Fresh Ground is a blog for global nomads and kindred cosmopolitans. Plan your own trip, or follow along with my guides to cafes and reviews of the world's best coffee in Asia, Europe, North America, and beyond.

Miscellany
Highlights from Coffee Fest NY 2012

Highlights from Coffee Fest NY 2012

I paid a visit to Coffee Fest NY yesterday and took a few pictures to share (today is the last day of the show, so if you want to visit you have a few hours left, or pre-register for next year). Trade shows are rather unglamorous, full of syrup manufacturers, smoothie products, and other goods...
Three Aeropresses, One Barista

Three Aeropresses, One Barista

Carlos Aguirre Gano, an inventive barista championship competitor in El Salvador, used a rig to press 3 Aeropresses at once. I don’t know Spanish, but it’s been suggested that he brewed the same coffee at several roast profiles. If you can translate more, please post in the comments :) Now, watch and be amazed (at...
1960s London Cafes & Thoughts About Cafe Design

1960s London Cafes & Thoughts About Cafe Design

I’m loving this old video, shot in documentary style, looking at the wide variety of cafes that had opened up in London in the 1950s and 1960s. Part of its charm lies in its anthropological gaze, spending most of the allotted time on the unglamorous and precarious economic end of the business, while highlighting the...
Looking for Instagram Research Participants!

Looking for Instagram Research Participants!

If you didn’t know, when I’m not obsessing over coffee I’m working on a masters in applied cultural analysis at Lund University. Lately I’ve been researching mobile photo sharing as a practice that is changing our relationship to ourselves, our surroundings, our daily lives, and more. While taking pictures of your dinner might seem trivial...
Video: "Shit Baristas Say"

Video: “Shit Baristas Say”

Don’t take it personally, barista friends. :) At FRSHGRND.com we try to showcase companies and individuals that are passionate without undue pretense or unwanted judgment. Nevertheless, the stereotype is amusing and it’s always good to make sure you’re not crossing the line into self-caricature when you talk about coffee. Video by Sprudge.com, filmed at Four...
Coffee & Cream in High-speed Slow Motion

Coffee & Cream in High-speed Slow Motion

Modernist Cuisine has put up two videos of cream being poured into black coffee in high-speed slow motion. While most of us probably only combine milk with espresso, preferring to taste brewed coffee in all its unadulterated nuance, the video is pretty mesmerizing. If only they’d done the same thing with a barista pouring latte...

Pardon the mess

So, my blogs got infected by some exploit that’s currently ravaging WordPress based blogs. I had to do a lot of maintenance to get things back to normal and decided to try a new theme in the process. One big change – I’m increasing the photo size throughout the site, so for a while all...

Summer Update

Just got back to Seoul from a 5 day trip to Tokyo, and now I have two days to pack up and move to Sweden for graduate school. I’ll be doing the Masters in Applied Cultural Analysis at Lund University and the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. I’m looking forward to meeting new people and...

2010 World Barista Championship

If you’re a coffee geek living here in Korea and want to watch the 2010 World Barista Championship (WBC) streaming live online from London, here’s a little time table converted for local Korean time to help you figure out the schedule. WATCH IT LIVE – CLICK HERE! Wednesday June 23 5:30PM – 2:00AM – Round...

Seoul Grand Hyatt & Guerilla Brewing Tactics

Our friends Seung Jin and Diane are blogging their way through a gastronomic exploration of Seoul’s culinary landscape, which led Claire and me to a nice Sunday brunch at the Grand Hyatt last weekend. The food and setting was very nice, and perhaps it was just the company influencing my perception, but I’d say the...

Black Cat Espresso

I got a ton of Intelligentsia’s Black Cat espresso in the mail, so I took a bag to my friend’s cafe to play around with. They only have one grinder so I didn’t have much time to play with the grind, but I did have one of my hand mills with me (a Kalita with...

Too Much Coffee…

…makes people do strange things. I like this video, just saw it on Youtube. ...makes people do strange things. I like this video, just saw it on Youtube.