I was just in Boston for a business trip, and while there was indoctrinated into the Boston coffee world of Dunkin’ Donuts. Yep, coffee at a donut shop. Very a la Tim Hortons.

Now, aside from the fact that the donut was far superior to our own Tim Hortons, the coffee was still just normal everyday coffee - albeit a fairly good one.

Now, from what I gather, they do their own roasting or something of the sort. But, what’s unique is the way it is served as standard.

In Boston, at Dunkin’ Donuts, they’ll give you your coffee with milk and sugar - unless you tell them not to. And they are very very generous on both fronts (whole milk, it tasted like). Anyway, it made for a rich and sweet coffee, and with such a light roast, it’s hard for me to say what the coffee itself was like. Perhaps a good thing ;)

Anyway, I would indeed take this coffee any day over Tim Hortons. Better, but not a great cup of coffee.

We’ve been using an electric kettle to boil our water when we want to drink coffee or tea. One of those that doesn’t even shut-off automatically, you have to pull the plug when you think the water is ready. So we started looking for a new kettle that would look nicer in the kitchen and would not burn the house down if we forgot to unplug it.

We looked in a few places: The Bay, Sears, various kitchen gadget stores. They all had the same stuff and the nice looking kettles where $90 minimum, so we gave up. That is until we wandered into a tea shop and saw the utiliTEA, a nice looking stainless steel kettle with temperature control.

The knob on the bottom allows you to control the water temperature when the kettle shutfs off. If you want to boild the water you crank it all the way to the right. On my kettle the middle setting heats the water to about 82C and the middle of the shaded area gives you about 92C. After some trial and error you can find out where the right setting is for whatever you are brewing: coffee, green tea, black tea.

The units are not calibrated so you have to use the kettle a few times to figure out where the temperatures are on your kettle, but it doesn’t take very long and the results are worth it. Compared to the other stainless steel kettles we saw the utiliTEA was about $20 cheaper at $70. And the other kettles didn’t have the temperature control.

Tags: water, kettle, review, utilitea

We were married on April first. During the planning process, we found ways to infuse almost every aspect of the wedding ceremony and the reception with elements of who we are.

One such element, obviously, is coffee.

Our coffee-themed elements included:

• Our wedding favours: chocolate covered coffee beans (Java Beans) from JJ Bean
• Our wedding cake: hazelnut sponge cake with chocolate ganache and espresso flavoured butter cream (the strongest flavour, as per our direction)
• Wedding breakfast: no hotel coffee for us! Coffee delivered with breakfast from Trees

We took the coffee theme just about as far as you can take it, and those guests who know us appreciate that we connect with our wedding so closely. It was really "us".

Plus, we have to say, it was really delicious :)

Tags: wedding, coffee, wedding favors, chocolate, wedding cake, blogaholicswed

Today we moved Vancouver Coffee from MovableType to WordPress. Some of you may see the old pages until DNS servers expire their caches. But if things went well, you shouldn’t really notice any difference. Ok, some permalinks may have broken but I think most of them will continue to work.

Let us know if you find something wrong with the site.

This post on BoingBoing links to a few self-portraits taken using a shiny french press. My press has the dull black plastic top, so you’ll be spared from seeing my face, after I woke up, before I drink my coffee. I think she’s had too much coffee already :)

Me and my girls enjoyed a fabulous breakfast the morning of the wedding, all brought in from Trees. Mexican-origin coffee. Scones, muffins and croissants.

I had been waiting 6 months for that scone (no carb diet), and I have to say it was worth the wait.

Meanwhile, Ianiv went to Denny’s with the groomsmen. He was  scheduled for De Dutch, but their website time did not agree with the actual opening time.

I think my breakfast was better :)