http://www.scienceteecher.comToo much of this in my diet.Once upon a time, as best as I can recall, I was a cautious caffeine consumer. Decaf (or at the very least, a split shot) was routinely ordered if I surpassed one coffee per day. One or two cups of coffee per week defined my early college days, with a gradual increase to a cup or two per day during particularly daring phases in grad school. Once upon a time, a single shot of espresso was the answer to early classes after long nights of studying. A latte was just enough to push through mid-afternoon post-tonal music theory classes. Any extra caffeine left me jittery. And then . . . I started coffee blogging. Late on sunny Saturday morning, if you had looked, you could have found me bundled up against the wind, trekking around Seattle with Sebastian (of Seattle Coffee Works), Michael (of I Need Coffee and CriticalMAS), and Allison (an unsuspecting friend from Portland’s Bramble Floral Design), comparing espressos at different shops. Alternately commenting on the weather, whichever coffee we’d just tasted, or justifications for striking another coffee shop from a list far too extensive for one day’s coffee crawl, we sipped our way from Pike Place to Queen Anne, across Phinney Ridge, past Fremont, and into the U District by way of Greenlake. Limiting ourselves to a seven-stop tour of the city, we chose to avoid the most famous names in Seattle coffee, in favor of seeing what else was going on around town instead. Now, after the fact, it occurs to me that considering seven stops a “limit” of any kind when you’re ordering double espressos at every store is ludicrous. 36+ hours later, having finally hit a point where all the caffeine has worn off, I am excessively sleepy and this blog will be short. I will highlight only one moment of the trip: Big Truck Espresso at Le Reve Bakery. Spilling the Beans featured Le Reve once before, shortly after it opened, predicting that it would surpass most of the city’s bakeries when it came to espresso, and naming it a coffee destination to watch. After checking in again on Saturday, I am happy to report that both the bakery and the coffee appear to be doing splendidly. But of particular interest to me was the startling change in the Big Truck Espresso flavor profile. An interesting photo from coffeedetective.com, showing coffee alongside a favorite coffee descriptor: blueberries.Like all espresso blends, Big Truck depends on changing combinations of seasonal coffees to achieve some kind of product consistency. Espresso blends, inevitably, shift slightly and change flavors as different coffee lots become available and disappear again from the market. Typically, a roaster tries to select coffees that can be combined and roasted in a way that underlines taste elements very similarly to the previous blends and roasts. Thus I found it curious that, had I not known I was drinking the “same” coffee both times, I would never have guessed a close relationship between the Big Truck espresso I sampled this past Saturday and the one I’d encountered previously in November. Whereas November’s coffee was rich with wine and pomegranate, Saturday’s was sweetly paired with the day’s sunshine: full of blueberry notes and faintly exotic. In some ways, I suppose such variation could be considered a flaw, but since I enjoyed both espressos, I actually find the change (accenting unique characteristics of the available coffee, rather than masking them for the sake of consistency) to be positive.This marks the third time I have been both surprised and favorably impressed by the Olympia Coffee Roasting Co. As well, it signals an unexpected upset, as a young roasting company and a Seattle bakery significantly surpassed the level of excellence achieved by four-fifths of the cafes with established reputations we visited on Saturday! Well done, kids. Well done. And now . . . I am definitely going to go catch up on sleep.Follow me on Facebook and Twitter!