Brooklyn Brainery get into things ✁

Hey everyone!

First and most importantly, we're about to open a whole new round of classes next week - keep an eye out here and sign up for the mailing list to hear about 'em first!

If you're interested in the stuff we covered last semester, check out a few course wrap-ups on coffee and NYC history (part 1 and part 2).

What else? We're seriously hunting for a permanent space, spending half the day scrolling through Craigslist for new leads and the rest of it walking around Brooklyn scouting out "For Rent" signs. More updates as things progress on that front!

If you donated to our Kickstarter campaign to help find a space, you're likely getting a tote bag for your troubles, and you'll be happy to know hundreds of blank ones are in transit to us at this very moment.

We'll be spending the next couple of weeks screen printing them and then mailing them to you from one of Brooklyn's notoriously long-lined Post Offices. Good news is we'll have a bunch of extras, so if you're itching to add one to your wardrobe, you'll be able to buy one on this very website very shortly.

And finally, if you prefer your Brainery updates in a form other than writing, you can check out an episode of Electric Sheep all about DIY Education (featuring the awesome NYC Resistor as well) or even a video! 

As always, send us your ideas and whatever else (real estate advice?!) to info@brooklynbrainery.com.

For the past couple of weeks, our coffee class has benefited from some serious expertise from the folks at Cafe Grumpy and Blue Bottle Coffee. I learned a ton from them about sourcing beans, roasting them up, and turning them into deliciousness, a bit of which is below.

What's a coffee bean anyhow?  I don't think I'd ever really considered where coffee comes from, biologically and botanically. Turns out it's the seed of a cherry-like fruit which grows on a coffee plant, a bushy thing that falls somewhere in between a shrub and a tree. (You can totally eat the fruit, should you ever come across any.)

Once the fruit's picked, you need to get that valuable seed out, and this can be accomplished one of two ways - wet vs. dry processing. Dry or "natural" processing is just that; the berries are left out to dry until the fruit falls away, exposing the seed (the bean). In its simplest form, wet processing speeds things up a bit by using water to wash the flesh of the fruit away. (There's also a semi-washed method.) Some people say wet processed coffees are cleaner, while dry processed coffees are more earthy, but like with everything else, it's just about whatever you prefer. 

As far as roasting goes, as long as it's done by a competent professional, you should be fine. Neat fact: lighter roasts actually have way more caffeine than darker roasts!

And when it comes to buying beans, sure, you could spend $50/lb. on some Jamaican Blue Mountain, but you're much better off buying beans from people who actually care about the quality of the coffee they sell, roast it freshly, and buy it from good farms. Now that there's a bunch of really good roasters and cafes in the city, it's even easier to do that. It's also a good idea to not buy too much at once, say half a pound, since the beans lose a lot of flavor as they get older. 

Making it at home: No matter how you're making your coffee (drip, French Press, whatever), there's four different variables that come into play when you're brewing coffee at home.

* Water temp: Make sure it's not boiling! You want it to be more like 195 - 200 degrees, so let your kettle boil, then take it off for 30 seconds before you start pouring it on your grounds. 

* Size of the grind: Different methods need different grind consistencies (which is why it's great if you can grind at home, right before you make your coffee).  For a filter cone, you need something finer than you do for a French Press. Here's a guide. 

* Proportion of coffee to water: A good rule of thumb for drip and French Press is about 3-4 tablespoons for 8 ounces of water. It seems like a lot, which it is, but you'll absolutely notice the difference!

* Brew time: For a French Press, you want to let is sit for about three minutes. When you're using a filter cone, it's all about trusting your eye.  Before you even start brewing, pour in a bit of water to bloom the grounds; they'll absorb a bunch of water and get lighter in color. Once this happens, you can start pouring your less-than-boiling water in circles, using a thin stream of water if you can. You'll know the grounds are used up when they get really light (and you'll probably have a full cup of coffee).

Huge, huge thanks to the incredibly friendly, knowledgeable, and just plain awesome folks over at Blue Bottle and Cafe Grumpy for sharing their secrets on all things coffee.  

Last night we wrapped up our NYC history class in Dumbo, going over some of the history of the various buildings along the skyline.  Here's a super quick summary of the highlights, and huge thanks to everyone in the class for their ridiculously thorough research. 

1. Staten Island Ferry Terminals - I don't think the buildings themselves are terribly interesting, but the Ferry itself is full of good facts: it carries 21 million passengers annually on its 5.2 mile route and until 1997 you had to pay for it ($.50). Back in the 1700's, the first private ferry service took you to Bay Ridge, and it mostly helped farmers get their stuff to the market. 

2. Woolworth Building - The Woolworth Building's old - 1913 - and was the tallest building in the world for a bit. Back then, architects still weren't really sure what a tall building should look like, so they looked back at other tall buildings from the olden days.  Some made their buildings look like columns, but Cass Gilbert went with Gothic and it makes total sense in this case.  The Woolworth Building also gets the prize for the most obvious/appropriate nickname Downtown: the "Cathedral of Commerce."

3. South Street Seaport - In the '80's, this building company thought the best way to get people to come to the downtowns of their various empty cities was to build huge malls, euphemistically termed "festival marketplaces." And they built them everywhere; you've probably been to a few of them at some point - Faneuil Hall in Boston, Bayside Marketplace in Miami, National Place in DC.

Well, 25 years later, everyone's waking up to the fact that South Street Seaport's kind of a lame place only tourists go, and they decided to build a big fancy new tower, except then the Landmarks Preservation Committee said you can't really do that in a historic district and then the company went bankrupt. So we'll see about that. 

4. City Municipal Building - This was McKim, Mead & White's first skyscraper (1914), and the whole thing has always seemed a little off balance to me. Regardless, it was hugely influential in civic building, where Classical architecture remained relevant way after everyone else took up Modernism.  Fun fact: 28,000 people are married here each year!

5. Brooklyn Bridge - Since there's way too much to actually say about the Brooklyn Bridge, here's just a few random facts I cobbled together from Wikipedia and the internet. 

*It wasn't until 1885, two years after it opened, that someone decided to jump off the Bridge.

*The granite to build it came all the way from Maine. 

*Its suspension cables are 16 inches in diameter.

6. Verizon Building/375 Pearl - I've always wondered why this building was so ugly. Turns out because it wasn't built for people but for telephone switching, which you apparently needed skyscrapers for at one point. The plan now is to put a new facade on it so it isn't quite so offensive to the Brooklyn Bridge. 

7. One Wall Street - Just to make this building extra expensive, the entire thing is clad in limestone. It's kind of gorgeous though, and a really nice example of Art Deco architecture. Apparently the inside's amazing too. Lots of gold and red mosaics. 

8. 60 Wall Street - A newcomer to the skyline, 60 Wall topped out in 1990 and is oh-so-Postmodern. You can't tell well from the picture above, but the top is full of abstracted classical columns, all aglitter in glass. Check out the lobby, feels a bit like a Las Vegas casino! 

9. 70 Pine Street - Another Art Deco skyscraper, like One Wall but with a big spire, the coolest thing about 70 Pine is that is has double decker elevators, to reduce the number of shafts needed. At the moment, it's the third tallest building in the city at 950 feet. 

10. Freedom House/120 Wall Street - Here's a textbook example of the skyscraper style that NYC perfected in the 1920's, all the result of some zoning laws. Before 1916, you could build as high as you wanted on your plot of land, whatever the effects on the street below (i.e. plunging it into darkness and shadow and making it an entirely unpleasant place to be.)

After this happened a few too many times, the city decided to impose some zoning regulations, known as the setback laws. Only on 25% of your lot could you build as high as you wanted.  Otherwise, once you reached a certain height, the building had to step back from the street to let more light in. You can find these buildings all over the city, and they're a pretty incredible example of public policy influencing aesthetics. 

11. Beekman Tower - And now something from Frank Gehry. This'll be 76 stories of apartments, with a big public school and a hospital too.  Early reviews are pretty positive, but I think the most interesting thing is that Gehry really has no control over the inside of the building, because real estate developers have their own ideas of what apartments should look like and there's really no changing that. 

12. One Chase Manhattan Plaza - Pretty much everyone agrees this is a masterpiece of the International Style (built in 1969), though it was only officially landmarked in 2008. This picture of it is amazing. 

13. One New York Plaza - You can identify this building by its strange/cool beehive facade pattern.  It also has a wickedly large cornice at the top which makes it easy to tell apart from any other building way down at the tip of the island.  Before One New York Plaza was built, the city tried to acquire the land in order to build housing projects here.

This semester's class on the history of Downtown and Brooklyn is taking on a motley (you could say random) group of neighborhoods during our four weeks. 

Partially this is because there's just way too much stuff to learn about in four 90 minute meetings; partially it's a way to try and fit lots of topics in, and partially it's an excuse to do lots of the stuff I've been meaning to do and see since I moved here.  Since there's no unifying theme to our exploits, this seemed as good a time as any to recap some of the stuff we've done. 

Before class started, I biked out to the city's oldest building - the Pieter Claesen Wyckoff House in Flatlands. It's pretty awesome and extremely old (1652!) but also kinda small and unassuming.  It's got a super cute park and some nice gardens surrounding it, but there's also a tire shop next door and a McDonald's next to that. There's no train nearby and it's a little out of the way, but that's also what's sort of neat about it.  The best part about the Wyckoff House is that it just sort of blends in to the city, and it kinda feels like this secret thing when you find it.

Best fact? All the Wyckoffs in the world (50,000 of them!) are descended from this family, since it was the first time the surname "Wyckoff" had been used. It means something like "town magistrate" in Dutch. Also they have some really old waffle irons there and corn cobs in the walls for insulation. Neat. 

Last week we were super lucky to take a walking tour of Crown Heights with a neighborhood expert.  We started at the site of another old farm (maybe farms are the theme of the class?!), this one right around the corner of Nostrand Ave. and Macon Street in Bed-Stuy.

We wandered and walked all over the neighborhood, but easily my favorite building was this rambling structure on the corner of New York Ave. and Park Place. It's seriously huge, like half an avenue long. It's the kind of building you stumble upon and makes you feel like you're not in New York anymore. It's a school now, and you can't go in or anything, but it's totally worth the trip just to gawk at it a bit. 

This week we met over in the East Village (yep, a farm too) to meet with a local artist and talk a bit about Tompkins Square and the neighborhood. Tompkins Square was never a farm, just a swamp that's had a long history of protests and the occasional riot.

The most infamous riot in Tompkins Square happened in 1988, when the city began enforcing a 1 a.m. curfew in the park after noise complaints started rolling in. A protest of the curfew drew lots and lots of cops to the scene, and eventually things got violent, lasting until dawn. It's another one of those things about New York that's hard to imagine when you see the place today. 

Next week's our last class (skyscrapers!), after which I promise some random facts about very tall buildings.