Whether you grow it, sell it or drink it, coffee is now more than just a hobby or your favorite drink - it's also your ticket to new friends, new information and a serious gateway to procrastination.

I'm referring to Barista Exchange and Barista Connection, two new additions to the sorta-recent explosion of social networking sites. But unlike Facebook and MySpace, these two cater to a specific audience, and the content revolves around everything java.

On Barista Exchange, you create a profile (first, define yourself by any number of coffee-related personas, including a barista, a farmer, or simply an enthusiast), and then gain access to thousands of similar-minded peeps. The name of the site describes one of its primary features: members can use their connections to facilitate an actual coffee exchange, which consists of baristas changing places for a week or so to experience the coffee culture in each others' city.

At the bar, shake up a Golden Orange Sake-Tini, Java Mojo and sip the Wine Pick Of The Week, a 2004 Torres Coronas Tempranillo, making sure to note How To ... Store wine better.

In the kitchen, the Seattle PI is quick cooking Quick Moussaka and seven different recipes, one for each day of the busy week, including Salmon with Lemon Olive Oil Sauce and Walnut-crusted Drumsticks. There's also a recipe for Catalan Fish Stew.

Ballerina Brunson doesn't give up good food for her art.

Even if you're not a real barista, you can pretend at home with Barista: The Game. Discovery Bay Games calls it "a strategic game of fresh-brewed fun," and it may be for the amateurs out there. But let's admit it: for hardcore baristas, we all know it's so much more than that. Like a bartender playing a drinking game, or a chef playing Wii Cooking Mama, it's a chance to show off your skills and prove yourself once and for all amongst your comrades.

For $14.95, you can roll the dice and flip the cards to "make" drink orders - but beware of fellow players spilling your drink or messing up your order! And don't get your hopes up when you win Barista of the Month, because with another card draw, your store can just as easily be sued for serving its coffee too hot.

Essentially, Barista is a card game, so you'll have to test your trivia and actual knowledge elsewhere (for a full list of rules, click here). But it's a cute idea, and a fun way to pass the time, for baristas and wannabes alike.

A group of scientists at Nestlé Research in Switzerland have come up with a machine that will rapidly taste and rate as many as eight different kinds of espresso. The ratings, they say, will be as accurate as if tasted by...well, actual people.

According to an article in Live Science, the machine analyzes the gases released by the espresso, and then interprets the data as "cocoa," "citrus," or "toffee," for example.

Sounds intriguing, and it could definitely save time. But do we really want to let a machine take the place of a task that people already perform well? It's not as if there is a sudden, increased demand in coffee taste testers, or that they are not adequately performing their jobs. ("Toffee?! No way. I distinctly detected citrus notes...you're fired.") I don't think that we're somehow missing out because our coffee isn't properly classified. Perhaps the machine is more discerning?

Cool invention, but for right now, I'm comfortable in the notion that my espresso has been categorized by humans, thanks.

I'm not a big coffee fan. Love the flavor, but it upsets my stomach. But I do have some iced coffee drinks during the summer, as long as there is some chocolate or mocha element in it. I like the Starbucks Frappuccino in the glass bottles (Mocha flavor), and I'm a fan of Nestle's Iced Java syrup.

This recipe has me a bit confused, though maybe it's just because I'm not a coffee guy. It's from allrecipes.com and it's a recipe for iced coffee. Do you really need a blender to make iced coffee? Or is this literally for iced coffee, a thicker drink, and not the cold coffee drink we're used to?

I am by by no means a "morning person." Like many a sleepyhead, I often require a steaming cup of coffee to get my engine firing on all cylinders. Sometimes I overdo it, either due to quantity or strength. On those occasions, I wind up with a case of the java jitters by late morning. Which brings me to the subject of this post: Panama's leading coffee producer just brewed up what it hopes is the world's biggest cup of coffee. I assume the guys standing around the rim of the massive mug are wearing masks so that they don't die of overexposure to caffeine.

Once the folks at Cafe Duran stop shaking and sweating, they'll submit their results to Guinness for authentication. The company brewed up 750 gallons of coffee, placing it above the previous record of 650 gallons. As of this writing there's been no word of what kind of cup holder has been designed for the megamug.

So I was drinking a nice hot cup of Dunkin' Donuts hot chocolate the other day (probably one of the last of the season as the damn temps keep going up and up), and I noticed their newish logo (on the right). It needs work.

I mean, I love the slogan, "America Runs On Dunkin'." It's not only catchy, but it firmly establishes DD's national presence very quickly. And the logo is a clever idea. But let's take a look at the four panels one by one and see if we can make the logo even better.

Over at Engadget, there was a post on how to convert your air popcorn popper into a coffee roaster. An interesting bit of tech work, but they definitely made it more sound more difficult than it really is. And the commenters seemed certain that trying to use an air popper to roast coffee beans was a move likely to burn down the house. Clearly, they haven't roasted coffee before. I have used an air popper to roast beans successfully, without any serious modifications to the machinery - and without burning my house down, as I cleverly thought to do my roasting outside. In retrospect, this was an excellent move, as the process produces a fair amount of smoke.

Here are some tips and instructions for roasting your own coffee.

A well made piece of latte art is a beautiful thing, but when it's combined with chocolate, it enters a whole new level. Dessert Comes First encountered this divine drink at a coffee shop in Singapore called Bali Blends. Not only do they clearly specialize in the art of coffee making, they carry a variety of bean blends from Indonesia and, in particular, from Bali. Balinese coffee was, until recently, only exported to Japan, but it is now appearing in new markets. The coffee is supposed to have a deep, earthy tone to it, so it is easy to see how it would pair exceptionally will with chocolate.

When I was pregnant and thinking about limiting my caffeine a bit, I learned a handy way to "decaffeinate" tea: just brew it once. The second steeping of tea has almost zero caffeine. As I typically use each tea bag twice, I thought to myself, that means two cups of tea equals one cup of caffeine. And then I proceeded to forget I'd ever heard that caffeine was bad for my unborn child.

Evidently, coffee is decaffeinated the very same way. Except that, just like my second steeping of tea, once the beans are soaked to removed the caffeine, the flavor isn't much to write home about. According toAsk Yahoo!, this is where the science comes in: "In one practice, the beans' post-soak water is mixed with a solvent that separates the caffeine from the liquid. Alternatively, the caffeinated water can be forced through activated charcoal or carbon filters, which also separates the caffeine from the solution. After either method, the coffee beans are re-submerged in the now-totally-caffeine-free watery extract where (hopefully) they reabsorb their flavor."

I don't drink decaf coffee much - especially now that I'm a mom of a baby, I need the caffeine. But I wonder: can you coffee nuts out there taste the difference? It's a pretty chemically-charged process, and it seems when chemicals enter the mix, flavor always loses.

[Photo Sarah Gilbert]