Nick Felton’s “Feltron Annual Reports” – for those who know me, I’m passionate about amazing “indie” coffee and I’m a personal data obsessed nerd.  Mix those two together and this is what you get.  Special thanks goes to my friend Malcolm Bastien for introducing me to Daytum 🙂

At last! After a full year (since January 2nd 2011) of painstakingly collecting and manually entering my personal data for stuff I found to be most important (one of them being coffee of course) into Daytum, I can tell a story through numbers – sheer and glorious data that I sliced and diced for my own interest and maybe even yours if you want to peek into my unhealthy obsession of personal data and coffee.

Through this data I’ve collected through Daytum’s web app, iPhone app and mobile web view as well as Mint.com’s web, iPhone and Android apps, I’ve been able to capture an almost 360 degree view for the 365 days of 2011 of my coffee tendencies.  From number of speciality coffee drinks I’ve had, the different types, the time between drinks and the amount spent.  Save for location data, which was a bit of an after thought after I deleted my Foursquare account.. but that’s another story.

Coffee numbers for 2011

Total Coffee Consumption for 2011
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The Indie Coffee Passport Club – a Meetup for coffee lovers and genuinely interesting people

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indie coffee passport

While researching for interesting events and meetups for the Startup Digest, I stumbled upon the Indie Coffee Passport club, which is independently organized and the brainchild of Vanessa and Calin. Out of pure curiousity and wanting to visit my 10th stop on the Indie Coffee Passport (besides needing some more caffeine), I decided to check it out.  If anything, I figure I’d meet some interesting people and over a common passion – coffee.

About the Indie Coffee Passport Club

Today’s meetup was at R2 Cafe, which was formerly known as Quaff Cafe last year before changing ownership. From the meetup, met Vanessa and Calin, Andrew and Ariel. The level of passion and knowledge of coffee (nerdiness) was of varying degrees.

They hold a meetup at a pre-determined location and time every Sunday on the Passport.  The meetup was very informal and just a gathering of people discussing coffee and anything that came across their minds.

Out of our many conversations, we talked about Vanessa and Calin’s trip to North Korea and the state of the country, OccupyTO, our favourite coffee shops, our preference to dead-tree books compared to e-readers, my geeky passion on data visualization and personal data via Daytum.com and many others threads of conversation to give you a quick overview over what this meetup group is all about.

I’ll make the effort to drop by to these meetups more often.

Here’s a pic of the attendees of the Indie Coffee Passport Club – left to right are: Calin, Vanessa, Ariel and Andrew.

Indie Coffee Passport Club at R Squared Cafe

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On another note, I realized that the barista behind the bar was Matt Sonberg who was a wildcard from the Canadian Central Region Barista championships and a student of Sameer Mohammed of Fahrenheit Coffee.  He was a delight to get to know and dropping stupid knowledge about coffee.

Real men don’t put sugar into their coffee

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Of course the title of this post is a tongue in cheek statement.  It annoys me profoundly witnessing people unknowingly ruining the natural “sweetness” and flavours of coffee by dousing a perfectly good espresso (insert your drink of choice here) with a packet of sugar or artificial sweetener (the horror!).

For those who protest “it’s too bitter!” and then proceed to pour sugar into their drink like a little girl , I say this: man up! You’ve probably tried beer which was bitter as hell to start with, you pretended to enjoy wine without wincing. Much like fine wine and awesome beer, life is too short for bad coffee and it should be appreciated as such.

Here’s a little comic I made to convey the emotions a typical coffee snob I go through at an awesome indie coffee shop.

coffee shop rage

So real men don’t put sugar into their coffee… (okay, I’d understand if you were having a cup from  Tim Hortons … or Starbucks.)

P.S. This is just a rant so relax and have a coffee (with sugar if you want to 🙂