Pour Quality

Shuttle Espresso Machine Review

2010-07-28T13:28:00.008+10:00

Introduction

Domestic e61 heat exchanger machines have been on the market for quite some time now and for all of that time, they have been quite expensive. Lately, with the rise and rise of specialty coffee, we have seen an increased interest in these machines, part of which has coincided with an increase in prices of these machines as a consequence of the Australian dollar's fluctuation against the Euro. All of this has created a climate where there is a business case for sourcing out decent machines made in a country with a lower cost of labour and a more favourable exchange rate and bringing in a pricing model where the importer sells direct -as opposed to adding a markup to support a reseller network - in order to deliver a cheaper machine to the consumer. This is exactly what e61 has done in bringing the Shuttle into Australia from China. Of course, whilst this might be a recipe to cry "knock-off", none of these things
actually gives any indication as to the quality of the machine and the coffee that it creates. For this reason, I was interested and grateful to Matt from e61 to be given the opportunity to explore the machine.

This review is written with people who might be interested in buying this machine in mind. This means that I will make reference to other domestic espresso machines that I have used and even a few commercial machines. These references will be comparisons to tease out a little more about the Shuttle, seeing as this machine falls to be evaluated against a market of competing products, but are not intended to give any sort of insight into those other machines.

Finally, I want to touch on the issue of reviewer independence in this review. To Matt's credit, from the outset he accepted that I am only interested in writing this as a totally independent review and that I might not have anything nice to say about the machine. I have sent Matt a copy of the text of this review in advance so that he could comment on it; that resulted in one amendment, which was to correct my original error in saying that the machine was manufactured in Taiwan and not China. Our arrangement was basically this: I get to use the machine free of charge to me, but get nothing else. I cover all costs of coffee.

Espresso

Espresso is the most difficult part to get right in any espresso machine. If I were in the market for an espresso machine, I would give the most weight to this part and little weight to the rest of it.

Espresso - Taste Test

To evaluate the machine, I tasted a few different coffees that I am fairly familiar with.

The first was a commercial espresso blend comprising Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, Kenyan and central american coffees at a medium to light roast level. This is a fairly difficult blend to work with, but is capable of delicious results. I chose this blend because the result in the cup would give me the most information about how the machine was functioning. The espresso was thin, sour, metallic and dominated by grapefruit flavours (presumably from the Kenyan component) at all dose levels, with the contribution from the yirgacheffe overwhelmed.

The second that I chose was a commercial espresso blend that was slanted more towards heavy body and chocolatey sugar browning flavours. I chose this because it is a coffee that has proven itself to have mass appeal. The espresso was a little bitterer and ashier than I expected, even at coarse grinds, high doses and fairly fast flow rates. The coffee also seemed to blonde out towards the end of the pour (but I note that this is something that I have noticed with a lot of domestic espresso machines).

I tried a few other coffees and struck gold with some home roast Tanzania Blackburn Estate Shade of September Microlot. This was a failed filter roast that went slightly too far. Too light for most espresso machines, on the Shuttle it produced a sweet, rich shot with loads of berry goodness and a lively acidity. The fact that this coffee performed well illustrates a good point about domestic espresso machines and most commercial espresso machines; seeing as people don’t tweak brew temperatures, people will tend to gravitate to blends that suit their machines, which is always a consideration to take into account when reading reviews and posts online.

These taste tests, together with the steam flashing from the group, made me suspect that the machine was running too hot.

Espresso - Numbers

I borrowed a Scace device and portafilter pressure gauge from Craig at 9 Bar Espresso Services in order to test out the machine. The first thing that I did when the machine arrived was to run the pressure gauge and see it settle at around 9 bar brew pressure. I used the brew pressure gauge before packing the machine up and got a reading of 11 bar. I should note that this was using a blind gauge.

The Scace device read brew temperatures between 104C and 99C. For reference, the Giotto at work put out brew temperatures between 94C and 89C.

Temperature measurements should be taken with a grain of salt, in that there are a myriad of factors that can give rise to inaccuracies. The Scace device does a fantastic job in creating a platform for repeatable measurements, but it is still important to be aware of sources of error, such as probe and multimeter error. In this case, the actual value of the reading may be out by a few degrees. For what it's worth, boiling water read 104C on the particular multimeter that I was using, which implies that the “true” brew temperatures were in the range of 100C to 95C. As an aside, the difficulty in measuring brew temperatures is something that people should consider when reading espresso machine reviews that give a passing reference to “temperature stability” or similar without giving any insight into their measurement process. Similarly, brew pressure measurements need to be taken with a grain of salt, as measurements taken from the gauge built in to the machine will vary depending on where the gauge sits in the internal plumbing on the machine - so two different models displaying the same brew pressure on the internal gauge might actually have different brew pressures when measured at the head. Measurements at the group head depend a little bit on the measurement device; I seem to remember that the rule of thumb is to subtract about one bar from the gauge reading for blind gauges.

In terms of how these numbers scrub up, I think that we can infer fairly safely that the brew temperature is on the high side. I should note that there is no "correct" brew temperature; most espresso blends will perform well somewhere between about 89 and 96C, depending on roast levels. I'm a little more hesitant to draw conclusions about brew pressure; I think that this is not a variable that has been well explored, seeing as most machines are set at the "holy grail" pressure of 9 bar ... using whatever gauge is most handy! That said, I suspect that lower brew pressures might be a little more forgiving for the domestic e61 HX market.

Milk - Use

In contrast to espresso, milk performance is fairly straightforward and easy to evaluate. To test out the milk, I tried frothing on a few 350mL jugs in a row. There was certainly enough steam available, such that I actually found it a little difficult to control. My housemate, a professional barista, thought that the steam was great, which suggests that it might just be a matter of spending the time to get the right
technique.

I did notice that the "no-burn" steam wand got uncomfortably hot after steaming a few jugs in a row. This is consistent with the performance of other steam wands with inserts that I have used on domestic machines, such as the Giotto that I have at work.

Milk - Numbers

The Shuttle was able to steam enough milk for a single milk drink, using a 350mL jug, in 16 seconds. In comparison, the Makin Espresso Maver machine also takes 16 seconds and the Giotto that I have at work takes about 26 seconds. A La Marzocco FB-80 can do it in 10.

In my review of the Makin Espresso Maver machine, I noticed that a good predictor of steam performance is the amount of time that it takes for the steam boiler to drop to 0.7bar, seeing as at this boiler pressure the milk isn't being moved around enough to be worthwhile. When the steam valve is fully opened, the Shuttle drops to 0.7 bar boiler pressure after 33 seconds. In contrast, the Makin Espresso took 85 seconds last time I checked and the Giotto at work takes about 28 seconds.

The Machine

This section is just some brief notes on the build aspects of the the machine.

The Good:

Stainess steel frame - won't rust as compared with a powdercoat steel frame, which can rust where the powdercoat chips off. That said, I have to note that the courier dropped the machine that I used and as a result the section of the frame holding the drip tray had bent.

Stainless steel tank - makes sense, given concerns over the past few years of materials leeching from plastic. The tank has a valve fitted to the bottom so that it can be pulled out, filled and dropped back in, though the over pressure hose must be maneuvered back into place.

Wire grill over drip tray - you don't get as much crap collecting on the top of it and transferring to the bottom of the cup. Of course, the tradeoff for this is that you can see more of the muck that collects in
the drip tray. The opposite extreme is the metal plate drip tray cover of the giotto; see the photo below to see how much mess collects on top of it after a few shots. At work, I have to wipe the drip tray after
every use.

Internal components - whilst the machine is made in China, the components all seem to be components that have been used in other machines. The brain box is from gicar and the pressurestat is from CEME. I note, though, that I didn’t get to strip the machine down - instead, this is based on the tear-down photos sent to me by Chris.

Stainless steel body - seemed to polish up very easily.

Boiler is insulated - presumably a good thing in terms of energy savings, but query whether in this instance it isn't another factor making the machine run hot. Nonetheless, having the machine come with a boiler insulated from the factory means that there shouldn’t be any need to consider embarking on this task yourself.

The Bad:

Double portafilter spouts - these sit forward and, so, make it impossible to wedge the portafilter against the bench for tamping; they are also a little wide for pouring two both streams of a double shot into a single espresso cup. The Giotto has the same issue. See photo below.

Drip tray - the drip tray is far too small, particularly if you want to flush a large amount of water through it - I was emptying every shot or two, which is basically totally impractical unless you have your machine right next to the sink, in which case it is still annoying. I keep a bucket under the bench to empty the giotto drip tray into.

Water tank cover - the water tank cover has two holes punched into it for handles. Things like dust, dirt and ground coffee can fall through these holes. Again, the giotto has the same problem.

Stainless steel tank - the fit and finish on this was somewhat poor, in that some of the edges were fairly sharp. To my mind, this is a bit of a problem on the part of the machine that your fingers are going to get near the most often.

Drip tray grate - as great as it was to see a wire drip tray grate, it was irritating that the drip tray grate did not sit flat in the drip tray.

No brew pressure gauge.

Boiler pressure gauge - I found it somewhat hard to read, as the markings are not at the numbers that I am used to; eg 0.9 bar instead of 0.1 bar.

Conclusion

As I flagged before, for me an espresso machine purchasing decision should come down to espresso performance. In this case, I can’t honestly say that I was thrilled with most of the espresso produced by the machine. It may be that this is simply due to the machine running too hot, which is something that can be cured in a number of ways. I understand that E61 has requested modifications to the machine to address this problem. If these work, this machine might be worth revisiting as a good value
proposition.

An Aeropress Recipe Collection (And Why It Doesn't Matter)

2010-04-25T22:07:00.004+10:00

Introduction

My espresso machine has been with some dude having some modifications done to it and my housemate has been convincing me of the virtues of the aeropress. I was pretty sceptical of it initially because of the infomercial type advertising (snuggie eat your heart out) and the rave reviews from people brewing hyper-concentrated brews and re-using the paper filters 15 times (I kid you not), bu it's pretty hard to argue with it on the convenience front and it is true that it allows you to control pretty much all of the variables, so I have been experimenting with it a bit over the past few months. One of the things that I found irritating about it was finding info on how to use the thing. So, without further ado, I present you ...

An Aeropress Recipe Collection

Manufacturer's Instructions (pdf)

Wendelspro

Wendelblog (I think the above is updated)

Varney's Kenyan Brew

Anders Valde, 1st Aeropress World Champion (Woo! Yay!)

2009 Aeropress World Championships Top 3

Tristan Stephenson

Scott Marquand

Klaus Thomsen

Tom Owen (You Tube)

Why It Doesn't Matter

If you read through all of the above, you will find that they are pretty different. I'm sure that a big part of the difference is due to the difficulty in communicating grind size. (And the associated extraction info.) That, and the massive variety of taste preferences - people often put forward their preferences as the best without explaining why. Actually, that's a good point, so I might reiterate:

People often evaluate without describing.

For example; I was suprised at the strength of one Japanese siphon champ's preferred brew.

In other words, at the end of the day you have to adjust coffee based on taste, which brings us to ...

The Gold Cup

As with any other brew method, aeropress brewing follows the gold cup fundamentals. The gold cup has an interesting history, which is well summarised by Paul Stack here, but it basically comes down to something like this:

Good Coffee = Extraction of the right compounds to the right strength

Extracting the right amount of stuff basically means not underextracting (and having a cup that lacks flavour) and not overextracting (and having a cup that is bitter), but rather getting the right amount of flavour. The range 18-22% has become canonical; this means that, for example, if you grind 20g of coffee, 3.6 to 4.4g of it should end up dissolved in your cup. From memory, the number seems to have come from the early experiments (read Paul's post) and now that we can very easily calculate extraction using a nice refractometer and calculator, I think that we should all be repeating these experiments. From memory, for example, I think that Mr Howell likes to extract his delicious coffee to a narrower range within that 18-22% range.

The right strength is the other main matter of taste. From memory, the SCAE standard is about 1.3% TDS, whereas the SCAA standard is a bit lower. This means, in the case of the SCAE gold cup standard, that 1.3% of the volume of liquid should be coffee extract.

Got it? Simple? Should be.

(As a side-note, I did the SCAA gold cup certification last year at the Atlanta expo. Repeating the name "E. E. Lockhart" a million times made it feel a bit much like a remedial primary school history class for my liking, so I hope that my certificate arrives soon. A friendly follow up email is in order, methinks.)

(As a further side-note, Mark Pendergrast's book Uncommon Grounds mentions that initiatives such as the Coffee Brewing Institute, which did the research for the Gold Cup standard, was backed by the Pan-American Coffee Bureau. In other words, whilst the major US coffee roasters were busily squabbling amongst each other in the face of decreasing share of the beverage market, it was coffee farmers footing the bill to improve the standard of coffee consumption in a land far distant from them and to consequently increase market share for their customers.)

Variables

The whole point of the Gold Cup is to learn how to change strength and extraction to improve your cup. Doing so requires you to change variables. Fortunately, the Aeropress gives quite a lot of control:

steep time
stirring
grind
water temperature
coffee/water ratio

My Recipe

So at long last we come to my recipe. I imagine that this will be useful for no-one, seeing as it is very specific to my setup. To start off with, we noticed that the cups we were getting were quite bitter. It turned out that the culprit was the grinder that I was using. Big conical burr grinders might be the bees-knees for espresso, but aeropress proved to be a challenge for my Kony. The problem was solved by removing the finer particles using a drum sieve. The resultant grind was then not yielding enough per gram, so the weight had to be increased from a standard 55g/L ratio. All of which means that the following is probably fairly useless, but I'm going with more or less:

22.5g coffee (post-sieving)
~200mL water (a few minutes off boil)
stir coffee one or two times
1 min 50 sec steep time (inc 30 sec plunge time)
dilute to taste.

Works for me at the moment. At a guess, I'd say that I'm probably at about 1.25% TDS by taste. Extraction is probably on the lower end, but I do notice bitterness if I let it steep much longer. Yes, I'm looking at getting a better grinder for filter. The ceramic burr hand grinders that I have tried so far have been pretty woeful.

I have been using the inverted method, though Tom Owen points out that if you fit the bits together, a vacuum forms to stop more coffee leaking out anyway, so I might try that. As a practical matter, it depends if you're comfortable with the risk of catastrophe if you can't fit the filter properly with the press inverted. As a taste matter, I suppose it depends if you want your coffee sitting up against a bit of rubber or a bit of paper - neither of which sounds attractive. I will probably have a go at making some cloth filters at some stage.

Of course, the absolute best thing about it is that clean up takes 2 seconds!

Updates!

It may be useful to keep a collection of Aeropress recipes, so if you have any links that you would like me to add, let me know ...

Summer and the Brown Menace

2009-11-21T21:56:00.005+11:00

OK, so I know that my legions of regular readers have been missing my contributions to this blog, so I wholeheartedly apologise to both of them.

There are a few things that I should probably talk about here, like meeting Geoff Watts and the lovely speech he gave at St Ali recently (it doesn't take a genius to predict that a bunch of people are going to try to pass off crap bought through brokers as "direct trade" over the next six months), the opening of ten million nice cafes around the place, the great performance of the usual suspects (need more links) at this week's Bolivian COE Auction and, let's not forget, the amazing work of Aida Battle's fincas Mauritania and Kilimanjaro being showcased by Square Mile ... but I'm not going to.

We're unfortunately entering that time of year that is traditionally a wasteland for good coffee. The heat just kills coffee so quickly. Some dudes have come up with some really cool ideas - no pun intended - to address the problem. Andrew at the Maling Room came up with a great idea after we got sick and tired of having a window of two days to use our deliveries at Maltitude and Maling Room; wine fridges. Nolan has put some in at Proud Mary and I'm guessing that they will become more popular. Nim came up with the great idea of using a tiny esky at home. Whilst Rio Coffee was supplying Mecca, Tony shipped coffee to them in polystyrene boxes. I have a few at home from orders from Tony and I'm using them to store wine. Surprisingly, when the ambient temperature was about 24.5C, it was about 6C lower inside the box. Not bad for a "cellar" that cost me ... nothing, and therefore possibly a feasible solution for cafe owners whose space and budget won't allow the extravagance of a wine fridge.

The effect of heat is magnified with those unsealed brown paper bags that seem to be really popular now. Sealing coffee in the gases that it gives off after roasting seems to me to make a real difference in preserving flavour and, of course, brown paper bags don't really do a good job of sealing it in ... really, the only thing that's worse is buying coffee from an open basket. Valve bags seem to do a better job, but we need to remember that those valves apparently fail quite a lot. In any case, I wonder if the plastic is permeable - at Coffeelab, the oxygen meter showed that these bags seem to vary. If we're talking about 250g, vacuum packing it in valveless bags after roasting would probably be an affordable and sensible option, but I imagine that you'd feel like a moron selling prepackaged coffee bags that had puffed up like a football. Not to mention that for some reason vacuum packaging seems to have developed a bad reputation, possibly because it is associated with stale coffee in many people's minds.

I have had great success with brown paper bags by adaptin a technique from Mr Wolff; once I buy coffee in a brown paper bag, that brown paper bag lives inside a cheap 750mL takeaway container, which seems to be the ideal size for storing 250g bags of coffee. At $12 for 50 at a restaurant supply store, they won't break the bank and it's surprisingly convenient to have that many containers with lid. Presumably they aren't airtight, but I think they certainly make a difference in the shelf life of the coffee. Now before you go saying that they run contrary to any sort of environmental reason for using paper, these containers are dishwasher safe and recyclable. The only downside is that the edges can crack.

Deadman blend; not dead coffee! Speaking of which, this coffee is absolutely delightful; one of my favourites of the past six months. A shining example of the convergence of clever blending and clever sourcing of truly spectacular green coffee. It also runs contrary to the idea that blends hide the farmer: you can clearly taste the acidity and berry of the kenyan element, the more fermenty berry of the Aricha, the body of the El Sal and the sweetness of the Colombian element. Buy it!

Finally, with filter brewing on the rise, this post seems like a good place to vent my hatred of brown filter paper, too. Most of the brown papers that I have used have been garbage - heaps of rinsing required to get a cup that tastes like coffee and not like paper. If you're opposed to bleached paper for environmental reasons, spare a thought for the litre of water that you might need to throw away in the middle of this drought ... oxygen bleached paper might well be more environmentally friendly. That said, Chemex paper is bleached and seems to be pretty unimpressive - see the Hoff on the subject. Fortunately, the bleached Hario paper and the bleached stuff with MCM's filters seems to be pretty good.

New Rules

2009-07-26T15:30:00.005+10:00

So Starbucks finally opened a store to try to go toe-to-toe with the high-end coffee crowd. The signs were there all along; from half way across the world, even I knew that they had bought the company that manufactures clover and remember people complaining about how Starbucks had apparently gone and bought up all the Blue Batak so that it was difficult for the little independent dudes to get any?

Read the Cho's article, take a look at the photos on flickr: from a five minute glance it looks like the new store is a cold and calculated attempt to jump into the little independent dude space. Take a look at the bolts sticking out of the back of the LM, the old-school kettles, chalkboards and enough recycled timber to take on even MD. This is grunge manufactured with decimal point precision.

Naturally, I think that the gut reaction of anyone interested in high end coffee will look at this venture with cynicism. I mean, they can't really be cool if the process by which they create the image of being cool is detached, calculated and analytical ... can they? These guys are just stepping into the little independent space and presumably regurgitating all the same messages about "single origins" and other buzzwords that the high-end coffee movement has been all about; any bets the coffee won't actually be all that good ... will it?

But let's take a step back for a minute. It's not as though putting together a funky looking cafe, presenting the public with a beguiling array of buzzwords and information about coffee and still selling a pretty crappy product is something that Starbucks has a monopoly on (if, indeed, that is what they are doing here). There are any number of little independent roasteries out there that are free-riding on the work of the good guys. I think that many of us have been to a cafe or roastery where the barista behind the expensive multi-boiler wundermachine has waxed lyrical about the fantastic properties of the coffee of the day, only to serve something that was disappointing, if not defective, but in no way lived up to the hype. Similarly, I think that many of us have been sold coffee accompanied by a whole page of information about it, but that two seconds of research will show is actually one of the cheaper, commodity type coffees right off the offer sheet of a large broker. (Sidebar: I'm in no way bagging the large brokers; they have stunning coffees as well as crappy coffees - the challenge for the roaster, as always, is to find them.)

The good news for the consumer is that Starbucks will hopefully mop the floor with independents who talk the talk, but don't walk the walk. Starbucks has the cash, the marketing brains and the clout to beat these guys at everything that they do. The only advantage that the independents have in wining the marketing "war of words" is that they are not associated with the Starbucks brand and can position themselves free of the baggage that that entails. Hopefully competing with this new entrant will mean that independent little guys will have to deliver better quality. The news is good for those that do; hopefully this new Starbucks store will act as a stepping stone to get consumers in the USA moving towards the best coffee.

So overall, I'm quite optimistic about the impact of this new venture on the consumer (as opposed to on little independent roasteries) - more competition is usually better. I do have one gripe, though - whilst the "inspired by Starbucks" tagline obviously does the job of getting the consumer to understand that it is a Starbucks store, it is a bit of a slap in the face to all of the independent stores that would seem to have been the real inspirations for it.

The B Word

2009-07-21T21:54:00.003+10:00

OK, so it has been a while since I last updated, but it hasn't exactly been hard to get your fix of Luca coffee rants. My last article, on Fair Trade coffee, was published in BeanScene #3 and is on my other web page, complete with copious footnotes and the full reviews of the featured coffee. My recent article in Cafe Culture gave a very brief overview of the wonderful coffee tasting course that I did in the USA earlier this year. And there is much more in the pipeline ...

The one thing that is decidedly missing in the above is controversy and opinion. After all, what is the bloggosphere if not a virtual soapbox?

There was a tiny bit of controversy in response to my last post, where I dared to use the word "best," albeit with half a billion disclaimers, including prefacing the word with "one of" as opposed to "the". The person who posted the comment since deleted it. I kind of wish that that person hadn't because the comment raised a very good point. From what I remember, the comment was something along the lines of "don't use the word best; can't we all get along and appreciate everthing that everyone is doing without comparing and whilst singing kumbaya." Obviously I'm paraphrasing. The poster of that comment is welcome to take exception and correct me, but is welcome to stay silent, safe in the knowledge that I won't reveal his (or her) name ;P

I certainly agree that the B-word is used indiscriminately online in relation to coffee and its presence often indicates unreliable information. In the past, I have been careful not to use that word where possible. That said, all coffee, all coffee machines and all coffee roasters are most certainly not created equal. I don't think that it's controversial to recognise that some things are better than others and having spent a lot of time exploring the world of coffee I'm happy to mention some things that I like. (I'm even more happy to do so against a background of a disturbing rise in coffee roasters using buzzwords over substance, but that's a rant for another rant!)

In that spirit, let me point out that our good friends at Square Mile have to be amongst the world's best coffee roasters. (Stick that up your pipe and smoke it, anonymous commenter!)

On a more serious note, I have now had the pleasure of tasting coffee from Square Mile on multiple occasions and in each instance I have been quite amazed at the care taken to select different coffees and roast them to present vastly different sensory experiences, which mostly match up pretty closely with the description of the coffee.

Now, there are a few really top notch coffee roasters around and whilst the shelves at Square Mile groan under the weight of many trophies, that's not really enough to merit my dragging my lazy hide to the keyboard for this blog post. What merited this post is that Square Mile seems to be a happy convergence of an abundance of coffee talent and a dearth of accounting talent leading to a ridiculously cheap subscription for us Aussies. Long story short, we can get a 350g bag of coffee delivered to our door from merry old London every month for about $20/month (roasted for filter brewing). That's about $60/kg delivered. I actually wrote an email to Anette to check that this price was correct for Australia, given that postage of anything to Australia from practically anywhere is usually enough to impoverish all but the six richest kings of Europe. To be fair, though, this is also in part due to the AUD being the strongest that it has been against the GBP for a long time.

There's always a catch and this time around it is quarantine. It seems that AQIS has now decided to inspect anything and everything. Green coffee imports quite clearly require a permit, but I have never had a problem having roasted coffee shipped in until a few months ago - presumably because nothing nasty can survive the 200C+ temperatures that coffee is exposed to when it is roasted. The first time around, my order arrived a mere week after it was posted, but this time around it was delayed two. Here's hoping that we return to the situation where roasted coffee is acknowledged to be as low risk as it clearly is.

Great coffee every month and reprieve from the agony of choice. Lovely.

Anyway, with my obligation to put something on this blog fulfiled, I bid you adieu!

USA - FINAL POST ... and then some ...

2009-06-08T15:33:00.005+10:00

OK, so the old blog hasn't gotten much of a workout in the last month, so time for a whirlwind update ...

USA Trip - The LAst Leg

OK, so after Atlanta, I headed over to LA for a few days of hanging out with Em, Scott and Saxon from AIR and the various Intelligentsians ...

Deaton gives us a tour of the Intelly roastworks.

Kyle and Tim showed us the training room, where the staff for Venice beach were hard at work in their intensive training program. Terry Z's GS2 looked pretty schmick.

Intelly Silverlake. This store was like a magnet; I was in LA for two days and I think that we made about four trips to Silverlake!

Gorgeous layout in the front patio; I really should have also taken some shots of the inside of the store. The store is set out to give the staff heaps of room to work, but nonetheless looks beautiful. Great coffee offered in a number of brewing methods.

Kenya Thunguri brewed as a clover. An absolute stunner, in the league of the Mamuto. Personally, though, I find a whole mug of brewed coffee to be a bit of a hard slog. Not only is it a helluva lot of coffee, but it also takes forever to reach a nice drinking temperature. I much prefer BBB's way of brewing it into a pot and serving it with a small cup, which allows you to pour a small amount into the cup at a time in order to have it at the perfect drinking temperature.

We also took a trip to Venice Beach to see how the new store is progressing. It is going to be pretty phenomenal. I'm tipping this to become an iconic photo for the area once the sign is lit up.

Home Again

Of course, there have been a lot of interesting things on at home, too. Looking back, I have actually done a heap of cuppings over the past few months. And good ones, too - good coffee, good roast levels, multiples of each sample.

(Conclusion: you can't cup with paper cups. I'd better add cupping bowls to the shopping list.)

I also feel that we're on the up-side of the Melbourne coffee cycle. Not only are we getting in a lot of new green coffee at the moment, but the cold weather allows for much better storage and ageing. I think that it will get better over the next few months as the stuff that is now new becomes an old acquaintance to the people roasting it, following which, as it starts to heat up several months down the track, things will start to decline. That said, there's every reason to be optimistic that the down side of the cycle won't be as bad as it has been in years past. For one thing, the past year seems to have seen a lot more competition come to the green coffee market, with a few Aussies starting up agencies for overseas importers. For another, I think that the better roasters are now starting to think about green storage and will be better able to manage their inventories towards the end of the year. The question is how much these best practices will actually spread; getting people to spend more time, money and effort on coffee is always an uphill battle. George Howell puts it very succinctly; to paraphrase him, good green storage only costs a few percent of the overall price - everyone in business believes in insurance, so why not pay the tiny amount for good green storage so that you don't end up having to try to sell green that has gone bad?

Finally, I suppose that I should briefly mention Seven Seeds. I suspect that the guys probably want to keep it under wraps a bit so that they can have a slow start, but that's simply not going to happen. Needless to say, it is extremely well fitted out and there are a few really clever ideas that I'm sure will be copied, such as the nursery. Taking a walk around the green room is really quite confronting; there's a lot of very expensive and very good coffee in there. Frankly, this place has nearly everything to be one of the best coffee roasteries in the world. And I don't say that lightly.

USA Trip 09 - Days 9 Through Whatever ...

2009-04-27T21:52:00.004+10:00

New York

So after Coffeelab I didn't do too much coffee stuff in New York. Apparently there's stuff there that you can do other than coffee.

I did make it down to Cafe Grumpy and 9th St Espresso. Grumpy delivered service true to its name and coffee true to its reputation. Everything seemed to be very driven by Ethiopian coffees; more stuff of the IMV Ilk. The espresso and clovers were pretty good, but I have to say that I found their in-your-face IMV type flavour to be rather unsatisfying after the balance of the espresso that Mane busted out on our last day at Coffeelab. Fantastic cappuccino at both Grumpy and 9th St, with Grumpy pulling off a rather amazing transmogrification as the berry flavour of their coffee gave way to dark choc in the last few sips. But what's with the milk? Coarse bubbles at both places.

SCAA + Atlanta

The Specialty Coffee Association of America Expo was always going to be jam packed ... add the World Barista Championships and it was a very, very, very packed few days ...

WBC

Team Australia in their run through time; Tim, Wolffy and JP. I really wanted to spend more time with team Aussie and more time watching the WBC, but had too much stuff to try to squeeze in at the expo. In fact, I only ended up watching one performance - Mike Philips from the USA (who I thought definitely had a winning performance). Tim's run through went well; his espresso tasted really sweet and I can't wait to stream his performance, already knowing full well that he will have done us proud.

Grinders provided by Espresso Parts. Tshirts provided by latteart.net.au.

The WBC espresso bar; fancy being able to get great coffee at a barista competition!

Labs

OK, so in a nutshell, I did four labs - two brewing labs and two farming labs. The farming labs were absolutely awesome, with some guys at the cutting edge taking us through all of the various processes and correlating the many goings on at the farm with the result in the cup. Money well spent.

Show Floor

Me using the new time machine. At least I think it was a time machine; every time I came near it I lost half an hour!

The machine that everyone was talking about. Utterly amazing. Brew pressure profiling via a new lever group. Critics correctly point out that brew pressure profiling via a lever is impractical in a busy bar operation. Except when you can record the pressure profile and play it back! There were also a bunch of other cool things, including SS portafilters and teflon coated steam wands. I'll go out on a limb and say that I reckon this prototype is the best machine on the planet at the moment.

You can get an idea of the front of the machine from the photos above.

LM are popular dudes. Every man and his dog gave them coffee.

So how did the coffee taste? Pretty amazing.

USA Trip 2009 - Day 5

2009-04-09T10:07:00.003+10:00

Some images from Coffeelab for your viewing pleasure ...

Jen grading coffee before passing it through the screens

My coffee grading table

Aroma tests - note the red light; used during the aroma tests and triangle cuppings so that you can't tell the difference in the colours of the ground coffee, solutions, etc

Mane pushes forward the odd one out - I think he got this one right

Preparing for a regular cupping - an activity that takes place very quickly and efficiently with many people and Mane's awesome cupping lab

Today's Indonesian cupping featured a few pretty mindblowing coffees. Delicious.

USA Trip 2009 - Day 3

2009-04-07T12:24:00.006+10:00

A picture's worth a thousand words ...

Mild, inoffensive. Surprisingly good, actually.

Gibraltar + Idido Misty Valley from the lever machine.

Pourover bar for Fleur.

Lever machine. Tasted like it burnt the coffee a bit, but, still, nice coffee.

Kyoto brewer + syphon bar.

Syphon of the IMV.

Right, so great coffee from Blue Bottle, but missed out on Ritual. I am currently writing from Waterbury, Vermont, taking the Coffeelab course with Ben and Jen from Five Senses. One of the questions that I'm hoping to answer is exactly how much Australian coffee in general sucks compared with what's possible. The first day has proved to be a great calibration with the SCAA calibration form ... and I'm pretty zonked ...

SCAA

2009-03-31T21:36:00.002+11:00

Excuse the lameness of this post, but I just thought that I'd let y'all know that I'm off to Coffeelab, then to the SCAA conference and WBC. Agenda is as follows:

Waterbury for Coffeelab
New York
Atlanta for SCAA/WBC
LA

So get in touch if you'll be around for any of that.

MCM/Mercanta @ St Ali + More Ethiopian Craziness

2009-03-09T17:01:00.005+11:00

First of all, let's just get this out of the way. In breaking news, Lloyds of London have insured a coffee taster's tongue for ten million pounds: check it out. Pretty cool stuff.

Enter MCM

Melbourne Coffee Merchants recently started trading as a green coffee importer that is the exclusive Australian agent for Mercanta. Last week, Mercanta's MD, Stephen Hurst, visited the country to meet and greet. The whirlwind tour netted a fairly good article in The Australian, which is worth a quick skim.

For me, the main event was the presentation by Stephen + cupping at St Ali. Not only has Stephen been running Mercanta for over a decade whilst being a Cup of Excellence board member, but before that he was a commodities trader specialising in coffee. Needless to say, it was a rare treat to be able to pick his brains on a wide number of topics.

I guess that the elephant in the room, as always, was the issue of whether or not the public will actually respond to better coffee. Stephen painted a rather rosy picture of the possibilities of the market for high end coffee in Australia, which certainly made me feel a lot better about it. There are some truly spectacular coffees out there and, in an ideal world, I would really love to see Australian roasters shelling out for some truly spectacular lots and, by the same token, informed consumers demanding that roasters lift their game when they try to charge premium prices.

One of the stats that came up in response to the aforementioned point was that Australia's per capita coffee consumption has room to expand, at least when compared with a number of other markets. Stephen was able to draw a number of links between countries with high per capita coffee consumption and the countries to which much of the better quality coffee in the world goes. It seems that quality drives increased consumption, so on the whole consumers do seem to be able to vote with their feet and tongues. Anecdotally, this fits perfectly with my experience - Maltitude constantly got busier and busier, with its neighbours selling less and less coffee. Once Cafenatics opened in Church Lane, Hydra across the street started to look almost empty in the mornings. BBB is constantly packed for coffee during the day, whilst other cafes stay empty. I also checked Michael Sivetz' book today and he mentioned the converse relationship - per capita coffee consumption dropped in the USA last century when a higher proportion of robusta was imported. When you consider that against backdrop of the lipstick index (ie. people buy more cheap treats in times of recession), there's definitely an argument that now is a good time to be a coffee roaster investing in great coffee. The question is, as always, how great? What level of awesomeness is worthwhile buying? I have my own thoughts on that, but I'd love to see some comments on it.

Of course, as one would expect, the night also involved lots of interesting conversation about coffee sourcing and some interesting tastings. Steve from Hasbean in the UK did a great job roasting all the samples and there were definitely a few standouts that would be very interesting in an espresso-dominated market. I'm hoping that some people put their hands up to buy them. I also ended up walking away with a bunch of loot - leftover samples and a nice ceramic drip cone from Fleur @ MCM. These ceramic drip cones have the advantage of being non-porous, whereas my plastic ones are starting to get a little skanky after about a year's use.

More Ethiopian Craziness

I don't even know where to begin with this one; it's just so crazy. So apparently Ethiopia has passed legislation that mandates that all coffee sold in Ethiopia be identified by region. That's not a problem, except that it can only be identified by region. This means that you won't know if you are buying IMV, Beloya, Aricha or total crap. No longer will you be able to get Sidamo Dale; it will all be called Sidamo. Now, you might still be able to pick the Dale or whatever out of the blind tasting lineup and bid for it at auction, but, obviously such a system makes it impossible to invest time, expertise, money and equipment back in the producers to get them producing the best quality stuff that they can for our consumption. In other words, we are potentially looking at the extinction of IMV, Beloya, Aricha, Shakiso, etc, as we know them.

People on the ground have commented that they think that there will be some workaround. I certainly hope so. For the moment, though, the knee-jerk, seat of the pants legislation and regulation seems to be continuing. George Howell reported that it was mandated that some coffee that he was interested in be processed on the standard equipment in Addis, as opposed to the state of the art equipment that foreign buyers had invested in. The latest report is that coffee exporters have been told that they must sell all of their 2008 crop within a week.

Craziness.

I hope that the Ethiopian government is able to find a way through this, but, frankly, if this turns out to be a strategic attempt to focus on the lowest-common-denominator commodity crop dollar at the expense of the cutting edge of quality, I will not be buying Ethiopian coffee. After gorging myself on all of the super-duper stuff that I can get my hands on, that is!

There's a workshop being run as part of the SCAA symposium on this issue and hopefully something will be done about it. I simply can't afford to go to the symposium, but there are some very talented folk going and I hope that they are able to sort out something sensible.

Esmeralda

Finally, I'll just throw this out there: best Esmeralda through the clover ever at BBB last weekend. Apricot jam bombshell with powerful overtones of mandarin and bergamot. Superb.

The Big Weekend

2009-02-06T18:46:00.008+11:00

I spent last Thursday through Sunday at the Australian coffee championships weekend, so I suppose that I really ought to do a quick recap on this blog. Many of my regular readers were actually there, but for the benefit of the overseas guys, the non-coffee industry guys and the sorely missed Tony, here goes nothing ...

Before we begin

We live in the communication age; this entry isn't here to reinvent the wheel, so you might want to refer to a few other sites as well.

Video: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/gun-barista-challenge

Photos: http://syd-low.com/09aascachamp

Entry forms/rules: http://www.aasca.com/

Barista comp rules: http://www.worldbaristachampionship.com

Latte art rules: http://www.world-latteart-championship.com/

Cup tasting rules: http://www.world-cuptasting-championship.com/

Coffee 'n' booze rules: http://www.world-coffee-in-good-spirits-championship.com/

... and also take a look at the gagillion blogs that will cover it.

Introduction

I guess that I have been around all of these competitions for so long that it's getting a bit ho-hum. Every year, the difference between first and second place shrinks and the overall standard improves. The change to the Nuova Simonelli machines from our beloved La Marzoccos might not have met with universal approval, but at least it shook things up. Meanwhile, everyone involved gets better and better at running these events every year, so it was set to be a good weekend.

I lazed around the gold coast for half a day taking in some sun and polishing off a novel before Nim arrived and we checked in to our apartment. I owe Nim a great deal of thanks for organising a lot of the trip, including taking a whole bunch of coffee stuff in checked baggage so that I only had to worry about a backpack and suit bag. Thursday night was time for the judges' calibration and then a nice, overpriced, italian meal.

Barista Competition

Three gruelling days and a lot of wonderful performances. I was privileged to sensory judge four competitors and walk away having enjoyed some very yummy espresso, indeed. I also got to be a timekeeper and see a number of performances close up, including that of the champ, Tim Adams. The competition keeps on getting better and better organised each year - check out the nifty AASCA branded stuff in the photo below! Major props to everyone involved, especially Emily Oak and Dave Makin.

Given that overseas competitors may be looking to this post, I'll make only general observations to preserve the competitive advantage of our guys overseas! There were a number of interesting labour, time and mess saving devices that were employed by most competitors and most competitors also realised that the competition can be won and lost on setup time. The transition to a more taste-focussed scoring system didn't really result in more informal and sloppy presentations, but it certainly did make it harder to work out how well people had done if you were anyone other than a sensory judge. I suppose that the most valuable information as a spectator came from watching the pours very closely; generally speaking, the kinds of pours that the simonellis favour seemed to do well and the kinds that the simonelli punishes were presumably also punished on the sensory score sheets. The new format requires the competitors to prove themselves in an additional semi-final and most of the competitors whose performances I watched - fewer than I would have liked - delivered strong, polished performances on both days. For this reason, I suspect that some competitors may have found that their coffee peaked on one day and died the next.

Tim delivered an amazing performance on the day and before the results were announced, the phrase 'dark horse' followed his names in many of the 'whaddayareckon' conversations that I had. As Wolffy said, Tim really put the work in himself to win this competition. I hope very much that all Australian competitors will volunteer to lend a hand for his WBC training.

At this point, I'll just pause to mention a dilemma that I face in writing this post - there are lots and lots of competitors and volunteers whose efforts I would like to praise or point out. Too many. Unfortunately, the only thing that I can think of doing is just listing a few and not mentioning others - so please don't take offence if I haven't mentioned you here.

Latte Art

I think that the past three Australian world championship victories have really increased the seriousness with which people take this competition. Consequently, the audience seemed to be pretty tense and on the edge of their seats for both the opens and the finals. I had to laugh when Will from Maling Room beat both Habib and Kirby to win the opens by pouring a pacman eating a ghost, given that I got laughed off the machine with my attempt at the same thing a few months ago at the caffenatics competition ... might have been something to do with my crappy latte art skills. Nonetheless, given that I can't find the ustream vids of the latte art comp, I'll post up a crappy attempt here:

Kirby and Habib were both on 23 points in the open, so there was a countback. This only makes sense if you understand how the latte art comp works; you are scored for various categories, then the scores from those categories are matched up to a band. The points listed in that band are added together to give you the final score. So the countback procedure for breaking ties is the addition of the raw scores, rather than the scores in each band. Confusing? Read the score sheets!

Anyhoo, the finals were a clash of the titans, with Erin and Habib on the same number of points and spectators biting their nails as the countback procedure was used. Erin was eventually declared the champ by 8 points after countback to be immediately congratulated by Habib. Given the amount of training that Erin has put into the various comps over the years, I think that we have a great chance at this year's WLAC.

Coffee 'n' Booze (Coffee In Good Spirits)

I didn't really watch too much of this, but was amused to find out that Kirby had won. Kirby was a late substitution for another competitor and put her routine together in the 45 minutes before the competition, with the help of CS member Mark!

Cup Tasting (Cupping)

OK, so if you have never seen a cupping competition before, you should know that it is an awesome competition to watch. This is what it looks like from the audience's perspective:

24 cups of filter brewed coffee are placed on the table. These are divided into 8 groups comprising two cups of one coffee and one cup of another. The competitors' task is to taste through all of them and pick the odd one out. The cups are then emptied and the bottoms of the cups selected are revealed to the audience to see if they have been marked as the odd ones out. Though it takes a few hours of coffee grinding and brewing and many volunteers to set up the competition, it is done and dusted in a matter of minutes. Dave Makin had cleverly worked out the dimensions of the stage so that a whopping six people could compete at a time. The videos should be pretty good; I loved the soundtrack for the first open heat!

Anyhoo, I originally started competing in these comps because the game plan was always to keep in touch with the coffee industry by setting up a coffee review (http://coffeereviewaustralia.com/) and I wanted to see if I could have some objective measure of credibility. I haven't yet managed to win one yet, but I have had an irritating five podium finishes. Nim and I did a bit of training for the event and I was very proud to see him win the open heat, though I probably wouldn't have minded if I had come first and him second ;P
As for the finals; fantastic performance by Ben nailing 8/8 within cooee of Casper's time last year! Ben finished a few seconds faster than me, so the competition was clearly over before my last cup was revealed. Nonetheless, I'm glad that Ben and I were able to keep the revealing of the cups interesting until the end! A big thankyou to Mick Kiely for roasting and brewing the coffee - no small undertaking.

The Rest

Other than the competition, the whole weekend was absolutely frenetic. Nim and I thought that we could save some cash by cooking at the apartment that we booked -- wrong; we didn't even have time to buy groceries!

The guys from BeanScene seemed to really get behind the event; they printed a bunch of rather nifty stickers and programs for AASCA and I think that they even delayed printing the bulk of the magazines to do so. It was a shame that Steve was sick, but Brad and John seemed to really get into the whole event. The magazine looked fantastic, but I haven't been able to read it yet.

The coffee companies exhibiting at the show put all other food shows that I have been to to shame; it was utterly ludicrous to be able to get excellent coffee at a trade show ... that doesn't even happen at so-called coffee festivals! I walked over to Campos and got a shot from John Ronchi, JP at Veneziano and Anne Cooper at Di Bella ... craaazy stuff. A big thankyou to Di Bella for the book and t-shirt, Campos, Veneziano and Emanuele from ristretto for the coffee beans.

A nice highlight was eating out each night with a bunch of cool people from around Australia - so much for saving money by getting a serviced apartment!

Unfortunately I had booked flights home on the assumption that I would be needed at work on Monday, so I missed out on the afterparty and the trips to Mountain Top, but overall it was a great weekend.

Veneziano Booth: A bunch of awesome baristas kick it on the Synchro.

Campos booth: John Ronchi and Co keep deliciousness flowing with two lineas. No photos of the Di Bella booth, unfortunately.

Comfort Food

2009-01-19T23:08:00.006+11:00

Things are pretty stressful at the moment, what with the "GFC" (as the knobs that use TLAs call it), general uncertainty over what this year will hold and bad vibes hanging over from the holidays (yes, I'm a bit of a grinch). The last thing that I needed was for my espresso machine to break down. My fault, really; I always say that pressurestats should be regarded as disposable parts and I didn't have a spare on hand. My friendly local supplier had a spare sitting around for me, but, of course, in a spectacular convergence of bad luck, inattention and stupidity, I managed to over-tighten the nut and break the fitting, which fit in nicely with my shocker of a week last week. Fortunately, it was Makin to the rescue again, cannibalising a spare machine to give me yet another part for what would otherwise be a two and a half grand paperweight.

I can only presume that MC Escher started drawing as a way of making notes on an espresso machine that he had dismantled. Seriously, though, it doesn't get much easier than this.

I knew the instant that I perambulated over to the machine this morning that my luck had changed. I love most forms of coffee and have been enjoying heaps of brewed coffee of late, but it's easy to over-analyse. Cappuccino is a totally unique form of coffee; comfort food for any barista. There's something soothing about taking five minutes out to make a cappuccino, half-asleep, with brain still in the 'off' position as your arm rocks back and forward in a pattern rehearsed a million times. No need to try and sort out malic acid from lactic, TDS 1.2% from TDS 1.4%, atitlan from huehuetenango. No need to think about who I need to chase up about what. For a few minutes, I just sit back and enjoy the warm, chocolatey foam and pretty pictures.

Come to think of it, there's something oddly soothing about late-night blogging, watching with amusement as my stream of consciousness sprawls, whilst my sentences grow ... and grow ... and grow, attaining nightmarish numbers of commas (and, let's not forget, the occasional parenthesis) ... damn I need a cappuccino!

Is the cafe's decor 'distressed,' or ought I be as a customer?

2009-01-09T23:54:00.003+11:00

So Melbourne has developed a rather cool style of cafe that I guess you would call 'distressed.' You know the kind; heaps of recycled timber furniture, exposed brick, chipped paint, concrete floors, big old communal table; that kind of thing. A lot of places carry it off well. Really well. See: BBB, St Ali, Auction Roooms, for example. Props to MD for making it cool at his bar. The question is where, exactly, does 'distressed' become dilapidated?

I think that I found the answer earlier in the week. I turned up to a cafe that shall remain nameless and ordered a coffee; to give the barista a bit of slack, I even ordered a milk-based drink. I went to help myself to a glass of water and noticed that the cheapass duralex glasses were utterly filthy, with so many scratches that they started to move beyond being beaten up and towards almost looking like they had been scratched in a regular pattern. As I tilted the glass to take a drink, the light caught it and I noticed a definite brown tint and some dried milk stains on it. These glasses had clearly been in the game for several years and had clearly never been looked after. I looked around the cafe and it continued the theme. The floor was filthy, the glass cabinets scratched and the wall speckled with milk spittle. Finally, my coffee arrived, with an extra helping of attitude. I took two sips. It was ashy and acrid. I got up to pay for the coffee and leave. $3.50. Tightarses always try to gouge that extra thirty or forty cents out of you, but refusing to spend fifty or sixty cents on new duralex glasses every now and then really is going above and beyond.

You know, I'll go to pretty much any cafe if the coffee is decent, but in this case, I don't see the maths working out:

Undrinkable coffee + unpleasant staff + unhygenic glassware + dirty surrounds = premium price?

An extreme example, to be sure, but at least I have established my own answer to the difference between distressed and dilapidated. Clearly, though, the market thought otherwise - the place was packed.

Humbug

2009-01-04T22:24:00.003+11:00

With some of the coffee that I had bought to tide me over Xmas turning out to be quite bad, it was out with the heat gun and dog bowl again for laughs. I home roast every now and then and can't really profess to have had great results, though I imagine that if I were to invest some serious time in it, I'd get there.

The half dozen batches that I have had varied from garbage to acceptable, due to a combination of bad technique and bad beans in my stash. The sometimes-maligned Nicaraguan Maragogype from ARC that I won in the Victorian Cupping Competition turned out to be the pick of the lot; not a complex coffee, but definitely soft, smooth and sweet as a brewed cup. In the past, it has been nutty and mild as an espresso, but my machine has been disused for the past few weeks.

I will keep on experimenting for my own amusement and education, but will likely try to scam my way on to some commercial equipment, which I have found easier to handle in the past.

In the meantime, I continue to appreciate the hard work that my favourite roasters put in to their green selection. I bet that if you were to walk in to any roastery and check out their stash you would actually have a fair idea of how cluey the roaster is.
Perhaps my dog bowl just doesn't have enough carats ...

Books, books and books

2008-12-22T17:43:00.006+11:00

A quick roundup of some of the coffee books that I have read this year:

The Professional Barista's Handbook, Scott Rao

This book was the inspiration for this post; Shaughan from Five Senses kindly sent me a copy of this book to get my opinion on it. So if you want to buy this book as a result of this blog post, kindly point your web browser here!

Scott Rao is clearly a gifted trainer; watch this clip to see him teach a total newbie how to steam milk and pour latte art in ten minutes. Rao has some rather cool innovations, such as a cheap way of leaning to steam milk (watch the video) and a clever way of affixing thermometers to milk jugs (buy the book). Rao is also not above making reference to the work of others, and it is this that raises Rao's book above being just another training book. The concise and snappy description of the espresso process makes the thinking of the likes of Schecter, Schulman and Petracco - to name a few - accessible to people who don't want to wade through the original articles. The book also includes thoughtful chapters on drip coffee (bulk brew), french press, water and tea. Extracts from the book are available to sample on Rao's site and on H-B.

Rao's book has received a lot of praise, but little attention has been brought to its shortcomings. The two most glaring omissions are cleaning and the relative contributions of the factors covered (eg. maybe using one group at a time results in a marginally better shot, but is this book seriously advocating that one should never use more than one group at a time on their cafe's three group machine?). The chapter on science and theory of espresso extraction is interesting, but not ultimately useful in terms of improving the quality of your cup. A better inclusion would have been some more extensive data on how grind, dose and brew temperature can be manipulated to change results in the cup -- such knowledge currently resides only in the heads of experienced baristi.

Who should buy it: People who want the steps to great espresso laid out in a concise, succinct and comprehensive manner.

The Espresso Quest, Instaurator

Inny's book is an engaging narrative that takes the reader through some of his experiences over twenty or thirty years in the espresso game. The book makes no pretences towards being an exclusive reference on any of the topic covered, but it does provide a lot of interesting information that might otherwise be hidden from the coffee consumer. Stellar photography paired with engaging narrative.

Who should buy it: Anyone who is interested in the coffee industry and, in particular, the Australian espresso scene.

God in a Cup

Apparently both this book and Espresso Quest shared the same title; Weissman's book beat Inny's to the presses by half a length, so the title of Espresso Quest was changed. Weissman brings both the skills and ethics of a professional journalist to bear in writing this impressive book. Set out in novel style, the book chronicles Weissman's immersion in coffee culture as an outsider meeting some of the US's great roasters and travelling to origin. Panama Hacienda la Esmeralda features heavily in the book and I can say from experience that coffee nuts will enjoy reading this book with a cup of that coffee in hand! This book is highly US-centric, as one would expect, and that perhaps makes it an even better read for an Australian audience. You can listen to an interview with the author in CG podcast #62.

Who should buy it: Anyone who is interested in what goes on behind the scenes in bringing a cup of coffee to the table.

The Coffee Cupper's Handbook, Ted Lingle

This is a 'must have' for anyone who cups on any semi-serious level. I would be shocked - shocked - if anyone who purported to call themselves a professional roaster did not own a copy of this book.

The book itself is unashamedly technical and dry. It isn't a thrilling read, nor does it have Promethean tendencies to illuminate the art, but it does make for an extremely useable reference.

Who should buy it: Serious cuppers. And, to borrow a phrase from Derryn Hinch, if you call yourself a professional roaster and you don't own a copy - shame, shame, shame.

Coffee Technology, 2nd Edition, Sivetz et. al.

Published in the 1970s, from memory, this unashamedly dense and technical book is still ahead of the curve. Coffee enthusiasts and professionals constantly lament that 'someone should do a technical study on' the differences in packaging, effects of certain factors on roast, etc, etc. I haven't yet devoured the entire tome, but I would not be surprised if many of the questions facing the current crop of specialty coffee professionals aren't addressed to some extent in this book.

Who should buy it: Professional coffee roasters.

Espresso Made in Italy 1901-1962, Enrico Maltoni

Enrico Maltoni has what must surely be the most jaw-droppingly awesome collection of perfectly restored vintage espresso machines in the world. This bilingual book is light on words, but heavy on photos. For the price, though, buyers should beware that it is soft cover.

Who should buy it: Vintage espresso nuts.

La Marzocco History, Piero Bambi

Ron Cook kindly gave me a copy of this book when I made the pilgrimage to the factory in Florence a few years back. This bilingual book is a surprisingly great read, giving some insight into what it was like to be in the business of espresso machine manufacture in the early days.

Who should buy it: Serious La Marzocco nuts.

La Marzocco 80th Anniversary Collection Book, La Marzocco

This is La Marzocco's equivalent of the Maltoni book; gorgeous photos, light on text, but hardcover. The photos are also available in the 80th anniversary poster set and I put many of them up behind the bookshelves at First Pour, Melbourne.

Who should buy it: La Marzocco and vintage espresso machine tragics. (If you're putting in an order on the LM E-Shop, please let me know - I'd like to get some stuff, but am too stingy to do it without splitting postage!)

Hacienda La Minita, Bill McAlpin

This book has some great photography from the famed Hacienda La Minita in Costa Rica, together with a few speeches from the farm's owner, Bill McAlpin.

Who should buy it: A coffee table book for coffee enthusiasts.

Connecting Worlds - The Coffee Trail, Olaf Hammelburg

Another book with fantastic photography and relatively little text; this one follows Peruvian coffee from seed to cup, from Peru to the USA and Canada.

Who should buy it: People who like great coffee related photography.

Not raining ... pouring!

2008-12-11T22:58:00.003+11:00

Regular readers will notice that I sometimes go through droughts in which I haven't tasted much worth mentioning. Well, the last week has been the reverse. Let's skim over it:

Brewed coffee:

Kenya Gethumbwini from Hazel: Grapefruit, creamy mouthfeel, dry.

Kenya Kitamaiyu from the Source: Tea, lemon sherbet.

Kenya Muchoki Peaberry from Square Mile: Crisp, strawberry, citrus.

Esmeralda from BBB: Mark NAILS the roast and it actually lives up to all of the ludicrous overseas tasting notes; floral, perfumed, peach ... can't even remember what it tasted like ... it just threw everything at us and stood out in the blind cupping by a mile.

Dale Sidamo from BBB: Peach, from memory.

Nicaraguan Natural from BBB: As always, mega clean coffee with natural process blueberry superimposed on top of it.

Espresso:

Kopi Luwak from Instaurator: Can't remember in much detail, but it was pretty ordinary, at best.

Devon Estate SL-795 from Instaurator (the monkey picked coffee): Black pepper up front, quite heavy in body, whilst it had a fair bit of acidity at the same time. Very heavy in body at the bottom of the cup ... wonder if the monkey spit was still left on it. A number of us agreed that the espresso machine must have been running cold, though. (Inny had gotten ECA to send down a Giotto Premium Plus for the event, as he isn't a fan of LM/Synesso ... ironically, I suspect that we could have gotten a lot more out of the coffee on the Synesso ... should've mentioned it whilst we were there. Actually, Inny had bought some new mountain top down to feed the Synesso ... totally didn't twig that it was there and taste it. Damn.)

... so that's ... like ... seven pretty good coffees in less than a week ... craaazy ...

I have to say that I feel almost swindled by the Kenyan coffees that I have tried this year. The stereotypical and much loved berry flavours seem to have been transmogrified into crisp citrus flavours in practically everything. Still some great coffee, to be sure, but I'm still hoping to get something in the same genre as the Mamuto, let alone in the same ballpark taste-wise. Anyhoo, this will be the subject of the first article on my new web page and I'll probably syndicate that to the new mag that's being launched.

November Grab Bab: Midali Espresso, Cafenatics Opening, BBB Insider

2008-11-30T18:06:00.008+11:00

Cafe Reviews And This Blog

My avid readers will note that this blog is all about coffee, but seldom contains cafe reviews. There are two main reasons for this. First, I have a greater interest in exploring coffee than in exploring cafes - to some extent, I view the latter as a way to do the former. In this regard, I think that it's a bit of a misnomer that in Australia cafe reviews invariably use the word coffee to describe their subject matter: eg. one, two, three cf. overseas. Before Steve Agi and co hasten to break my legs, I should point out that this has nothing to do with the usefulness or lack thereof of those sites; just pointing out that cafe and coffee are not synonymous. Second, I prefer to leave it to others, given that any sort of online review seems to have a relatively strong impact on cafe owners, regardless of what they may say.

Breaking With Tradition

On Friday I decided to take a trip to Carlisle St to replenish my dwindling stock of filter papers at Coffee Company. Carlisle St has long been regarded as one of Melbourne's coffee hot spots, so I decided to celebrate completing my final exam by gorging myself on espresso from four of the spots that are commonly mentioned as having a decent reputation. In some respects, it was a nice wake-up call. Enthusiastic coffee dudes world over state as a matter of pride that they make better coffee at home than they can get at most cafes. My experience has usually been that the bulk of cafes that I go to produce coffee on par with, or better than, what I produce at home. Of course, I'm pretty selective in the cafes that I go to. I don't want to single out any cafes in particular, but I have to say that I wasn't overwhelmed with the quality of what I was served.

I do think that it's legit to point out cafes that are doing a good job, so check out Midali Espresso. I had an espresso that was reasonably short, had a lot of body and was very sweet. Sweetness is always the hardest thing to get into the cup, so big props to them. I have no doubt that this will be a fantastic base for their milk drinks, as a few cognoscenti have confirmed. My pick of Carlisle Street.

Unstoppable?

A big thankyou to Cafenatics for hosting a barista jam by way of launching their fifth store, at QV. Cafenatics head honcho Joseph brings a great laid-back sense of humor to the Melbourne coffee scene and it was nice of Cafenatics to host an event where the usual suspects got a chance to chill out and enjoy some coffee together. There were cameras-a-plenty, so I didn't bother to take photos of the latte art smackdown - I'm sure that Simon or Amy will oblige in good time. Save to say that Toshi's triple rosetta beat my pacman eating little white dot to take the trophy.

A few photos:

Joseph pours, surrounded by smackdown participants.

We decide that it's better to have a FB80 on the bench than a cash register.

Simon asks Joseph if he can borrow his vase for a barista competition.

I finish up the day up one Reg Barber tamper - thanks!

Coffee?

Just a quick note, for readers who would otherwise be disappointed in this post. Saturday saw an extraordinary cupping lineup at BBB, with Rwanda CoE #13 (think the number is right) stealing the show, for me. Many of the new Rwandan coffee farms have been set up with the Bourbon varietal, which is particularly well suited to espresso. CoE #13 did not disappoint in this regard; it was heavy in body and very sweet. With the $AUD tanking against the $USD, which I understand to be the default currency of the global coffee market, I expect that this one will not come cheap. But boy do I expect that it will be worth it!

I get the impression that coffee that makes phenomenal espresso doesn't cup up as extraordinary; it's necessary to do some work to figure out how the flavours in cupping will translate to the espresso cup. Hence, the Esmeralda and the washed and natural Sidamos were probably more exciting on the cupping table. I'm pleased to say that BBB's Esmeralda seems to be closer to the 2007 Paradise roast that I had than the 2008 Terroir roast, although the mandarin flavour of yore emerged closer to orange. The sample roast might have been a tad dark, illustrating the importance of sample roasting and cupping to any commercial roastery; no doubt MD will be on top of this tricky bean for production roasts. The Sidamos were an interesting lot; from memory both were from Dale, the difference being that one was natural and one was washed. I liked the washed Dale, which, I seem to remember, was pretty sweet and tasted of peach. Dale + Esmeralda for drip, anyone? The natural Dale superimposed your standard natural blueberry on top of it, with a touch of quinine. I imagine that people will be interested to try the natural and washed head to head.

Needless to say, I'm pretty excited about BBB's offerings and I continue to be astounded that (a) they offer their cuppings for free and (b) relatively few people turn up.

Golden Beaches, Beans

2008-11-16T18:07:00.014+11:00

As I alluded to last entry, I headed up to Port Macquarie for the Equal Golden Bean coffee roasters' competition and conference over the weekend, run by CafeBiz. Day one comprised a number of workshops run by various industry types and the actual competition took place on the second day.

Day One

Unfortunately, disaster struck a number of the initially scheduled speakers. My condolences and well wishes, as appropriate, go out to Toby Smith, Phil Di Bella and Scottie Bennett, whose sessions I was looking forward to. Fortunately, a number of other speakers were able to take their places and day one ran smoothly.

Session One - Visiting Origins - Ross Bright - Spinelli Coffee, Singapore

My flight arrived at around 10, so I missed Ross' session, finding out to my chagrin that it was very well researched and contained a bunch of great video footage. It was great to have a bit of a chat with Ross and Ibrahim from Bero Coffee during the weekend. There's certainly a tremendous amount of stuff happening origin-side to learn about. We agreed that developing greater understanding of what happens to coffee at both extremes of the supply chain amongst both industry consumers (ie. roasters, baristi) and industry suppliers (ie. farmers, buyers, brokers) is key to increasing the quality of specialty coffee available in the market. This is especially true for espresso, for which green coffee with different attributes to coffee bound for filter use may be desirable. Ross hopes to make some interesting origin-side video footage available to the public at some stage or other.

Session Two - Agtron Roasting - Mick Kielty - Michel's Espresso

I came in half-way through Mick's session, to a room full of engrossed roasters. Mick had brought in an Agtron abridged spectrophotometer and explained how it could be used to maintain coffee quality in a commercial roastery. I gather that the Agtron gives a reading that basically tells you what colour the coffee is, but it's actually a measure of the absorbance of some organic compounds in the coffee - Mick mentioned quinones - that correlates with the progression of the roast. When asked how much an Agtron costs, Mick said that he wasn't sure. The crowd chimed in that they thought they were around $20K, to which Mick replied "Oh, I probably shouldn't have just chucked it in the boot without a box, then."

Session Three - Global Trends in Specialty Coffee - Oliver Broster - Bero Coffee Japan and Singapore

Oliver is the MD of two subsidiaries of the Neumann Kaffee Gruppe. In 2007, NKG handled 7% of global coffee exports and 15% of global coffee imports. NKG does not operate in Australia, but supplies quite a lot of coffee in Singapore and Japan.

Oliver explained that there are a lot of difficulties in gathering information on the coffee trade, but nonetheless was able to deliver some very interesting statistics, courtesy of NKG's dedicated statistical unit. There were a number of interesting statistics, from memory, I think that Australia consumes about 0.7% of the 2008 coffee production. For reference, Nestle Japan will consume about 1.2%! The various coffee certifications represent an extremely small proportion of all coffee traded, but demand has been increasing quite a lot over the past few years. If you want more info - go to the conference!

Session Four - Installing and Maintaining Your Roaster - Greg Clubb (did I spell that right?) - Appliance Maintenance Company

Greg stepped up at the last minute to run a session instead of Scott Bennett. Greg covered a number of technicalities involved in installing and maintaining a coffee roaster, which turned out to be of great interest to the many roasters around. Topics included how to obtain the correct certification for your roaster - without which your insurance won't pay up if something goes wrong, overlooked maintenance areas and correct ventilation of roasters and afterburners. In conversation afterwards, many of the roasters attending the session mentioned that they had learned something that they were going to put into practice as soon as they get back.

Session Five - The Re-emergence of Brewed Coffee - Chris - Toby's Estate, Melbourne

With Toby unable to deliver his session, Chris jumped on the first plane in the morning, delivered his session and jumped on the next plane back! I was looking forward to hearing from Toby, but it was nice to meet our local TE dude all the same. Regular readers will recall that in my last entry on filter coffee, I queried why on earth Toby's were running this session, given that they seem to like the sort of gloopy, thick and rich ristretto shots that are about as far from a thin and delicate brewed cup as you can possibly get. I put that question to Chris and he answered that the roasters really love their filter coffee precisely because it does allow the origins to stand out in a way similar to cupping, but that their baristi will require some convincing! No doubt, customers will, too. At the moment, the only successful way that I have seen of getting cafe goers to pay for brewed coffee is to brew it through some sort of gimmicky gadget like a Clover or a Siphon. There is most definitely still a perception that all filter coffee is garbage and I very much hope that roasters work on that.

Session Six - Coffee Machine Maintenance and Cleaning - Chris Short - Cafetto

Cafetto has always been a great supporter of the coffee industry and the session delivered at the Golden Bean was no exception. Chris covered a number of topics, such as what actually builds up where in your espresso machine, the necessity for descaling and the results of a soon-to-be-released study on the effect of regular espresso machine cleaning in the cup. I had never really thought about the role of scale in backflushing the group as opposed to maintaining the boiler, but I couldn't see why it wouldn't decrease the effectiveness of espresso machine detergent in the same way that it interacts with other surfactants. Chris answered that it is probably a good idea to do an occasional backflush with a descaler; all espresso machine detergents must be alkaline, so they will not remove scale from the group.

Session Seven - Judges' Calibration - Justin Metcalf

Not much to say; just a calibration session run by Head Judge extraordinaire Justin Metcalf, of WBC fame. A definite highlight for me was the opportunity to taste the kape barako liberica coffee, brought in from Singapore by Ross. Even in milk, courtesy of Makin, it was garbage:

Day Two

The Competition

Not much to tell; a bit of a blurr, really. Heaps of time on the machines with Zoe and Makin. Tasted some coffee. That's about all I remember!

Awards Night

Well, you can see the results on the golden bean web page. As you can see, there were a gagillion medals to give away and I must admit that sitting next to Andy, who got up every few minutes to claim a total of four medals, made me think of entering something next year ;P Unfortunately, I don't think that I tasted any of the gold medal winners, so I guess I'm going to have to order some coffee! Massive props to Kamran at Fiori Coffee for being the overall winner. If you check out the pdfs, Fiori got a bronze medal for their espresso and a silver for their milk-based - wonder if some of the other silver medal winners simply didn't enter in both categories?

Sean also took the opportunity to present the Sugar Australia Cafe of the Year Awards. The overall winner was Alen's Espresso in Brisbane. A shout-out goes to my former boss Andrew Lew, as The Maling Room won the Victorian category.

You'll note the not-so-subtle positioning of sponsor ECA's banner. ECA are running a great little ad campaign for their Domobar Super machine, in which they basically get endorsements from some of Australia's top coffee dudes (check out their how-to-videos with Scottie C). I ribbed Charles a bit for being so Sydney-centric and not including any Melburnians; hopefully some will get a go on the new ad for the Giotto. Speaking of which, you've gotta admit that it's a pretty cool looking piece of kit:

Given that the Giotto is one of the few domestic machines with separate side panels like that, as opposed to having a wrap-around shell, I wonder why we haven't seen anyone with one knock up some cool mirage-style painted glass panels?

Anyhoo, looking forward to trying out some of the winners and next year's Golden Bean.

A big thankyou to Sean and Justeen for their hospitality, too.

November = Events

2008-11-13T22:40:00.005+11:00

Don't ask me, why, but there seems to be a bit on this November.

Barista Comp Wrapup

The Victorian Barista and Latte Art Championships were held over the weekend. I did the judging calibration purely out of interest, but intended to study rather than judge. Turned out that there was a bit of a shortage of judges, so I sidelined studying to get the opens judged and happening. The obvious changes this year were the new machines and the new faces - who, without exception, displayed a very good level of technical competence. It would be impossible to remember or list all of the home runs that the competitors hit, so I'll just mention one - Simon James absolutely nailing the description of his espresso. It was nice to see Nim step up to judge, adding another experienced palate to the Victorian pool of judges.

Talor judged by HJ Ross, Myself, Mel, Tom and Jeff.

As usual, Syd has put up his amazing photos of the events. Emily Oak's idea to fly him up to Atlanta to be the official WBC photographer is brilliant.

I was furiously footnoting an essay on Sunday, but it was nice to see a well-deserved latte art comp win from Erin, who I am sure will win the Australians and the Worlds, but might lose the Intergalactics to the seven-handed Florgostillians and their legendary 'galaxy of rosettas.' Big props to Kirby from Maling Room and Dave Seng for their placings. Jesse 'Iceman' Hyde took out the Barista comp, leaving the press with the immortal one-liner:

"I used to play guitar full-time for a living," Hyde said. "Coffee geeks will never be rock stars. Slash (former lead guitarist of Guns N' Roses) is way cooler than David Makin."

Golden Bean

So I've got a 5am flight tomorrow to the Equal Golden Bean conference + coffee roaster competition. Should be fun; really looking forward to tasting the best that Australia has to offer. Many thanks to Mr Makin for the lift and Cafe Culture for the whole thing.

Drinking?

Why yes, yes I am drinking coffee. I have a nice drip roast kenyan coffee generously sent down to me by the boys at Mecca in Sydney. Thanks guys!

Siphon: With a high dose, surprisingly full-bodied, with apple-juice like acidity and mouthfeel. Relatively low on the classic winey/raspberry flavour - for a Kenyan - but definite orange overtones. Wierd. Dry finish, owing to the hot weather that the parcel has been exposed to.

Seriously. Lightish roast kenyan coffee, for brewed methods, has to be as close to shooting fish in a barrel as you can get in coffee. It's usually very impressive and this one is no exception.

LucaTech Industries Unveils the GhettoMax 2000 and Filter Coffee in Australia

2008-11-01T15:56:00.012+11:00

Enter Mr Callahan

A few months ago, Adelaide espresso savant Ian Callahan threw down the challenge during conversation:

So here are the rules. Who can find the best/funniest/cheapest/most ingenious piece or pieces of crap to either
A) Chuck Norris (read, brake beat or crush) or
B) McGuyver (read, manipulate or engineer in some way) into a Drip station.

Single drip is okay, bonus points awarded for multiple cup drip/pour-over station, as well as practicality or sheer impracticality.

I feel that we need to set important boundary on the competition - you have until, say, December 14 to enter and you may enter as many times as you wish. (Selected so that my exams will be out of the way and I can have another go.) Your entry must disclose everything necessary to make your pourover station in such a way as to spoil the prior art base for anyone who might wish to patent such a device in future ;P Once all entries have been rounded up, Ian will collate them into a post on his blog and we can vote for a winner, to whom Ian will forward a prize by Xmas ;P

Given that Ian has a blackberry, I expect that he will be aware of what he has signed up for slightly before I publish this blog entry.

What the heck-a-roo?

So, if you're not up to speed on the uber-glamorous world of professional pourover brew stations, you might want to check them out:

4 Cup Station truBru from Taylor Maid Farms - $330 USD

4 Cup Station from the genius tinkerers at Espresso Parts $595

The latest Cafe Culture also features a 4 cup station called the 'terror bar' from Factor Design. Looked expensive - does anyone have a price?

The LucaTech Industries GhettoMax 2000 2 Cup Pourover Filter Station (EXXXTREEEEME)

As you can plainly see, the GhettoMax 2000 has a number of features unparalleled by any filter station on the market:
*Portability (TM) - suitable for catering, you can take the action to your customer and you can save valuable bench space when not in use.
*BrewGuard (TM) technology - owing to the wire guard on the side opposite the brewer, customers cannot touch the streams of filter brewing coffee
*Adjustulon (TM) saucer stands to get the brew vessels at the height of your choice
*PrecizoSize (TM) - the entire modular unit can be washed in a standard commercial dishwasher
*IKEA friendly (TM) - by utilising componentry from IKEA, this station will naturally blend in with the decor of any cafe ... that also uses a lot of stuff from IKEA

And the total cost is ... drumroll ... $5 per unit for the GORM clip on basket and you probably have everything else lying around anyway. To assemble, just buy one of the cheapass baskets, pull out the tin snips and make the necessary bends and cuts to get this:

OK, so it's a total piece of crap. But at least it's a cheap piece of crap.

Part II: Filter Coffee in Australia

Compared with the rest of the world, Australia is truly upside-down when it comes to coffee. We are close to unique in having a retail brewed coffee market that is almost 100% espresso. Until recently, that 'almost' was the nasty drip brewers at McDonalds. You know, the ones where the coffee would sit in glass carafes, baking on a hotplate for days because no Australian would actually buy it? The irony is that standard coffee scoring systems rate coffee for use as brewed coffee. Many is the time that I have had an 80something pointer outperform a 90+ coffee on the espresso machine. That said, brewed coffee is a fantastic way to appreciate the best that the world has to offer. The USA and Japan seem to buy a lot of the world's top coffee for consumption as brewed coffee. We could do worse than develop a fantastic brewed coffee culture in Australia to sit alongside espresso.

Enter the Clover. A few years ago, no-one in Australia had the slightest inkling of interest in brewed coffee aside from roasters, ex-pat yanks and random nutcases. A few brave cool kids bought a machine that produced coffee with a similar taste profile and - bam - people start to show some interest. Never mind the control that it gives you over the brew; people seemed to be more interested in the price tag and the fact that it was a complicated machine more like an espresso machine. Interest continued to gather for a few years and some of the cool kids overseas praised it to high heaven and built up the buzz. It looked like we were at a tipping point.

Out of the blue, checkmate - Starbucks bought the whole friggin' company, patents, kudos and all! A very clever move on their part. Starbucks has phenomenal buying power and reports are that they have been starting to snaffle up a lot of lots that specialty coffee roasters would otherwise like to buy. Is it possible that we could start seeing great coffee coming out of Starbucks? I can't see Clovers being rolled out in Australia for quite some time, if ever. It looks like Starbucks are doing OK, but not brilliantly with their Clovers overseas, with part of the problem being an inappropriate roast level. Still, it's only a matter of time until they get it right ...

Meanwhile, the snapping up of the Clover by Starbucks makes it unavailable to specialty roasters and cafes who might be interested in it. A similar level of control is offered by siphon brewers, but they are a total PITA to clean. You would have to be nuts to try to use one in a cafe ... how do the Japanese do it? Commercial filter brewing machines can produce a great result, but brewing two litres at once probably won't go down well with a public where those that are interested in coffee expect it to be brewed on demand and those that are not won't order it. French press/plunger is gritty and hard to clean. Aeropress doesn't have the clarity of flavour of filter. So, funnily enough, we are left with a renewed interest in single cup, pourover filter brewers - originally laughed out of the room as an alternative to clover. And why not? It's easy. Wet the filter paper, grind coffee, pour over water at the right temperature, serve up the brew and dump the leftovers in the bin. The amazing thing is that pourover filters actually do a much better job of brewing at a decent temperature than some crappy filter machines.

With a nice article in this issue of Cafe Culture, it looks like Toby is trying to take up the charge for pourover filter in Australia. Frankly, I was surprised. I have always pigeon-holed Toby into the high brew ratio, slow dripping, gloopy, chocolatey ristretto camp. After all, legend goes that Toby was critical in helping PB to develop the high brew ratio technique known as 'updosing', which has become as intertwined with the Australian identity in international coffee circles. Everything that I have tasted from Toby's Estate has been consistent with this approach and the TE stores seem to be kitted out with equipment geared towards it. This style of coffee is about as far from the light brewed cup as you can possibly get. Well, in recent years PB has been experimenting with 'downdosing', so maybe this is Toby's equivalent? Maybe Toby's interest simply arises from the similarity between filter brews and the cupping that all roasters enjoy? I'm looking forward to Toby's session on filter coffee as part of the Golden Bean and will endeavour to find out the answers - if I remember!

PNG Elimbari, Market Leaders and Blog Followers

2008-10-27T11:19:00.004+11:00

Sometimes you've gotta laugh. I went to buy some coffee a few weeks ago and ended up getting some PNG Elimbari that I was told was roasted by Five Senses' recently set up Melbourne branch, though it was in another bag. So I'll attribute this coffee to them!

When it comes to PNG coffee on the Australian market, there is a broker that is basically the authority and there is a roaster that is the authority. That roaster is Five Senses. Dean set up the company after working in PNG and getting to know the local farmers. They started their direct trade program years before the phrase came to be prominent. And while we're talking about direct trade, I'll take this opportunity to point out Watts' take on it, if you haven't read it already.

A better name for 'direct trade' would be 'fair trade', seeing as the former results in the exchange of a sum of money that the farmer is happy with for coffee of the quality that the purchaser is happy with, whereas the latter results in the exchange of a fixed sum of money for coffee of unspecified quality. Pity about that whole 'fair trade' movement having the 'fair trade' name - maybe we should think about calling it 'fairer trade' or 'fairest trade'!

The point is that Five Senses' direct trade relationship has enabled them to get spectacular coffee from PNG in the past and the same is true for the Elimbari.

Brewed: Good body, mid level acidity, hints of tomato.
Espresso: Decent body, long finish, clean, sweet, hints of apricot.
Cappuccino: Average ability to cut through milk, but, amazingly, on a few occasions I was able to coax the fruit flavours into the cappuccino.

To date, I haven't dabbled much in trying to score coffees on this blog, preferring to describe and get acquainted with the various numerical score systems in my own time. However, I will mention that I tasted this coffee soon after a cupping of Costa Rican Cup of Excellence coffees at BBB. The Elimbari clearly trailed behind the top two, but was up there with numbers 3 through 9. On this basis, I think that it would be fair to say that this is a mid to high eighties coffee on the SCAA cupping form, which is a bit of a rarity on the Australian market.

And Another Thing ...

I must be like - totally - the best person in history or something. My "followers" list has tripled! To three!

I guess that I should add the "followers" watchumcallit, but to do that I'd have to switch to templates ... and the last thing that I want to do is to lose all of the links on the right-hand-side that I have spent an eternity cultivating for the benefit of y'all, dear readers. Help?

The Supremes

2008-10-12T14:47:00.007+11:00

The company: Coffee Supreme.

The blend: Supreme.

Following discussions about Coffee Supreme on the Melbourne Coffee Review facebook group, I decided to wander on down to supreme and pick up half a kilo of the supreme blend to try it out for myself. Back in the day, this blend was a light, clean and acidic blend with a relatively low body. I liked to think of it as being similar to Campos' superior blend and you can bet your bottom dollar that Campos would start sweating if Supreme decided to put supreme up against superior. (Supreme vs Superior ... seriously.)

Unfortunately, my enjoyment of this blend was interrupted by the palate training course that I did recently, so, with considerable irony, I apologise that my descriptions of this blend will be incomplete and based on recollection.

Drip/Siphon/Cupping: A classic cup; flawlessly clean, somewhat sweet, mild acidity, medium body.
Espresso: High in acidity, low in body when young, but improving after several days' rest.
Cappuccino: As expected, no presence in milk whatsoever at 3 days resting time, improving considerably at 7 days.

So there you have it. Not very useful, but it's something.

Supreme clearly put excellent coffee in the blend, but I think that a lot of people expect their espresso to be very high in body and very low in acidity. Here, Supreme demonstrates why a company has multiple offerings - try their FTO blend instead.

A clean cup in a dirty world.

As a quick addendum, I got to have the briefest of plays with a new WBC spec NS Aurelia. As with the other NS machines, the steam lever is totally awesome. Beyond that, I think what my tastebuds and my thermocouple readings told me are best summarised by the following photo:

Palate Training and Sensory Analysis of Coffee - A Course at William Angliss

2008-10-05T18:08:00.014+11:00

William Angliss Coffee Academy not only covers the basics in one of the most well set out training rooms that I have ever seen, but also affers a selection of courses covering more advanced topics. Jill Adams' latest brainwave has been to rope Lindsay Corby from La Trobe University into making the leap from viticulture to coffee culture. Having done the basic 'prepare and serve espresso coffee' course at the academy about a million years ago, I decided to give this course a whirl. Simon James - dedicated latte artist, barista competitor, coffee trainer and somewhat less dedicated coffee blogger - was also in on the action. You can see the flier here on Simon's blog and I'm sure that he will have something to say about it at some stage in the future - be it forseeable or distant.

The entire course involved a good amount of smelling, tasting and spitting. By the end of the weekend, I could hit a pinhead from a mile away. The first day, run by Lindsay, covered some of the myriad of compounds found in coffee. The second day consisted of three sessions in which we cupped coffee.

Day One

The wine world seems to be pretty far ahead of the coffee world in terms of recognising the role that individual chemicals play in the final product and deliberately trying to maximise or minimise said chemicals. Lindsay was enlisted to muster up some relevant chemicals and to guide us through tasting them separately, in combination and in coffee. Part of this involved painstakingly working out the levels to which said chemicals should be diluted and bottling them; a job that I'm glad I didn't have to do:

The chemicals that we covered included acids, sugars, phenols, alcohols and aromatic alcohols and the session was structured around identifying the differences between each and what each does on one's tongue. For example, I found citric acid to have a sharper and brighter presence than malic acid, which, in Lindsay's words, dragged across the tongue.

The later brackets included combinations of the earlier brackets. Finally, the various compounds were tasted in coffee:

Day Two

This session involved three cuppings. It was amusing to see the anxiety and trepidation of those who hadn't cupped before give way to delight as they realised - 'hey, I can actually pick the differences.'

The first session was a totally unique opportunity. A dude by the name of Tony Marsh is running a project in Aceh to determine which coffees should be planted and how they should be processed. The project involves planting a number of different varietals at different elevations (800m to 1500m), processing them in different ways and sending the samples to a number of coffee buyers for feedback. Our first session involved tasting five pairs of varietals; one fully washed and the other wet hulled. The difference between the two is that fully washed is dried in parchment, whereas wet hulled is dried with the parchment removed, giving the coffee its distinctive dark green colouring:

The session vividly illustrated the futility of using origins alone as an indicator of flavour or quality - my cupping scores showed a spread of 18 points across the maximum of 55. (I digress to note that I didn't score in any particularly standardised way - I simply allocated the first sample middle-of-the-road scores and scoring everything else relative to it ... which was kind of odd, because the first ended up being my most highly rated.) The fully washed coffees, which I have usually referred to as 'wet processed' on this blog, generally had higher acidity and lower body than the wet hulled coffees. The group generally felt that the body on the wet processed coffees was quite good and that the wet hulled coffees were slightly dirtier or muddier.

The second session involved Andy Freeman stepping everyone through different roast profiles of the same bean, taken to the same finishing temperature and roughly the same colour/agtron/colorette reading:

In a nutshell, the fastest roast produced a much brighter cup than the bitterer cup produced by the slowest roast. At the end of the day, Andy and I pulled some shots of these two coffees for people to compare head-to-head.

The third session was a bit of a grab bag, people having been asked to bring along their own coffee to see if they could pick it out of the lot. Jill provided a number of African coffees; two harrars, a sidamo, two roasts of the same yirgacheffe and a baggy tanzanian.

Simon and I agreed that the aroma of the harrars made promises that they failed to keep. The yirgacheffes actually tasted totally different, one having been roasted on a sample roaster and one roasted on a shop roaster. I took along the infamous coffee number two, now twelve or so days old, and Guatemalan CoE #3 of 2007, kindly sent along to the session by Mark for the purposes of comparing with the notes on the internet. #2 was not as potently objectionable in cupping as it was in espresso and had mellowed in its old age. I missed it on the first pass, but caught it later on after Jill gave me the tip that it was next to the CoE; it cupped up exactly as my notes for drip recorded. I hadn't tasted CoE #3 before, but it was roasted for cupping and, so, wasn't hard to pick against a field of espresso roasts. Most people thought that it tasted clean and of citrus.

Closing Thoughts

The session certainly provided some in-depth and specific tasting experience that is seldom found elsewhere. The first session of day two was my highlight.

In conversation with others, it became apparent that people live up to the stereotype of Australia being 100% espresso, so I will predict a rash of enrolments in the masterclass. This course appears to have subsumed the espresso-focussed 'pulling shots' course that Chris Natoli ran whilst he was at the Academy and also appears to be pretty good value.

Ugh. Bad Coffee. And On My Birthday.

2008-09-28T21:20:00.008+10:00

I am not immune from getting crap coffee. Over the past few weeks, bad coffee has made its way to me from a number of sources. Lest anyone think that I have lowered my standards, I thought that I should share some of my disappointments:

Coffee Number One

Espresso: This coffee ticked a number of boxes to achieve an astounding level of complexity. Unfortunately, those boxes were sour, bitter, rubber, dirt and an astringent finish. No amount of barista-fu could remedy this one.

I think that this coffee must have been a blend of roasts that had a variety of problems.

Coffee Number Two

Aroma: Incredibly strong aroma of raspberry, tending towards vinegar.

Drip/Siphon: Slightly dry, bitter and with a small amount of raspberry. Not incredibly bad, actually.

Espresso/Cappuccino: Vinegar. Ferment. Garbage water. Aftertaste as though someone had sprayed floral toilet deoderiser in one's mouth.

The aroma made promises and the espresso delivered. Unfortunately, I was not clever enough to remember what that promise was.

I think that this was simply a batch of defective coffee.

Coffee Number Three

Espresso: Thin. Carbon. Hardly surprising, given that oil came to the surface a day after roasting.

I think that this one was burnt.

Coffee Number Four

Bin: The only thing that this coffee was suitable for, just from its appearance.

I know that this one was roasted badly by some hack using a newly purchased popcorn popper. I know because I was that hack.

Names withheld to protect the not-so-innocent.

Vic Coffee Cupping 09 - Spoons at Dawn

2008-09-22T22:31:00.008+10:00

It was an unlikely spot for a coffee tasting competition. But I guess that makes sense; coffee tasting is a pretty unlikely activity for a competition.

Rather than explain how it works, I'll show you. Check out Casper from Coffee Collective kicking arse, taking names and picking the odd one out of three at this year's world championships:

The show was really a great venue. There were plenty of onlookers and passers by ready to be brainwashed, surprisingly decent facilities and an aroma in the air that really brought out the horse notes of the Ethiopian Harrar Horse.

Anyhoo, long story short; I qualified for the finals in first position, but managed to scrub out and come third. Toshi from St Ali edged me out on second and Tom from Grinders took a well-deserved first with 8/8. Tom mentioned that he didn't have an espresso machine at home, so it was nice to see that he won the machine that Diamond-C put up for first prize.

For my part, it was a glass half-empty vs. half-full moment. On the one hand, this was my third podium finish without winning. On the other hand, this was my third podium finish. I guess that at least I'm nothing if not consistent. I walked off with some nice swag; green coffee from ARC, a barista cleaning kit from Cafetto and a nice chunk of perspex.

Ross from Jasper, Bruno from C4 and the rest of the roaster's guild did a great job of setting up the whole area to bludgeon people over the head with the message that fresh = best, as far as coffee is concerned, with roasting demonstrations and domestic coffee workshops happening towards the entrance to the main stage. Latte art champ Con Haralambopoulos gave people a little one on one instruction on the domestic espresso machine, not realising that barista champ David Makin had slipped fliers for his training services in front of the machine. To his credit, though, Dave also spent some serious time behind the espresso machines.

Credit is due to a number of people who volunteered, but I doubt that I will remember all. A special thanks is due to Andy from CS for managing the logistics of the whole thing. Hopefully it was somewhat easier this time around, given that AASCA bought four new brewers and a billion airpots.

Hopefully next year will be bigger and better. One of the dudes from the show dropped by and mentioned that they were keen to have the coffee stuff as a regular feature, which is great because Sydney have long since had a very credible coffee roasting competition.

If you have any suggestions for next year, please feel free to leave them in the comments field and I'll pass them on to the powers that be (aka Ross). Personally, I think that next year's tasting comp needs monster trucks, alcohol, scantily clad women and bacon.

Don't Turn Your Nose Up At This One: CoffeeSnobs' Colombian Volcan Galeras

2008-09-11T00:15:00.006+10:00

Background

I gather that Colombia's coffees gained a reputation for excellence through the Juan Valdez campaign, against a backdrop of filter coffee drinkers looking for something consistent and clean. As a result, Colombian coffees are sometimes thought of as bland. Kenneth Davids writes:

At their best, the classic coffees of Latin-American manifest bright, lively acidity and a clean, straightforward cup. They provide what for a North American is a normative good coffee experience.

Of course, and as Davids goes on to mention, there are plenty of Colombian coffees that break the mould. Those that I have tasted build on the base of a solid washed coffee by adding a little something extra. For example, last year one of my favourite coffees from Veneziano was actually a supposedly generic 'Colombian Popayan Supremo' that was very sweet in the cup. This year, buyers of BBB's Colombian Bachue might be forgiven for thinking that it was from Africa.

I can't help but wonder if professional roasters consider selecting that ultimate Colombian coffee from a batch of generic samples to be a rite of passage.

Introduction

CoffeeSnobs is a unique mix of online forum, green coffee buying cooperative, marketplace and coffee roastery. In order to order from CS, you must sign up as a member. Many new sign ups to CS decide to try their hand at roasting their own coffee at home. For them, the legendary sampler pack is a must buy; a once-per member offer of four 500g samples of green coffee for $20. (CS usually sells its green coffee in multiples of 2.5kg ... and I'm sure that packaging the tonne or whatever of coffee that it distribute every month is still a huge task.) Recently, Andy decided to introduce a roasted sample pack of 4 x 250g of coffee for $30. This time around, the Volcan Galeras was the pick of the pack.

I can't say that I know much about this particular Colombian, nor was I able to google up much, beyond finding out that Volcan Galeras is in the department of Nariño, a prolific coffee producer.

Espresso: Voluminous crema, lots of body and low acidity - in that regard, it was reminiscent of the last lot of CS coffee that I blogged about. Incredible marzipan flavour. (It's been a while.) Intolerant of shots that were run too fast; marzipan turned to metallic and bitter flavours.

Cappuccino: Fine, but marzipan fades into the background. Bitter and metallic flavours in fast shots seemed to concentrate in the crema.

Brewed (filter/siphon): Oddly, marzipan did not come through strongly. Potential for bitterness.

In summary, this coffee is like a lemon zester; it does that thing very well. That thing is espresso. You will find your cappuccino fine, but you won't remeber it in a week's time. As for all CS offerings, this coffee will be of particular interest to those who have bought it to roast at home.

If you buy this as part of a sampler pack, as I did, a good tip would be to plan to use it all at once, rather than changing the grind setting whilst swapping between different beans, as I did. This coffee will punish you for being overly sloppy. Get it right and Volcan Galeras has explosive potential.

The Emerald in the Coffeebloggosphere's Crown, or not so Special?

2008-08-28T00:49:00.012+10:00

Eliminating The Suspense

Esmeralda = emerald in Spanish, OK?

The Esmeralda That Was

Esmeralda is one of the coffees widely regarded as one of the world's best; its reputation is that of a modern-day Jamaican Blue Mountain. Last year, my curiosity got the better of me and I arranged to procure some from Paradise Roasters. In blogging about it, I introduced it as follows:

I probably don't need to write too much about this one. If you have been living under a rock, or if you just happen to be one of the few people who doesn't follow the coffee auctions, you might not know that this is currently the world's most expensive coffee. Previously, that dubious honour went to kopi luwak. (I'll spare you the jokes - google it if it's news to you.)

Esmeralda has an impressive back story; in a nutshell, the gesha varietal that makes up the Esmeralda Especial lot seems to have basically gone extinct except for a few random rediscoveries in Panama. It just so happens that this particular farm's gesha offering has won something like four Best of Panama auctions and every single other cupping competition it has been entered in. In terms of scores, the consensus seems to be that it's a 92 at a minimum, with some tasters going as high as 97!

The 2007 Paradise Roasters lot displayed a predominant and intense mandarin flavour in all brewing methods, backed with hints of bergamot and a slight astringency.

The Esmeralda That Is

Last year's, as far as I can tell, the correct name for it was "Hacienda Esmeralda Special." Flash forward a year and all of a sudden, the Petersons decided to shake things up by sorting the crop into different lots, all of which were auctioned under the "Hacienda Esmeralda Special" moniker. Again, the auction was blogged about widely. Readers are encouraged to post links to other relevant posts in the comments field. If you have to choose only one (other) blog post to read on the subject, remember the old saying - "in Hoff we trust." James' points about dilution of their own trademark and the effect on the market struck a chord with me, particularly seeing as trade marks was one of my favourite subjects.

The auction itself always reads like a who's who, so you might like to imagine Joan Rivers delivering the commentary. Stumptown was wearing batch one, hailing from "north of the creek," but the heavy hitter shared the most expensive batch, two, with Sweet Maria's. The dashing duo deftly devoured batch three, the peaberries, whilst 49th snapped up the sole double pass lot. Though the Petersons didn't credit Mountain Top for their technique - as I understand it - one wonders if the Piccolo clan's decision to purchase wasn't influenced by best buddy, Australian Mountaintopophile and coffee guru, Instaurator, who has done some consulting for them. Batches six through ten were bought by a wide spectrum. For the readers of this blog who I know follow the Japanese CoE buying circuit, it looks like crowd favourite Kentaro Maruyama didn't even contest the Esmeralda auction against big dog Wataru Nishibayashi. Presumably this means that Wataru will edge ahead of Maruyama in the awesome coffee purchasing league tables, but I would still want a several Watarus for my mint condition Maruyama trading card.

Competition results also deserve a mention. This year, the Petersons gave the Best of Panama competition a miss, presumably in order to give someone else a chance at winning. They also failed to place first for the fourth time in a row at the SCAA cupping pavillion (perhaps one of my kind readers could provide the link; I can't seem to find it). Fortunately, though, they did at least manage to walk away with first place in the rain forest alliance cupping for quality competition.

Anyhoo, that's enough background.

Having had spectacular success with the Mamuto, I decided to place an order for Esmeralda with Terroir, along with a few other goodies for various people:

Nim's care package; two packs of Esmeralda, a pack of Mamuto, Coffee Trail book, Hacienda La Minita book and a pack of the AWESOME filtropa pourover filters to go with his filter cone.

Let's take a closer look at that label ...

Where's the trademark Howell photo?

It was interesting to note that last year's batch from Paradise was comprised of unusually long and thin beans. This year's lot from Terroir looked considerably shorter and rounder ... perhaps a consequence of the decision to separate Esmeralda Special into different lots.

Anyhoo ...

Siphon/Vac Pot/Clover: These brews varied from being excellent to OK and I found the coffee difficult to work with. Several tasters agreed that there were Earl Grey tea (bergamot) notes, but differed to the intensity that they perceived. Sweetness was not as high as I had hoped, there was a good measure of acidity and the coffee was dry. The best brews had hints of peach.

Espresso: As I felt that the coffee was slightly too dark for siphon, I took it into the big V, borrowed one of their grinders and treated everyone to some Esmeralda espresso. The espresso had the kind of astringency that I usually associate with a roast that is slightly too light for espresso, but displayed a tiny amount of sweetness and some tannic tea type flavours.

This lot was interesting, but not the mind-blowing experience of last year's lot. Differences could have been due to (a) the separation of the Esmeralda Special lots this year, (b) the roasting of the coffee and (c) the shipping of this coffee, and attendant two week delay from roasting, compared with the last lot being brought over in carry on luggage. It would be very interesting to try out the various lots from the various sources that bought them, but that would probably end up being an expense to rival Krusty the clown's addiction to faberge' eggs.

The Esmeralda that will be ...?

It will be interesting to see if anyone actually does the work of tasting all of the various Esmeralda lots and working out how big the spread in quality is. Who knows how Esmeralda Special will be divided up in future? I am also very interested to find out how 49th's lot will go and whether this processing method might take off in Panama.

Digression - Siphon - Again

Siphon continues to be a learning experience, though brews are usually pretty good nowadays. I thought that the butane burner warranted a quick post. Frankly, I can't see how you can really use a siphon without putting it on the stove or using a butane burner. I bought mine off ebay from Jack Grieve. A similar burner is available at a very reasonable price through Jack's web store, along with some pretty cheap siphons.

When used in conjunction with a thermocouple, the butane burner makes it possible to get repeatable and adjustable brew temperatures. A marathon session of three siphon brews (and three cleaning runs) showed that the burner seems to emit more heat immediately after it is filled with gas. Good practice would be for the first use after refilling to be in a cleaning run.

So far, adjustments to the water temperature, dose and grind for the siphon have had eerily similar effects to doing the same thing for espresso.

One final tip - remember that every siphon brew is diluted by the water that doesn't make it into the top chamber to start off with and, as this is a fixed amount, the proportion of each brew that is made up of water that has never been in contact with coffee will increase if you try to brew less than the maximum amount for any given siphon. This lead to the experiment and realisation that if the brew is slightly on the strong side, dilution with hot water can sometimes save it.

Could it be ... BBB Logo ACF Tulips?

2008-08-24T10:49:00.004+10:00

Move along.

Minita and Mamuto Mumblings

2008-08-17T18:26:00.006+10:00

Introduction

I'm a firm believer that the quest for coffee excellence requires tasting a lot of different coffees with an open mind. For my purposes, I try to taste a lot of different stuff purely to build up my own palate, as well as to get an idea of what others are writing about and what is possible in the world of specialty coffee. All of the good roasters that I know also believe in tasting a lot of different coffees - they view it as an exercise in benchmarking, without which they will quickly be proclaiming the virtues of utter crap; emperors with no clothes. Conversely, I don't think it's a coincidence that the very few roasters who I have heard of who don't taste widely do not produce a good product. (That applies equally to home roasters as it does to commercial roasters.)

The USA

Several years ago, I never would have imagined ordering coffee from the US of A. Over the past few years, coffee from the US has made regular, but infrequent, inroads into my usual rotation - fuelled in part by the prolific writings of the US bloggosphere and other coffee web pages.

It would not surprise me if the USA's coffee mainly does live up to the stereotypical Starbucks ashy espresso or the pot of drip coffee that has been sitting on the burner for a week, but they have a lot of good things going for them. As the world's largest economy, they have considerable buying power and they are conveniently placed near south and central america; two great producing regions. Their roasters appear to have developed against a background of a drip coffee culture, in which single origins are appreciated for their unique characteristics ... even if only because of the forehead-slappingly obvious contrast between a smooth colombian and a winey kenyan. In comparison with Australia, their espresso roasts have developed in the vacuum of Starbucks' shadow. Finally, they have an active specialty coffee association and are home to various programs such as the cup of excellence and the coffee quality institute. The USA has well and truly emerged as a big player in both the worlds of espresso and brewed coffee - one that leads the charge in many respects.

(Unfortunately, I appear to have misplaced my bag of Mamuto. I have taken a page from the book of barismo and borrowed this photo from Steve Ford. Steve ran an excellent project where he took a photo of the first cup of coffee that he drank each day over a year. You can check out 'First Cup' here.)

Terroir and George Howell

This particular coffee comes from Terroir in Massachussets. Terroir is run by George Howell, the man who founded the multi-site roastery 'Coffee Connection,' which he later sold to Starbucks before co-founding the Cup of Excellence and winning the SCAA's lifetime achievement award. Avid PQ readers will note that this is not the first time that Howell has rated a mention on this blog and I reiterate that his Long Road To Coffee Quality is a must-read.

The lovely thing about the prevalence of e-commerce in the USA is that the person on the other side of the web site is usually quite responsive and adept at getting around all sorts of problems, which included the difficulty of getting the coffee sent out as soon as it was roasted and correcting for an incorrect credit card number on my part. Nonetheless, postage is still a significant problem, with my package taking about three weeks to get here. Ugh. This activity is also not for the faint of wallet.

Costa Rica La Minita

La Minita has a reputation of being one of the great coffees of the world. It is also a model of quality and ethics working hand in hand. In a nutshell, my understanding is that they are very stringent on their picking and processing, to the point where they pay the pickers a premium to ensure that under-ripe fruit is not harvested. In turn, this means that their product is consistently good, justifying the premium for the roaster. This is a delicate, washed coffee that is really ideal for brewed coffee (drip/filter/siphon/clover). However, I first tasted this coffee in Klaus Thomsen's 2006 WBC winning blend, where it was paired with Daterra Sweet Collection to create a light, clean, crisp and sweet blend.

Siphon/Drip: Bright, slight apple flavour. Slight bitterness emerged on cooling.

This particular coffee simply didn't stand up to the battering that it received in shipping. I have no doubt that it would be better if it were fresher. That said, it wasn't exactly bad, but this struck me as a relatively subtle coffee that was always bound to be overshadowed by the Kenyan powerhouse. Read on.

Kenya Mamuto

The Mamuto has gained notoriety due, in part, to the ridiculously high scores that Kenneth Davids has awarded it over the years. Again, this coffee also demonstrates that quality and ethics can happily coexist at the pointy end of the market - when I bought it, Terroir's web page said that $2USD per 12oz went back to the farm, which is a helluva lot of cash in the world of green coffee.

Siphon/Drip: Bright, sweet, smooth, ribena, coffee cherry, tomato.

This coffee was simply fantastic. I turned off the espresso machine for a week and gladly scrubbed my siphon out. If it was that good after its shipping ordeal, it's kind of scary to imagine what it would have been like earlier. Simon James was of a similar opinion:

Well I’ll cut to the chase! The Kenyan Mamuto was STELLAR! No wonder it scored a 97 at Coffee Review. I can’t say that my description of the flavours I experienced was the same as those of the Coffee Review, but it was certainly sweetly powerful, with a smooth balanced finish. But I got blackcurrant aroma with stewed apricot in the cup. A very tasty coffee!

Needless to say that this coffee stood up to its trip a lot better than the Minita did. I actually took both the Minita and the Mamuto along to a cupping at BBB. The Minita fared well, but was not a standout. The Mamuto was the absolute stand out; it was everyone's pick, regardless of their level of experience.

From my description above, you can see that this cupped up like an exceptional, but classic, Kenyan coffee - very different to what one would expect from a Colombian, for example. It's worth pausing to reflect that perhaps it is the fact that these coffees tend to have the least 'classic' profile that makes them so clearly special. Coffeecuppers deal with the distinction between classic cups and unusual coffees in their short coffee tasting primer. Howell that this consistent and unusual cup profile merited the title 'Grand Cru' - on his fondness for wine analogies, see CG podcast 63 (link directly to 29 megabyte mp3 file).

Teaser

Yeah. I admit it. I have some different stuff on the way from Terroir - readers with less respect for their wallets are invited to taste vicariously through future posts. I'm also keen on getting some stuff from the outstanding Ecco Caffe if anyone wants to split postage at some stage.

Indonesians are generally thick, dirty and not very bright ...

2008-08-11T01:08:00.009+10:00

... and that's not a coffee tasting description that you want overheard in public!

With Saturdays free now, I have managed to make it to BBB for cuppings. It seems that most people use BBB's cuppings as a way to learn more about coffee and to build their palate. It's not an exaggeration to say that people travel far and wide for this opportunity - last week Emanuel from Ristretto in Perth turned up; this week it was Perth espresso godfather Corey from Epic and a bus load of his staff. It's great to see such dedication ... and mind-boggling to see a cafe owner flying his baristi across the country just to check out some cafes.

That's all well and good, but cuppings also provide a fantastic opportunity to sample BBB's offerings to work out what to take home. Last week, I was on a bit of a mission to find a fantastic, generic chocolate-bar type blend. I had a fantastic drip coffee - more on that next post - and, so, was looking for the opposite end of the spectrum for my morning cappuccino. I found it in mystery cup number 7:

Cupping: From memory, the cup was not particularly pleasant whilst hot, with an odd rubbery/chemical overtone. After cooling, the dominant sensation in the cup was body, supported by hints of sweetness, dirt, broth and the immortal "funky forest floor." Remarkably clean, for what it was.

Espresso: Striking, dense, brick-red crema. Heavy body. Some acidity, bleeding into a slightly unpleasant camphor/terpene (chemical) finish.

Cappuccino: Effortlessly mastered even relatively large amounts of milk, leaving me wondering whether I hadn't inadvertently added several spoons of Milo. Sledgehammer subtlety.

No prizes for guessing that this was a Sumatran Mandheling - actually a new crop Kuda Mas. I'm looking forward to this one over the next few months.

Ennui, WBC and Coffee

2008-07-29T23:31:00.003+10:00

Despite the whirlwind that was the WBC, over the last month or so I found myself less enthused than ever about coffee. A few notable exceptions aside, really good coffee seemed to be pretty scarce on the ground. Fortunately, a few stunning coffees have sparked my interest again. This post is a news update that will be followed up by a coffee update within a week or so.

WBC

What a ride. I have been mulling over what to post about it ... how to capture the tremendous amount of work that went on behind the scenes and the bittersweet sensation of Dave's sensational second place finish. Well, I guess that I have pretty much summed it up in that last sentence.

I'll keep it short and sweet. Watching Dave's performance from 2nd place at the ABC last year to WBC this year has been nothing short of inspirational. Whatever you might say about Dave, you have to concede that he is an incredible barista and approached the task of winning the WBC with boundless energy, enthusiasm and effort. It was certainly an honour to be able to tag along for the ride. I hope that whoever wins next year avails themselves of the experience and expertise that Dave and the Veneziano crew have acquired. And, yeah, I guess that I have to concede that some of the coffee that I got to taste was pretty damned amazing!

End of an era

With my final semester at uni upon me, I have made the decision to resign from working Saturdays at First Pour. For the past four or five years, I have pushed myself to the breaking point by overloading at uni, volunteering and working a few jobs at once. I count myself extremely lucky to have had all of the opportunities that life has afforded me, but I look forward to focussing on my studies this semester and taking my last opportunity to enjoy the life of an undergrad.

It's fair to say that I have probably learned more about coffee from working at First Pour and the big V than I have from anything else. Dedication to producing great coffee is a given, but perhaps one of the other truly special things about the big V is the company's willingness to support its junior staff in learning more about coffee and advancing their careers in the industry. I will certainly miss working at such a fun place. I will also miss having customers with such good palates and a dedication to coffee that sees them travelling down dodgy-looking industrial back-alleys to get their weekly fix.

David Seng is back at university and has taken over from me at First Pour on Saturdays. He is joined by a new trainee, Ben. Frankly, Sengster is probably a better barista than I am - at the very least he's faster - so it ought to work out well for the customers. It is hoped that having an additional staff member on Saturdays will facilitate a few extra activities that I was never able to run by myself.

I'll still drop by Veneziano to keep up with the goss and leech off the guys as I did before and from time to time you might well see me filling in behind the bar or in some other capacity.

Yeah. I'll miss that Robur and FB80.

Some Competition Results ...

2008-06-22T00:57:00.004+10:00

Catherine gave the Cupping Champs a great shot, getting 6/8 in a lightning fast 1 minute and 11 seconds. Unfortunately, several countries got a perfect 8/8 and, so, Catherine didn't make the finals. There was the qualifiers, a semi-finals and a finals, so it was utterly ludicrous to see that Casper, the eventual champ, managed to get 8/8, 7/8 and then a perfect 8/8 to win. That's ... like ... 72 cups! The home town crowd must have been happy. From memory, Casper works at the Coffee Collective. Talented bunch.

Australia did a bit better at the Latte Art.

So with Con's win, I think that that makes Australia 3 for 3. I blagged Em's photo, so it was only fitting to take the one with her in it ;P Apparently Con was quite happy to win. Whoda thunk it? So any bets there will be a stampede to Church Street over the next few weeks. I hope people actually give him a chance to get back.

Back at home, Danes decided to bring back their competiton ... oddly enough, deciding to run it head-to-head with the WBC. Rivalry between my sometime co-workers Dave Seng and Jesse Hyde continued, with Jesse pipping Sengster at the post to come second, as he did at the Australian Barista Comp. opens. I think that both times Jess just grabbed a bag of Estate off the shelf, so go Estate! Not 100% sure what Dave did for coffee, but I think that it was also just a standard blend. Bella, maybe. Habib Maarbani took the cash home - very nice to see, seeing as he was announced as the winner of the Australian Latte Art comp, then when it was found out that the wrong score sheets were used Habib lost the re-run competition to Con. Watch out for Habib next year!

And then, of course, there was the WBC qualifying rounds. My heart was in my throat until they announced finalist number five ... from Australia ... Daaaaaaaaavid Makin! It's anyone's game tomorrow, but I have no doubt that Dave will give everyone a serious run for their money.

Live streaming ... and I've got my tax exam on Monday ... must ... concentrate ... on ... studying ...

Chasing Hearts and Dreams

2008-06-18T22:25:00.003+10:00

Chasing hearts; in my cup right now:

Chasing dreams; tune in to worldbaristachampionship.com, 7:20 pm Friday, our time, to see Dave's WBC qualifying round performance.

Coffee Supreme's Fair Trade Organic Blend

2008-06-13T22:53:00.004+10:00

Introduction

Going back a few years, Coffee Supreme seemed to be all the rage. These were the dudes that supplied Ray, the cafe that started it all for Mark D of the St Ali Empire. Now, for some reason, I barely hear about them. Well, business can't be all that bad - a few months ago they moved in to a bigger, badder and better factory with a bigger, badder and better roaster. It happens to be two minutes walk away from the Veneziano factory.

Digression

Of course, this put me in a bit of a quandry. I haven't ever featured any of the big V's blends just because I thought that it would be pretty cheesy to. By the same token, is it poor form to be reviewing the competitors down the street? Well, I figure that both of these are rather moot points, seeing as final year uni has forced me to wake up and smell the coffee, pun intended, and focus on actually doing something with that uni degree that I study between sips. Of course, this means that at some stage after I finish working at Veneziano, I'll be posting about some of what is actually the bulk of the coffee that I drink these days.

Notes

So I dropped by Supreme's factory and picked up a bag of their fair trade organic blend to keep me going whilst studying last week. I'm not opposed to buying fair trade coffee, nor am I for it - I'll make my decision based on taste. Ditto for organic. It so happens that the fair trade coffees that I have tasted over the past few years have hit more strikes than they have home runs. Still, Supreme have done a great job of working with a limited pool of green coffees. The ground coffee definitely smelled like it had some sort of natural processed coffee in it, but perhaps my mind was playing tricks on me - it never made it to the cup.

French press: Roast flavours predominate; too dark for my tastes. (I often find that stuff that tastes great as espresso doesn't shine in a french press or in traditional cuppings.)

Espresso: Dark crema, rich mouthfeel, malt/vegemite, moderate acidity and a very vague hint of some sort of dry spice.

Cappuccino: Cuts through milk with confidence; malty/vegemitey flavour and dry cocoa finish. Great.

How should we score espresso in a standardised manner?

2008-06-01T16:32:00.006+10:00

Unfortunately, we seem to be in a bit of a rut. Over the past month or so, I have had coffee from five or so of Victoria's finest roasters and I haven't really had anything worth mentioning. From speaking to various roasters, I gather that this is an industry-wide pheonomenon largely related to the green available in the country at the moment and that everyone is excited about new stock that should be arriving over the next month or so. (Despite which, I continue to read reviews and ads using lots of superlatives to describe the coffee that we currently have around - probably a case of "damned if you do, damned if you don't.") So I write this post partly because the experience has made me focus on how we communicate about coffee and partly as a substitute for some posting up some proper reviews.

I have long enjoyed reading reviews of brewed coffee such as those on coffeecuppers.com and sweet marias. I guess that no one will ever be 100% happy with every scoring method, but I find that the standard scoring system used by Tom, Jim and Bob, combined with their comments, is quite informative - I get a pretty good picture of what the coffee is going to taste like. If you are interested in the standard cupping review framework, you should grab a copy of Ted Lingle's "Coffee Cuppers' Handbook," from which the format might well have originated for all that I know ... in any case, it's a good read, but it is a reference manual rather than a coffee table book.

What's good for cupping or brewed coffee isn't necessarily good for espresso, and I have to say that the scoring system is a case in point. Let me give you a little example; say that we have an absolutely spectacular Kenyan SO (think Mamuto or Masai) ... something that scores low to mid nineties with high points for brightness and finish, but relatively low points for body. Then let's say that we have a brilliant El Salvadorean (think Santa Elena or Matalapa) ... something that scores in the mid to high eighties, with lower scores for brightness and finish, but higher scores for body than the Kenyan. I would expect that if you brewed the two as espresso, most people would prefer the El Salvadorean coffee, but as a brewed coffee, little could stand in the way of the Kenyan powerhouse. So I think that it's time that we ditched the idea that you can really use one scoring system for both espresso and brewed coffee. What are your thoughts?

The next problem becomes one of searching for criteria against which to score espresso.

The most well-developed, widespread and famous espresso-specific scoring system that springs to mind is the WBC scoring system. That system has proved to be pretty flexible, in that it doesn't prize one particular characteristic over the other, but instead allows the judge to judge the espresso against the competitor's description. This flexibility is a double-edged sword; its open-endedness makes it suitable for the WBC, but renders it pretty useless as a descriptive score system. If you want to describe espresso, you need something else.

I had a quick look around to see if there was some brilliant, well-established system that I had missed out on. Often, these are all solved problems and it looks like there wasn't such a system, but Mark Prince et. al. had a good go at tackling the problem in battle north america vs italy. It would be great to hear any comments that people have about Mark's scoring methodology. It is pretty close to the standard brewed coffee evaluation methodology, but transported to the espresso context.

Personally, I thought that the attempt in battle north america was quite a good one, both as a scoring system in itself and as a starting point for a discussion. Here are some things that I'd like to consider:

*Acidity, Sweetness and Body "Balance" - Changing these scores to "balance" scores rather than intensity scores is clever, as it helps to get around the problem of a very acidic coffee scoring highly for it. However, it makes the scores less descriptive. For this reason, I think that it might be worthwhile having some sort of an intensity ranking as well.

*Overall flavour - Perhaps this falls under aroma, or perhaps this is best dealt with by giving comments, but where do you reflect a score for a particular flavour? An example; let's say that we have a blend where some clever roaster has created a very simple blend by combining an espresso-suitable Kenyan with something with a bit of body to make a well-rounded cup. Clearly, you can take account of the acidity level through the "acidity balance" category, but what about the distinctive Kenyan berry quality? Is that factored into overall impression? Why not have some category for flavour balance? Or do people think that this would place "chocolate bar" blends at a disadvantage?

*Barista score - Is this something more appropriately taken into account in the comments or as a separate score? Or is it best taken into account in the overall score? If so, how do you come up with the right weighting of espresso taste scores vs ease of extraction scores?

*Milk score - Again, should this be part of the espresso score, or should it be a separate score? If the latter, what is the appropriate weighting?

I look forward to all of your comments, as this discussion could result in a very productive outcome for all of us.

(Please note; this post has been cross-posted to a number of other places, including the forum that shall not be linked to or mentioned by name - happy, Alistair?)

George Howell, "The Long Road to Coffee Quality"

2008-05-26T20:15:00.002+10:00

I have long maintained the links on the right hand side of the blog without saying much about them, so I thought it worthwhile to start mentioning a few.

International coffee superstar George Howell has come up with the brilliant idea of sharing his voluminous coffee knowledge by adding little snippets to the page linked above. George seems to be adding a snippet every time that he sends out his monthly newsletter in a bid to get more people to sign up. So do that too if you're in the US of A. (I signed up from half way across the world.)

At the time of writing this blog post, George's article focuses on coffee varietals and - you guessed it - terroir. I have only skimmed the article so far, but it is worthwhile remembering that George's focus is single origin brewed coffees, rather than espresso blends.

... and if I didn't make it clear, you can access the article by clicking the title of this post.

ARC Opening

2008-05-15T20:04:00.008+10:00

I was flicking through my photos in preparation to post something else when I flicked past some photos of the party to celebrate the opening of ARC's new bigger/better/faster/stronger warehouse a few months back. It occurred to me that many of my readers probably aren't really familiar with the ins and outs of the green coffee trade. For that matter, neither am I, so I'll just say that green coffee brokers/importers are an absolutely crucial and often overlooked link in getting something tasty into your cup; these are the guys who are largely responsible for selecting the pool of green coffee from which Australian roasters create their blends. And with that, I'll congratulate ARC on their new facility with some photos ...

Zoe hearts green coffee. This should give y'all some idea of the scale that we're talking about here, although the warehouse was practically empty at the time of the party.

Moshe aka. "Mr ARC" with a number of samples in his gorgeous new cupping room.

A rather serious piece of sample roasting equipment; Brambatti, from memory. ARC is part of a global network of coffee brokers/importers. Their quality assurance process involves a heck of a lot of sample roasting, including the exchange of sample roasts and roasting notes across the network.

Again, you can see that the space is pretty massive. The crowd included a lot of the movers and shakers in the coffee scene in Australia, with many making a trip from interstate to be there.

Some of the interstate guys continued the celebration the next day with a coffee crawl.

Australian Barista Competiton: The Gear

2008-05-06T17:10:00.006+10:00

There is plenty to write about the ABC and I anticipate that it will be at least a week until I get around to it. For now, interested readers should take a look at Syd Low's amazing photography of the open barista competition and the final event.

In the meantime, I compiled a few lists of what grinders and tampers everyone was using. The references in brackets are references to the number of the photo in Syd's series where you can see the competitor using that gear.

Grinders

Dave - BNZ + Stepless Mod (Syd, 16)
Con - Robur (Syd 06)
Jen - Robur (Syd 17)
Anne - Robur (Syd 1)
Aaron - Robur (Syd 1)
Kallum - Compak (Syd 03)
Ian - Compak (Syd 11)
Patrick - ???
Hazel - BNZ + Doserless Mod (Syd 10)
Jesse - Robur

Tracy Rupe - Compak (Syd 3)
Simon James - Robur
Kiril Shaginov - Robur
Nic Hind - Compak (Syd 1)
Vanessa Moore - Robur
Tim Adams - Robur (Syd 2)
David Seng - Compak
Alex Forsyth - Compak (Syd 4)
Jesse Hyde - Robur
Craig Simon - Robur
Kelvin Wong - Compak (Syd 5)
Douglas Bolzon - ???
Mimma Battista - Compak (Syd 7)
Emanuelle Muratore - Robur (Syd 3)

It looks like the Robur was the clear favourite, taking up 12 of 24 competition slots. The Compak put up a reasonable show, with 7 out of 24 slots, but we need to remember that it was the supplied grinder. Other than that, seasoned campaigners Dave and Hazel opted for the BNZs and did not like their stock configuration. Dave modified his grinders to give them stepless adjustment. Hazel modified her grinders to make them doserless. One has to wonder if they would switch to Roburs if they were buying now, seeing as they will soon be available in doserless and the new doser seems to sweep pretty clean and dose pretty straight.

Tampers

Dave - Espro (Syd 16)
Con - RB (Syd 15, 36)
Jen - Pink RB (Syd 20)
Anne - Pink RB (Syd 20)
Aaron - Coffeelab (Syd 6)
Kallum - Old Pullman (Syd 3)
Ian - ???
Patrick - ???
Hazel - That NZ Thing (Syd 12)
Jesse - Espro?

Paul Asquith - Some Generic Metal Thing (Syd 2)
Tracy Rupe - RB (Syd 4)
Simon James - Pullman
Kiril Shaginov - RB
Nic Hind - RB (Syd 2)
Vanessa Moore - RB
Tim Adams - RB (Syd 2)
David Seng - Coffeelab ?
Alex Forsyth - RB (Syd 2)
Jesse Hyde - Espro ?
Craig Simon - Espro ?
Kelvin Wong - RB (Syd 05)
Douglas Bolzon - ???
Mimma Battista - Pink RB (Syd 07)
Emanuelle Muratore - RB (Syd 05)

Again, there was a clear favourite - the Reg Barber, taking up 12 spots out of 24. The Espro made a minority showing, taking up four spots. The Coffeelab (2), Classic Pullman (1), New Pullman (1), Random NZ Tamper (1) and Generic Metal Thing (1) took up the slack.

A Five Star Coffee: Guatamalan Cinco Estrellas

2008-04-21T22:56:00.006+10:00

Introduction

I'm happy to go out on a limb and presume that Spanish is the main language spoken in Guatemala. (Go ahead; wikipedia it up and tell me I'm wrong.) This being the case, "cinco estrellas" means nothing more than five stars. Whether this is a grading or a trade name, I don't know.

The terrifically uninformative start to the post is really just to draw attention to the nature of the coffee trade in Australia and to underscore the importance of cupping as a commercial roaster; how much do we really know about the green that is on offer? I would argue that we don't know much, in stark contrast with some of the top-end roasters overseas, who can give you full details of the family trees from which their farmers pluck both their coffee and their workers. Fortunately, the depth of the brew in the cup doesn't depend on the length of the name on the bag ... it just means that roasters have to be shrewder about their purchasing decisions.

The Cinco Estrellas draws together a few different lines of research that have kept me amused of late and over the past few years. The first line of research concerns role of the washed coffee. My much-neglected regular readers will probably remember my linking to this thought provoking piece on the subject. It so happens that this coffee is a washed coffee. In fact, it more than so happens ... according to Edwin, it might even be illegal to sell naturals in Guate. Washed coffees tend to produce a clean, bright cup, perhaps with some subtle flavour accents and/or sweetness. See coffeeresearch.org In fact, I'm sure that many people would think of washed coffees as one-dimensional when it comes to espresso. This last trait made the 5* an excellent feed into the second and third lines of research; learning how to use my gene cafe and learning how to brew drip.

On Drip Brewing Generally ...

The humble drip brewer seems to be becoming a bit sexier. The revolting idea of the day old carafe sitting on the hotplate at McDonalds has long since left my mind and been replaced with a willingness to actually give it a shot ... admittedly brought on, at least in part, by involvement in the cupping comps. (Including my atrocious 5/8 score in the last one.) It turns out that there is more than meets the eye to drip coffee equipment - for example, the k-mart drip brewer at work definitely brews a less flavoursome cup than the old royal boiler co thing that we found. As far as I can tell, the much-lauded Technivorms aren't available in Australia ... a fact that I regretted until I realised that even I have no use for a litre of drip coffee.

For $20, I was game to find out how the humble plastic pour-over and melitta filter fared. This brew method carries the weighty approval of Paul at Mecca, so I figured that it couldn't be that bad. It turns out that if you pour water straight off the boil, the brew stays between about 95C and 92C for the whole brew time. (That sound you're hearing is of a million k-mart brewer owners slapping their foreheads.) Anyhoo, 15g of ground coffee and 250mL of water right off the boil seems to yield a tasty cup in something like a minute. Comments welcome.

The cup profile is very clean; totally sediment-free because of the paper filter. The cup changes a fair bit as it cools; at the beginning it is too hot to taste anything, then you hit the optimum temperature to get a flavour explosion, then it cools down and all that you can taste is brown and acid. It's kind of like Clover ... although that statement seems to be pretty cool since the big green mermaid plucked the little green plant.

Drip Tasting Notes

Over the first few days, the 5* simply tasted ashy and quite acidic. Surprisingly, letting it sit for a week improved it immensely - something that I expect for espresso, but not for anything else. After a week, the cup was clean, relatively acidic and had an interesting potpourri-like character that I can't quite put my finger on. I was quite surprised to see that subtlety emerge after a week, as opposed to retreating.

Espresso

The roast must have been quite close to second crack, so I decided to give it a shot through the Maver. The resultant espresso was quite bright, very sweet and very clean. It actually reminded me quite a bit of Klaus Thomsen's WBC winning blend. It did an admirable job in milk, with little body to speak of, but a fair bit of caramel. I only wish that I had left myself enough to experiment with lowering the dose.

# Update 27 April 2008 #

I found myself with a little 5* left over from the last roast and decided to experiment with a lower dose, as I alluded to in this post. It turned out to be a good call. The resultant espresso was a bit less sweet this time around, but it presented a fantastically balanced shot, with the elusive floral/potpourri flavour from the drip brewed shots making it through into the cup. The shot was light in body, but otherwise exceptionally rounded and complete. Perhaps the most interesting feature was a distinct bitterness that was not at all unpleasant.

While I Was Away ...

2008-04-10T00:32:00.003+10:00

OK, so heaps of stuff has happened since my last update. Heaps. In brief:

*Back from Sydney. (Miss y'all, Mecca.)

*Lots of training and behind the scenes stuff for the Vic Barista Comp.

*Super Jolly went missing; slumming it with a Kony.

*Robur becomes a permanent addition to the bench at work. That thing is so good that I'm embarrassed to have ever served coffee without it. We have had a heap of different grinders on the bench, but I'd trade all of them for a single Robur.

*Currently drinking the first iteration of Andrew's new blend for Maling Room. It's a simple, chocolate-bar style blend, done very well. Clean, but not afraid to stand up to milk. I respect Andrew's take on just going with the basics in times where fruity coffees are disappointing.

At the moment, I have mixed feelings about a number of trends happening in the coffee industry. When we talk about raising the bar, we are always implicitly talking about raising two bars; the lower one, representing the average standard, and the higher one, representing the state of the art. The lower bar usually represented establishments that quite overtly didn't give a damn, whilst the higher bar was usually held up by people willing to invest serious time and money. On the one hand, I'm concerned that we're starting to see a flocking to the middle, in which people are talking the talk, but failing to even put in a decent effort at walking the walk ... if not cynically ripping people off. On the other hand, we are also seeing an increase in establishments pushing up the top end. This blog will focus on the latter, as will I.

Until next time, when I hope to talk about some dudes who are doing it right, a teaser ...

... guesses welcome.

Yep. You Guessed It. MORE Eating Out.

2008-01-15T22:33:00.000+11:00

Exciting news. My machine finally arrived, sans grinder, a bit beat up and rather later than I had intended. The best laid plans of mice and men. Fortunately, Renzo from Di Bartoli has fixed me up with a grinder to pull me through 'till I get back to Melbourne. I owe him some grumblecakes. All of this means that the Eating Out series is coming to an end. Yaay!

Saturday proved to be a nice opportunity to catch up with Matt, coffeegeek extraordinaire, who was generous enough to take me on a tour of a few little haunts that I would probably never have otherwise gotten around to ... I really ought to take notes, as I am already having difficulty remembering what I had for breakfast this morning, let alone what I did on the weekend.

Ringa's Cafe, Marsfield (?)

A neat little place in a university type suburb. The , particularly the funky water bottles. In the spirit of internet-stories-cum-reviews getting stuck into relatively inconsequential minutii, I have to say that I hate the font Comic Sans with the fiery passion of ten thousand suns. Glad I got that off my chest ;P (It will make more sense when/if I get around to uploading photos for this adventure.)

Matt and I started off with an espresso. It struck me that the flavours were oddly separate ... almost as though there were two liquids in the cup, sitting side by side. The shot ended with an intense cocoa flavour that persisted for quite a while. This was cocoa proper, not chocolate - it was somewhat dry and savoury. In a good way. However, the shot began with a flavour that I can only remember as being rather unpleasant. I seem to remember it being a bit sour to start off with or something like that. Hopefully Matt will post up if he remembers. Matt and I followed the espresso with some milk drinks of some description. I do remember that the first sips started with the same let-down, but the cocoa flavour certainly came into its own.

Kafenio, Cronulla

Yes, we drove to the other side of the city! Kafenio reminds me of some of the old-school cafes in Melbourne, like Mario's Coffee and Candy. I am quite sure that if I stared at their sign for long enough I would be transported back into the 1950s. (Again, wait for the photo.) The shop itself is quite tiny. A constellation of random espresso cups from all over the place peppers the walls. (Reminds me of the drawer beneath my espresso machine ;P) Some bright spark had the idea of putting an office style water cooler by the front door to ward off the heat. Perhaps they're hoping to stimulate conversation.

We took a seat outside and ordered some food. Fortunately, there was plenty of seating on the sidewalk. In contradistinction to the actual shop, lunch had generous proportions. In fact, watching six dishes come out at the same time was like watching a clown car trick at the circus. The plates looked like they were bigger than whatever kitchen area they have! And man I love bacon. (Hmm ... bacongeek.com isn't registered ...)

Espresso on a hot and sunny day is bound to disappoint. In this respect, Kafenio didn't disappoint. (Think it through ... continue reading ... good ...) The first sips were quite violent, reminding me of cheap and nasty stale coffee. Fortunately, once the crema was aside, what was underneath was simple, rich in mouthfeel and somewhat sweet. In hindsight, I ought to have also ordered a coffee with some moo juice in it, but at that stage my dreams were porcine, not bovine.

Grind, Cronulla

A stone's throw from the beach, it was kind of odd to find a cafe without outdoor seating. The guys running the place obviously enjoy themselves; the walls are plastered with photos of people around the world holding up signs saying "I'd rather be at Grind," and the specials board asks "are you a goose or are uganda?" Perhaps what you'd expect from a place that has a sign that looks like it came off a 1980's T-shirt. (I figured that I should mention signs again; I seem to be on a roll.)

The Ugandan robusta that we tried first was interesting. Massive crema bubbles, monster mouthfeel and less of a medicinal/chemical type taste than I have had from some of the Indian robustas. Good fun, but the taint wasn't quite kosher. Or perhaps that was just a hangover from the bacon. The main blend was a better experience; balanced and heavy in mouthfeel, but I can't for the life of me remember any more about it than that, other than wondering whether the main blend also contained robusta.

Of the shots that I had on the day, I'd say that Grind was the prize pig. This is odd, seeing as most of the time people seem to remember coffees from earlier in the day as being better. Judging from the latte art photos on the wall and the espresso shot, it looks like Grind's milk drinks bring home the bacon, but unfortunately there's more chance of pigs flying than of me fitting another trip to Cronulla into my schedule. Fortunately, having been reunited with my espresso machine, I am pigging out at home. Nearly half a kilo of coffee pucks attest to my tragic binge, but for the moment I'm as happy as a pig in mud.

OK, I need a BLT.

Still Eating Out ...

2007-12-18T21:30:00.000+11:00

OK, so y'all are in for a bumper crop, this being an amalgamation of things that I had previously written up for my December activities in Sydney. Unfortunately, difficulties using the Macs at my disposal had made completing this a very difficult task. Having misplaced my USB cable, I think that I will just omit further photos and let y'all deal with giant slabs of text.

Coffee Crawl - Saturday 8th December

Introduction

This weekend was a nice opportunity to catch up with Stephen Frame. Stephen is one of a number of home coffee roasters who has been contemplating going pro for a while. It is my hope that outing him in this post will make it that much more difficult for him to resile from his plan >;) Stephen deserves particular credit for his open-mindedness, humility and dedication. He has been home roasting and making espresso at home for years, but still insists on taking the point of view that he knows very little. In fact, he is probably at the forefront of the emerging crop of domestic roasters turning to professional micro roasting. Long ago, Stephen made the commitment to buy a two group linea for home, built a sample roaster that functions like a commercial drum roaster and started ordering coffees from a variety of roasters across Australia and the world to compare with his own. Stephen has even gone out of his way to send samples of his stuff to people across Australia for comment and I count myself fortunate to have been one of the taste testers. I imagine that this is a level of thoroughness on par with even the best commercial roasters. So go pro, already!

Sass Bar, Erskineville Road

I'm a bit of a prick, sometimes. Emily Oak has been a barista comp judge and the southern hemisphere coordinator for the World Barista Championships for quite some time. She also has a roasting and consulting business called Fresh Ground. We knew that she was being charitable enough to fill in a shift at Sass Bar at the last minute, so Stephen and I swung around to judge her coffee. After much ribbing, Em delivered the goods. Sass bar's custom blend isn't something that I personally would choose, but it made for a somewhat nutty and strong latte with a distinctive savoury finish to it; I seem to remember a touch of liquorice or aniseed. Sass does a very generous all day breakfast, so I have been back a few times.

Danks Street Depot

A quick pit stop for breakfast at an iconic cafe and then onwards. In hindsight, I should have chanced the coffee, for fun if nothing else. Did you know that the Hillsong church has an ECM Veneziano with their own logo on the backlit glass plate?

Morgan's Coffee, Emu Plains

No, that's not a typo. I had some green coffee samples to drop off to Dean, so Stephen and I decided to have a bit of fun and make the trek down to Emu plains. We arrived just in time to sit back and watch whilst Dean finished cleaning up after a domestic espresso class, then serious time wasting began. Dean indulged my geeky desire to fiddle around on his Mirage Bastone. Conversation covered a few topics, from logistics of setting up a roastery, to chocolate, to blending and, before we knew it, several hours had passed. I picked up several kilos of coffee to send back to the Melbourne Mob and some hot chocolate for myself.

Coffee Crawl - Saturday 15th December

When in Rome, do as the Romans do. In Sydney, the local CS chapter go on cafe crawls, and there was a bit of a monster crawl organised for the 15th. It was an interesting mix of seasoned vets, many of whom were just in it for breakfast at Cordial, and relative newcomers, who were keen to check out as many different places as possible. Our story starts at ...

Cordial, Carillion Avenue

I have mentioned Cordial before on this blog. Cordial is a sentimental favourite for many purely because Sonny and Dave from the Golden Cobra, their roaster, are amongst the nicest guys on the planet. When Sonny heard that we were coming, not only did he forego his day off to come in and get behind the machine, but he also brought in a number of sample bags of a new blend for us to take away and try.

Whichever blend Cordial is using strikes me as a very good cafe blend. It is not hugely complex, but it is low in acidity, relatively chocolatey and it seems to be extremely forgiving. An alarmingly long double espresso a week or two ago actually tasted fine, albeit a little lower in mouthfeel than usual.

Sunshine, an hour or so of conversation, eggs benedict, chocolatey double espresso and it was on to the next stop.

Campos, Missenden Road

There was some debate as to whether or not it would be worthwhile hitting up Campos. I love the place, but not the coffee. The rest of the group fell into two camps - those in favour of skipping it and those who had never checked it out. We decided to go for the benefit of the latter group, seeing as it is only a hop, skip and a jump away from Cordial. (It strikes me that this is perhaps the first time that someone has ever described Campos' location with reference to Cordial, rather than the other way 'round.)

As usual, Campos was pumping. As usual, the staff continued to set the bar for coffee professionalism. Money changed hands and spoons, plates and dice were laid out to communicate our orders to the baristi. We melted into the crowd and stalked the benches, pouncing on any seats that happened to become vacant. Roburs whirred, dosers clacked, steam wands hissed. Drinks were delivered directly to us, despite our best efforts to confuse the staff by playing musical chairs.

Unfortunately, the coffee failed to impress. I thought that my espresso had hints of grass and iodine, thin mouthfeel, an unpleasantly high acidity level and slightly burnt crema. Any of these flaws on their own wouldn't have been a deal breaker, but the combination of the lot of them was quite disappointing. Wild speculation amalgamated from all guesses was that the coffee was a bit too fresh and brewed at a temperature slightly too high. Those who ordered milk drinks didn't seem much happier and we actually left with a few cups only half-finished.

I think that it would be extremely unfair of me to write this post without noting that this experience is certainly not characteristic of my past Campos visits. Usually, the baristi do an extremely good job of staying on the right side of the knife-edge between acceptably high acidity and sourness. On this occasion, they fell foul of their own blend. This has piqued my curiosity in trying their blends out at home.

(Update: I went to Campos on the weekend, enjoyed a very good, simple flat white, whose only fault was a slight instant coffee type flavour to the crema. I'm looking forward to trying out a bag of their "Dark City" blend, which isn't actually that dark I hope will be more to my tastes.)

Toby's Estate, City Road

Toby's is the roastery with the big mainstream reputation for quality. I seem to recall that Paul Bassett even worked there (corrections gladly accepted). Seeing as cutting down tall poppies is part of our national identity, I was concerned to give them a fair go. Only part of the reason why I wore my World Barista Championship T-Shirt was because I am a bit of a wanker. The rest was because I thought that it might be a subtle way to communicate that I have relatively high expectations. At Toby's, not only did this plan not work, but I suspect that it might even have brought down the wrath of god; such was the implausibility of what was to transpire ...

We were told that a Cuban single origin was on offer for espresso, with the fair trade organic blend. I have played around with the latest Cuban lot and never had much joy with it as an espresso, but, nonetheless, I ordered an espresso and a mince tart. Well, it was like there was a party in my mouth. And everyone was butting their cigarettes out on my tongue - something that Castro would no doubt find ironic. Even the mince tart provided no respite; it tasted like the baker made it with equal parts sultanas, fat, sugar and spite. I don't think that I was alone in my opinion. Demitasses littered the table, each one with barely a sip taken out of it.

I thought that I really ought to be fair and tentatively reached for a glass of water. Fortunately, it is pretty hard to screw that up. I went up to the counter, wanky WBC shirt on display, and asked if it would be possible to have an espresso with the fair trade organic blend, thinking that perhaps it might be a problem with the single origin. Though this was slightly better, the overwhelming flavour was as though the staff had neglected to scrub out the portafilters for quite a while.

As we got up to leave, one of the staff had the temerity to say that their espresso is pretty good, hey? Given that less than a single espresso had actually been consumed out of the half dozen espressi on the table, it struck me that the whole experience was so absurd as to come out of Lemony Snickett's A Series Of Unfortunate Events. Except that some lemon juice certainly would have improved the mince tart.

To be absolutely fair, I have to admit that both the Cuban and the fair trade organic blend had an impressively heavy mouthfeel, as though they had a whack of robusta or monsooned coffee in them. Perhaps this is partly due to the use of e61 group machines.

The last time that I was at the Woolloomooloo store, everything was several orders of magnitude better, so, again, I think that it would be unfair to write off Toby's on the basis of this experience. As at Campos, my interest in Toby's is piqued as a result of the experience.

Mecca Espresso, King Street

After Toby's, lunch at Mecca sounded like a plan. Food settles the stomach after so much coffee.
The guys at Mecca allowed us to reorganise the tables outside to suit ourselves and coffee started to flow. My first espresso had a slight bitterness in the crema, but then showed good mouthfeel and some floral ferment. My flat white, pictured above, also had a slight bitterness in the crema, but the rest of it was very good, with memorable Harrar type flavours - some sort of floral flavour. John, whose experience selling aromatherapy was starting to pay off, took a sip and commented that the flat white tasted of orange blossom, whereas the piccolo tasted of rose. The next round tasted very similar, except that the bitter crema had disappeared. We later found out that the first round was made using coffee five days older than the second. Perhaps there's something in having your coffee transported around in styrofoam organ donor boxes.

Ironically, I dropped by Mecca yesterday and they, too, have coffee to hand out to people.

Luxe, Bondi Junction

I understand that some of the people behind this place are the same people who were behind the place of the same name in the CBD a few years back (now called Elixir). This one was a bit of a head-scratcher. Much was ordered from them, but it was mainly fruit juice and cakes. There were only two coffee orders - John's latte and my espresso. The latte came out at "here's one we prepared earlier" speed and did not inspire confidence. The espresso seemed to take an eternity, but wasn't bad. Following on the theme for today, the crema was rather burnt. The espresso itself was totally single-note; I couldn't pick anything except for generic chocolatey flavours, which is not a criticism at all. The espresso also had great viscosity; really, they seemed to do a better job at what Toby's were trying to deliver. The various cakes and things were good, too.

Di Bartoli Espresso Centre

Though Di Bartoli's main business is the sale of espresso machines, they also sell roasted coffee and espresso drinks. I gather that the coffee is roasted by Hazel at Coffee Alchemy. Somewhat amusingly, they only use domestic grinders to prove the point that they're perfectly capable. Perhaps this was responsible for the interesting trick that was played on us - John and I each had an espresso made with whatever El Salvadorean bean was on offer. Both were thin in mouthfeel and somewhat sweet, but we scratched our heads and swapped espressi. One tasted distinctly like almonds; the other tasted more of hazelnuts ... and yet they were two halves of a pour from a double spout.

Epilogue

The day's ordeal was, literally, a day's ordeal. From 9am, the day was entirely taken up with drinking coffee, eating and travelling to repeat the process. At 4pm, when we finished, the coffee was definitely starting to take its toll. I felt a strange sense of satisfaction that none of the troops let loose a technicolour yawn.

The Cheese Room, Henderson Rd Alexandria

Waiting for my espresso machine to be shipped up has been made significantly easier by the Cheese Room, a cheese shop a few blocks from home that happens to have a decent espresso set-up. They are one of what seems to be an unending legion of new Campos accounts and I'll go out on a limb and say that they are delivering coffee on par with the mother ship, albeit service is much slower, seeing as they don't have a gagillion baristi, machines and grinders.

Eating Out

2007-11-27T22:48:00.000+11:00

It has been a hectic past few weeks, what with end of exams and moving up to Sydney for a few months. As a result, I have been abdicating my self-imposed coffee responsibilities - roasting and extracting. And it hasn't been all bad. I thought that my readers might be interested in a comparison between two very different, but equally great, CBD coffee places. Particularly seeing as they are in different cities and therefore not very easy to compare.

Brother Baba Budan, Melbourne

Brother Baba was just the sort of laid back place that I needed to get me through my exam period. For one reason or another, I always had things to do that left me stuck in the city for a few hours. Or maybe I inadvertently organised it that way ;P The crew at brother baba were very hospitable during this time, grinning and putting up with me taking up one of their precious few seats for an hour at a time. But, to be fair, I consumed a hell of a lot of coffee!

There are usually only two people working at BBB at a time - one barista and one person taking care of the retail coffee side. Seeing as there are always two espresso offerings, one or two clover offerings and a galaxy of different roasted coffees, BBB does a fantastic job of exposing people to the coffee equivalent of a sommelier. Laid back beats create an environment that is easy to relax in. Perhaps a little too easy - they have less than a dozen seats, so perhaps I ought to be more considerate and move on faster!

Mecca, Sydney

In many ways, Mecca and BBB are polar opposites. Whereas BBB has a million different offerings and thereby almost draws attention to the roaster, at Mecca the focus is clearly on the barista. Tony at Rio in Adelaide handles the single blend on offer. Meanwhile, in Sydney, in an area the size of a postage stamp, you have a Kees van der Westen Mistral, a two group Synesso (for when it gets busy), two Roburs and a Swift. More impressive than that, though, is the people behind the machine. The baristi have an incredible mix of experience, competition results and raw talent that has to make them one of the best teams in the world. In fact, you can bet that even the guy behind the cash register could run rings around your average barista.

With one blend and multiple espresso machines, the focus at Mecca is on getting coffee out quickly without dropping the quality. The guys do a pretty good job of it, too. Though the serving area is often overflowing with marked takeaway cup lids and saucers with cryptically arranged spoons and dice, the wait is seldom more than a few minutes.

The Machine Review - Makin Espresso's Maver Marte

2007-11-15T21:44:00.001+11:00

Introduction

It has now been over a year since I made the step up to a "prosumer" class HX machine. During this time, I have tried not to say much about it online. After all, fanboy reviews are irritating enough, let alone reviews from someone who sells a product! (Avid readers will note that for the same reason I have never posted much about the blends that we sell at Veneziano)

I have decided to write this review for two reasons; first, I have had a few people politely nudge me towards doing it and, second, there is very little written on this machine online, with the exception of Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen's rather excellent review. However, Thomas' review concerns the Maver Marte as it was before David Makin got his hands on it. So if there's to be any sort of information available to people, it looks like I'm going to have to write something.

To be clear, readers of this review should note that:

I work for a company that sells this machine and part of my job is selling it.
I was given a discount on this machine (although I could have gotten a discount on basically any machine through work).

I will endeavour to provide as much hard factual information as possible. This is relatively easy for the milk steaming section, but the section dealing with espresso will necessarily have a lot of impression to it.

Also, readers should note that this review has been written bit by bit; it's quite piecemeal and generally could use a bit of editing. In fact, I might even do that at some stage in the future. For this reason, I have gone through and summarised each section under each heading. The first three sections are really just background information, so feel free to just skip right to the section titled "Espresso."

[Edit 1: Upon posting this review, I realised that it just looked incredibly long, so my first update has been to slash the first three sections down to the summaries, which really detail all of the important information.]

The Machine's Story

EDIT: I have been asked to edit this section. Seeing as who manufactured, designed, shipped, etc. this machine has no bearing on anything that is said in this review, having this section here means much less to me than it means to the person who asked me to take it down. Part of the reason why I have been asked to take this down is, as far as I understand it, because the person who made the request felt that this review was commenting about more than the Maver. For the avoidance of doubt, I want to point out that I was at pains NOT to divulge the names of any of the other prosumer machines against which the Maver competes, specifically because the aim of writing this piece was to provide information about the Maver, not about other machines. However, I found it utterly impossible to write anything meaningful without making some reference to other machines. In addition, the veracity of what I had said in this section was questioned. Frankly, based on a fair bit of evidence, I think that what was here was true and correct. But the balance of convenience lies in favour of simply editing this section.

Anyhoo, I hope that the following edited summary is uncontroversial:

Summary: David Makin decided to import this machine after seeing it when passing through Italy on the way to competing in the 2006 World Barista Championships. David has had quite a bit of involvement in how this machine ticks.

My coffee background

Summary: I have had a number of coffee gadgets, including the popular Rancilio Silvia and Rocky combination. I have also been lucky enough to use some very nice espresso equipment at my various jobs. Throughout this review, I make passing reference to the La Marzocco FB-80 that I currently use at work.

What I was looking for

Summary: This review does not take the paradigm frame of reference of someone buying their first espresso machine. Rather, I am interested in espresso machines that mirror what I am used to at work, both in terms of cup profile and convenience. Specifically, I was after a machine that would help me to build up my palate by making it easy to extract espresso with decent clarity of flavour.

Deciding to buy the machine

Summary: Despite my initial scepticism of a machine with a 1.3L boiler, the Maver performed well when used head to head with some relatively good commercial machines (a Linea and a WEGA Polaris). So I decided to buy it.

Espresso

Summary: The machine produces espresso that is characterised by reasonable body and quite good clarity of flavour. Just as importantly, it does so quite predictably and with a minimum of fuss. The consequence is that the barista is left to focus on truly important factors, like the coffee itself and its grind size and dose. I had difficulty coming up with a reasonable way to give a qualitative impression of how it performs, but basically said that although top notch commercial equipment seems to me to deliver better shots, the Maver is surprisingly not outclassed.

Characteristics that I like in espresso

Without spending too much time on the subject, it is worth noting that there are lots of different styles of espresso. I like to think that you could almost put them on a continuum, with descriptors like full body, syrupy mouthfeel and low acid at one end and descriptors like acidic, fruity, sweet and watery at the other. In my mind, the difference is usefully summarised by examining the brewing ratio. A higher ratio of coffee to water results in shots with the first group of characteristics - I'll call them "body" - whilst a lower ratio of coffee to water results in shots with the latter group of characteristics - I'll call them "clarity." If you have an espresso machine, a useful experiment would be to extract 60mL of espresso in 30 seconds, switching cups so that you catch the first 20mL in one cup, the second 20mL in another and the third in the last cup. The first 20mL should have more body, whereas the second should have more clarity of flavour. (The final cup, to me, often ends up devoid of anything of interest and sometimes even sour.)

Generally speaking, I think that it is more difficult to extract shots with clearly defined flavours than shots with lots of body. I used to find it relatively easy to extract a gooey, chocolatey shot on my silvia, but significantly harder to extract a sweet and acidic shot. However, this wasn't the case with the Synesso or the FB80. I didn't find it much harder to extract a full-length, flavoursome espresso on those machines than it was to extract a short and potent espresso. Ristretti were usually pleasant, rich and chocolatey. In fact, they were invariably pleasant, rich and chocolatey, regardless of what coffee I was using. By contrast, a proper espresso had an interesting and elusive element to it - I found it easier to taste the differences between different blends and origins at this brewing ratio.

I don't think that an espresso or a ristretto is necessarily better; usually the choice will depend on the blend or origin being used. But I do think that it is more difficult to extract a decent espresso than it is to extract a decent ristretto. This meant that in deciding to buy the Maver I was particularly concerned to avoid the following traits:

Excessive pre-infusion: I found that a long time between flipping the switch and seeing the first drops usually seemed to result in a shot that was either burnt or high in body and low in clarity of flavour, regardless of the extraction time and volume.
Accelerating extraction rate: Some machines seemed to start off at a trickle and quickly move to a gush. This made it difficult for me to stop the extraction at the point that I wanted.
Difficult temperature management routines: It is difficult enough to find the right grind setting. If you have to worry about the machine being at wildly fluctuating temperatures, all of a sudden you are chasing two variables around when trying to dial in a new coffee.

Espresso From The Maver

I am sitting here, cappuccino in hand, and I find myself with very little to say. I think that this is because much of my concern in brewing espresso is in liberating the coffee from negative flavours imposed by an espresso machine. That is what struck me and continues to strike me about this machine.

Going back to the espresso flavour spectrum, the Maver's shots strike me as having a good balance between body and clarity of flavour. Different blends and origins taste like different blends and origins. At the same time, I have never felt that my shots have been lacking in body or mouthfeel because of the machine. However, I have had shots that have been unpleasant because I have roasted the coffee badly. On the Silvia, the difference would not have been quite as marked, simply because most of the best extractions that I got on that machine were of the type where increased body obscured the actual flavour of the coffee to some extent.

Having this machine around has certainly helped me to develop my palate quite a bit. For example, during October I can honestly say that the various beans that I used had hints of blueberry (or cantaloupe), rose and nuts.

Yes, but how good is it?

Now, I guess that I ought to try to quantify how good the espresso actually is. This is something that every review that I have read has struggled with. Part of the difficulty is the fact that most espresso machine reviews seem to either declare the machine being reviewed as the "best" or they try to use some sort of numerical rating. Whilst I appreciate those that try to use the latter method, even at the top of the specialty coffee tree, cuppers disagree about how coffee should be rated. Accordingly, I have tried to focus more on describing the espresso rather than evaluating it. Nonetheless ...

... drawing on the machines that I have used, I would have to say that I like coffee from the Maver a lot more than coffee from the Silvia, but I find the FB80 to be the best of all - to my mind the good shots have similar body and greater clarity of flavour. The Maver is a lot closer to the FB80 than it is to the Silvia. So much so that, on occasion, I have actually either been at work or visited a friend's cafe and come home to have a nicer shot. I am not sure how helpful that is to anyone, but I can't think of a better way to do it!

Ease of Use and Tricks

The internet is overflowing with articles about how machines that use heat exchangers are difficult to use; evidently the importers/manufacturers dropped the ball and did not tune the thermosyphons as their markets required. The result, for those machines, is that one needs to develop a meticulous routine of running a certain amount of water through the group head at a certain time before brewing in order to get the water to the right temperature to brew the coffee - this is commonly referred to as the "cooling flush." Since David made sure that this machine was tuned how he wanted it in the factory, the cooling flush is a simple exercise. I simply flush water through the group head for two or three seconds, then extract my espresso. Sometimes I will do my cooling flush before grinding my coffee; it doesn't seem to make too much difference. The water that comes out almost never seems to hiss and splutter. Indeed, shots brewed without a cooling flush often taste fine - although I would always flush just for cleanliness.

Temperature management deserves a brief mention. The machine has a hole for easy access to the pressurestat. This allows you to change the boiler pressure which, in turn, ought to change the brew temperature. In practice, whilst changing the boiler pressure a few tenths of a bar does seem to have an impact on flavour, the difference has never struck me as large enough to be worthwhile bothering with the pressurestat. Accordingly, after about a year of experimentation I basically leave the boiler pressure at 1.25 to 1.3 bar at the top of the cycle. Letting a lot of water run through the group head - something like 10 seconds' worth - does seem to alter the flavour slightly. Again, I don't do it much. This is odd, because I tend to muck around with brew temperature a fair bit on the FB80.

Wishful thinking?

As I said in the introduction, evaluation of espresso is necessarily quite subjective. To try and work out whether or not my impressions were fair, I grabbed half a kilo of coffee and made 12 shots in a row, including a few sink shots. The results confirmed my impressions above:

Three shots made with my normal routine were identical.
Two shots made without flushing at all tasted the same as the normal shots, but one of the two had a slight bitterness to it.
Two shots made with a ten second flush were similar to the normal shots, but slightly sourer and with a slightly more watery mouthfeel, which was offset by a vaguely more floral flavour.
One shot made with a lower dose tasted both more floral and more sour than the normal shots. I also extracted less volume and it was more watery.
Two shots were thrown away in dialling everything in and one was thrown and two shots after that were thrown away due to errors in dosing. (I'm not particularly embarrassed to say that; indeed, I think that it underscores the often overlooked importance of consistent dosing in the whole espresso process.)

That experiment isn't particularly good science - the sample size is too small to be statistically significant and I knew what variations I had made - but I find it comforting.

Photo: Not actually from this round of testing, but the mess was similar!

Important and Unimportant Considerations in Espresso Brewing

A brief digression. There are a myriad of factors that make a difference in making a decent shot. Some make a huge difference. Some make no difference. Some will make a difference only in some circumstances. There is a whole galaxy of writing out there on the internet that deals with various factors in isolation, but very little that gives a reasonable account of the relative importance of each of the factors under the barista's control, hence this short note.

Let's remember that the most important thing is the coffee. Not just the freshness, but also the roast level, roast profile and the blend used. Garbage in = garbage out on any machine. Factors that are also of great importance are consistent dosing of coffee, machine cleanliness and the volume/time of the extraction (determined by grind and dose). I think that these are the important factors for anyone to focus on. These factors are the difference between an acceptable and an unacceptable shot.

There are then a number of factors that will make a huge difference if they are way off, but only a considerably smaller difference if they are taken care of within the tolerances that you would expect of a reasonably competent barista with reasonable equipment. These include tamping, amount of coffee dosed, brew temperature, brew pressure, portafilter baskets, preinfusion and a whole plethora of other things. These are the difference between a good shot and a great shot.

Finally, there are some oddball factors that either make no difference, or very little difference, or are only of relevance to correct something else. This category covers a number of elaborate techniques that are discussed all over the place.

So the point of saying all of this is to highlight that the Maver holds up its end of providing a consistent point for the barista to work from. The machine does not take care of things like the coffee, the dose and the grind, but it means that the barista can focus on those things rather than worrying about the machine.

Milk

Summary: The current Maver steam tip seems to work best when the steam wand is aimed almost straight down and positioned half-way between the centre of the jug and the edge. The tip is suited to producing microfoam and is very easy to clean, but I have a bee in my bonnet about it; I am more comfortable with steam wands that perform best when on an angle. My nominal steaming times are 16 seconds to make a single cappuccino and 26 seconds to make two. For reference, the La Marzocco FB-80 at work takes 11 and 16 seconds, respectively, to texture the same amount of milk. Those who want to experiment can change the steaming characteristics of the machine by changing the steam tip.

I have always thought that it is much easier to get decent milk than it is to make good espresso, so I basically completely ignored milk steaming for the purposes of deciding to buy the machine. That said, the way that this machine steams milk is the aspect of this machine that I least enjoy.

Steam Tips and My Comments

When it comes to milk steaming, the $15 steam tip at the end of your many thousand dollar espresso machine is basically determinative. The first thing that I did when I got the machine was to get hold of a few different steam tips to try them out. The machine seems to have a standard 10mm thread, so there are a fair few different steam tips available. Whilst lots of different steam tips will fit, they will not all necessarily fit flush against the steam wand, which can make them difficult to clean.

The various steam tips performed as follows:

Old Maver tip (ie. now obsolete): Suited for what the "dry" cappuccini that Italians seem to like. This means that it could produce a lot of bubbly foam easily, which obviously rendered it fairly difficult to create the smooth microfoam that is popular in Australia. Very easy to clean.
Generic four-holed commercial tip (seemed to me to be the same as what Synesso use): Made great microfoam with two of the four holes plugged up when inserted into the jug at an angle, but I thought that it let the steam out quite quickly, making it relatively difficult to control what was going on. Lots of straight sides making it relatively difficult to wipe down, plus it didn't fit flush with the steam arm.
Generic two-holed domestic tip (possibly used by Isomac): Easy to get microfoam with, but exceptionally slow. Seemed to cut the steam flow to a trickle. Ridges on the tip were magnets for caked on milk, making it almost impossible to clean.

After the first batch of machines landed, David organised for the machines to be switched to this tip:

Current Maver tip: Sensibly matched to this machine and designed for microfoam, not "dry" foam. Because the tip is designed to go with the machine, it fits on to the steam wand so that it can be cleaned very easily, with a single wipe. BUT, like a few of the common steam tips on domestic machines, it seems to be designed to work when the wand is aimed straight down. I am used to steam tips that work when the wand is put in the pitcher on an angle. As a result, I have suggested to David that he should source a different tip that will allow the same technique to be used as on a La Marzocco, et. al. David likes the current steaming action and thinks that it will suit most people; ie. I'm in the minority. One oddity with this steam tip is that if you introduce too many large bubbles at the beginning, it is best to let them sit on the surface whilst you continue steaming and then to pop them by rapping the jug on the counter. With a commercial machine, it is usually best to move the wand slightly to suck them under. For some reason, I never really got good results doing that.

Despite my dislike of the current Maver tip, I'm forced to admit that it is what I am currently using. The inconvenience of sometimes forgetting what I'm doing and starting to steam with the tip on the wrong angle is outweighed by both the ease of cleaning the tip and the fact that I would have to put effort in to find some other tips to try!

A quick note; whilst it is, of course, possible to brew and steam at the same time, I tend to brew first, then steam immediately after. That way, if I want to do the shot again I do not also have to throw out a jug of steamed milk. Instead of steaming, I tend to pull out my pastry brush and clean up my bench whilst the espresso is pouring.

Milk Steaming Times

For the results below I timed how long it takes me to steam milk for a single coffee in a 350mL jug and two coffees in a 600mL jug. I didn't measure the amount of milk in each case, but I filled each jug to the same level, being the level that I usually would fill it to. The 350mL quantity is sufficient for a 210mL drink with not much milk left over or a 170mL drink with a little bit of milk left over.

Maver Marte Makin Espresso Edition:

350mL jug - 16 seconds
600mL jug - 26 seconds

La Marzocco FB-80:

350mL jug - 11 seconds
600mL jug - 16 seconds

There is one final number that I think is of use; the amount of time that it takes for boiler pressure to drop below 0.7 bar with the valve fully open. This is important to me because I find it difficult to steam milk well with less than that much pressure. On my Maver, it took about 1 minute and 25 seconds for the boiler pressure to fall from about 1.25 bar to 0.7 bar.

Results

Next up was the photo challenge. The idea was to photograph nine coffees in a row to give y'all some idea of what I typically am producing at home, including embarrassing coffees like the middle one in the top row. Note that that coffee was a result of me starting to steam with the wand on the angle that I would use at work.

Obviously I'm not a pro photographer, nor a latte art guru! The irony, of course, is that I have been pouring nicer looking latte art as a result of paying attention to my mistakes during this exercise. However, the idea was to present the reader with some photos of typical coffees, not the best ones, so there you go.

(nB: All of those cappuccini were about 170mL in volume.)

Cleaning and Maintenance

Summary: The Maver ought to be treated like any other espresso machine - keep it clean and well maintained.

Photo: Why windex is good.

This section will be brief, seeing as I can't imagine that there is any real difference between the Maver and similar machines. Skip over it if you are familiar with cleaning and maintenance of prosumer espresso machines.

Often

*Keep a cloth near your steam wand and wipe down after every use. I think that the microfibre cloths are really good for this; others like chux cloths.

*Clean water backflushing is never a bad thing. The machine came with two portafilters, so seeing as I don't have much interest in single espresso shots I keep the blind filter in the other permanently and it lives on the bench next to the machine. A clean water backflush is, thus, painless.

Weekly

*Chemical backflush. The only hint that I have here is to leave the blind filter containing dissolved detergent sitting in the group for a few minutes to really dissolve all of the crud behind the shower screen - a tip that I learnt from Andrew. It ought to go without saying that the pump should be off at this time.

*Windex. Chrome = dirt magnet. It can get irritating. While the blind is sitting in the group soaking I tend to spray and wipe the drip tray and the panel on which the group is mounted. The sides tend not to get very dirty, so it's not usually necessary to clean them weekly. Apparently microfibre cloths are also really good for polishing chrome - but for crying out loud don't use the same one that you use for the steam wand!

Occasionally

*Scale (calcium carbonate) tends to build up inside espresso machine boilers at a rate dependent on the quality of your water. Scale forms preferentially at the water level line. I gather that autofill probes function by switching the machine off when the level touches the probe, allowing for current to be transmitted through the water and the probe and switching off the pump and boiler fill solenoid. Scale happens to form on the probe and I gather that it prevents this conduction, with the result that over time the boiler fills more and more. This, in turn, means that there is less steam in the boiler. (Someone correct me if I'm wrong and I'll update the post.) Then there's the fact that excessive scale build-up can eventually clog the various bits and pieces that water is supposed to flow through. So descaling when it is necessary is pretty important for all domestic espresso machines, unless you have a pretty hefty water filtration system. Descaling involves draining the boiler of as much water as possible, filling it with a descaling solution, running the descaling solution through the group several times, then draining and flushing the descaling solution out of the boiler and heat exchanger. Typically, the difficulty is that you need to open up the machine and do some shenanigans to get the machine to over-fill. I did that when descaling, but in doing so I noticed that tilting the machine 45 degrees or so will also make it overfill slightly. I imagine that this might be sufficient and, if so, it is a neat little shortcut.

*Wearing parts. The rubber O-rings in the steam and hot water tap and the gaskets will need to be replaced every so often. The teflon gasket between the steam tip and the tip of the steam wand might also need replacing - I'm not sure. I gather that pressurestats, pumps and brain boxes all eventually need replacing on most machines, although we are probably talking very long term there. Steam valves seem to need to be rebuilt every so often as a matter of course on commercial machines, so there's another thing to watch out for.

*Water filter. I gather that these things are supposed to be replenished occasionally by soaking them in a glass of brine, then running water through them. I have been completely negligent in this regard and will try to find out what the story is there.

Random Other Stuff

Summary: I talk about various things in this section that aren't of particularly great consequence to what's in the cup.

Forgive me, but I'm going to use bullet points to get through the random stuff that doesn't affect the cup and about which I have (comparatively) little to say:

Information overload: I guess that the front of the machine might make it look unduly complicated, but everything serves a purpose. The various lights indicate the element being on, the machine being at temperature and the power being on. The power light goes out when the weight sensor beneath the water tank detects that there isn't much water in the tank. It would be nicer to have some sort of gauge that gave you a reading of how full the tank is, but so far no manufacturer of "prosumer" machines has managed to do what sunbeam et al find quite simple. I don't look at the brew and boiler pressure gauges all that much any more, but it is nice to know that everything is as it should be.
Fit and finish: I think that it looks great, but, as I said, all of these shiny chrome things are hard to keep clean. I have dismantled the machine and put it back together a few times; occasionally a lack of care when putting the central piece of metal back in place will mean that everything doesn't fit flush.
Cup warmer: The good part is that it is easy to lift on and off, thanks to the rails. The bad part is that the cups at the back, above the water reservoir, don't get as hot as those at the front. I wonder if any prosumer machine manufacturer has solved this problem.
Drip tray: The Silvia had a drip tray that held about half a litre, but that was difficult to remove without spilling stuff everywhere when full. The Maver drip tray seems to hold something like a litre or a litre and a half and slides in and out easily. The wire grid supporting the cups is best removed before pouring the contents out. It is possible to pour the contents out through the grid, but everything will need a wipe down afterwards. Thanks to both the large capacity of the drip tray and the tiny cooling flush that this machine requires, I only had to empty the drip tray once, at the very end of the marathon shot-pulling session that I conducted for this review. That's including all of the water used to give the group a chemical back-flush before beginning!
Hot water: The hot water wand on this machine is unusually long. It's really six of one and half a dozen of another as far as I'm concerned - I don't use it that much. The long wand seems to have the neat little consequence that the first little bit of hot water loses a bit of heat heating it up; if you stop after the first 30mL, you can actually put your finger in it. After the first 30mL, the water is very hot and splutters a little bit when it comes out of the aerator. I guess that this is kind of cool because it means that I don't get the water causing the crema on a long black/americano to fade away as quickly as it otherwise might. If I drank a lot of long blacks, I might consider keeping a bottle of water with a pour spout on it around - a nice trick that Corey from Epic Espresso used when he had LM Lineas. Within reason, the colder the water, the longer the crema will last. Letting the water sit in the cup for a while whilst grinding seems to work, too.
Water reservoir: It seems to be pretty standard. It is clearly intended to be removed to be filled and it is pretty easy to do so. But I'm lazy, so I just pour water into it. This would be easier to do if the reservoir had a larger opening or if I condescended to use a funnel. That said, pouring isn't exactly rocket-science!
Navigating through the machine: I am not a huge fan of the way that this machine is put together - there is a piece of metal that supports the reservoir and shields the boiler and electronics from errant water. I am told that this is a safety feature, and probably quite a sensible one. However, I like to tinker and this means that there are more bolts that I need to worry about than there would be on a commercial machine.
Part replacements: It would be remiss of me not to mention that I have replaced a heating element, a pressurestat and have tinkered with the pump mount on my machine. It would be equally remiss of me not to mention that this was all because I am an obsessive tinkerer and I am too cool to actually read the manual. So if I you learn three things from this review, let it be these: (a) follow the machine filling procedure detailed in the obligatory poorly translated manual so as not to let the element melt when not properly immersed in water, (b) if your pressurestat adjustment screw won't turn further, it is because you have reached the limit and, finally, (c) if you tinker with the pump mount for no good reason you might well have to then try to reverse your tinkering for no good reason. Anyhoo, I had fun and I learnt a fair bit about how machines work ... or don't ... in the process!
Version 2: David has talked to BFC and Maver to make a few changes for current models of his machine. The only one that is immediately apparent is that he swapped the old Maver portafilter for the same one that Peter is using on the BFC commercial machines that Veneziano imports. These portafilters have a sloped handle (like mine), a deep bowl and open double spouts. In fact, they are quite reminiscent of the La Marzocco portafilters. Inside the machine, the frame has been strengthened and the OPV has been moved to a more easily accessible location. These modifications join the other two that David made after receiving the first shipment; the hole above the pressurestat for easy access and the new steam tip. Of course, the thermosyphon and preinfusion characteristics haven't been messed with! Not to be outdone, I have a few ideas for random stuff that I might muck around with, but I won't have time to chase it up for a while.

Conclusion

It is customary to conclude a review with some sort of overall assessment. I presume that this is really for people who skip to the conclusion, rather than people who actually read the review and, so, know what the reader thinks of the machine. I guess that my one sentence evaluation would simply be that half an hour after coming home from using the FB80 at work, I make myself coffee at home. That probably doesn't sound like much, but I think that it is pretty impressive, considering that the FB80 is something like eight times the price!

In terms of my goal of improving my espresso palate, I am quite pleased with how this whole thing has worked out. I used to drink far more espresso at work than at home when I had the Silvia; at home I drank mainly milk-based drinks. Now, I drink about the same ratio of milk and black drinks at home as I would at work. And I'm a lot more confident in describing flavours in espresso.

This concludes my attempt at writing a useful review. I fear that it won't be that helpful, but you can always ask questions in the comments.

Resources

Links related to various sections of the review:

Introduction

Thomas' Maver Marte Review

The Machine's Story

BFC Srl

Maver

Makin Espresso

Veneziano Coffee

Single Boiler vs Heat Exchanger by Jim Piccinich

E61 CAD Diagrams by Lino Verna

What I was looking for

La Marzocco FB-80 (no, that's not what I was looking for, but I referred to this machine a bit throughout)

Espresso

Understanding Espresso by Chris Tacy

Brewing Ratios For Espresso Beverages by Andy Schecter

Errors in Temperature and Pressure Measurement by John Bicht

The Home Barista's Guide To Espresso by Jim Schulman

Some Aspects of Espresso Extraction by Jim Schulman

Milk

Milk Frothing Guide by Aaron De Lazzer

Caffe Latte Art in the 21st Century by David Schomer (pdf)

Cleaning and Maintenance

Cafetto

HB's How-To

The Insanely Long Water FAQ by Jim Schulman

Bad Weather, Bad Coffee and Bad Latte Art

2007-11-11T13:56:00.000+11:00

Every year summer threatens to slaughter the Melbourne coffee scene. Those 30C+ days absolutely slaughter coffee if the heat can get to them. My coffee setup is, unfortunately, somewhat exposed to the dry and hot weather outside, so I'm bracing myself for it. First Pour is open to the elements via the roller door and the sunlight belting down on the corrugated iron roof doesn't exactly make things easy on the barista. Over a four hour shift, I have had to make many, many changes to both grind and brew temperature to keep everything tasting right. Meanwhile, Andrew is experimenting with storing his coffee in a wine fridge at Maling Room. I will probably experiment with some styrofoam esky storage at home.

Yes, it's red alert time and everyone is battening down the hatches, bracing for impact and sipping from porcelain demitasses with raised pinky fingers. So far, it seems like everyone is staying on top of things and, indeed, over the last month I have been drinking exceptionally sweet espresso on a more regular basis than ever before. Wierd.

In honour of the dawning of the "everything goes to $#!t" season, I have decided to start fooling around with double rosettas at home. I have always thought that these things look particularly ugly, and learning to pour them results in ugly pours even by regular double rosetta standards. I seem to be able to get the second one to come out looking OK, but blobby. But, in doing so, the first one gets mangled. Observe:

That's about the best that I have been able to do. The left one was poured first. I would welcome any tips from the seasoned vets out there. What works for you? Do you like to let the milk sit, or do you pour straight away? Do you lift up the spout after the first, or just move it over? Do you like the milk thinner like you would stretch it to create large, delicate leaves on a single rosetta, or do you like it thicker to make it easier to get shorter leaves on your second rosetta? I'm interested in all opinions that do not involve going over a 170mL/5oz cup.

Hopefully at least if and when bad coffee sets in I will be able to enjoy good latte art.

Eureka! Australian Coffee

2007-10-26T20:46:00.000+10:00

Introduction

It's kind of funny. I gather that many of the Australian farms are starting to harvest now, or will be starting in a few weeks ... yet now seems to be the time that Australian coffee is cropping up everywhere. If this means that it's taking us the best part of a year to get coffee harvested and processed in our own country, I have to say that that's kind of pathetic. But you can't argue with the results. Read on!

Archimedes Was A Coffee Drinker. Apparently.

There's a little espresso bar and roastery on St George's Road called "Grower's Espresso." Unfortunately, I'm seldom, if ever in that neck of the woods, so it has been a while since I last tasted any of Mark and Sam's Eureka Coffee. Lucky for me that, like all serious coffee dudes, Mark likes to keep track of coffee happenings all around Melbourne, so a few weeks ago he stopped by my work on a coffee crawl and dropped some of his stuff off for me.

Eureka take the whole bean-to-cup thing literally; they roast a single origin grown on their family farm in Byron Bay. I don't know much more about it than that, but if you're interested you should check out their webpage as linked above.

The coffee itself seemed to have a split personality. It was not difficult to pour and always presented a relatively balanced shot. Whenever I ground the coffee, my grinder was filled with a rather special rose blossom type scent. Enter Jekyll and Hyde: half of the shots were balanced and eminently drinkable, but not especially memorable. Remarkably, the rose blossom scent translated directly into the cup in the other half of the shots. In fact, the whole experience had me perplexed enough that to make sure that I wasn't just spitting out exceptionally wanky tasting notes I actually dug down into the pantry and pulled out a bottle of rosewater to make sure it was actually the same scent. Perhaps this is a coffee that warrants some serious experimentation in terms of dose and temperature. One final note; I found that this coffee benefited greatly from being allowed to sit in a sealed bag for a week after roasting - at two or three days after roasting it displayed the classic symptoms of excessive acidity and ephemeral crema.

On your Marks ...

From Australian coffee from one Mark to Australian coffee from another Mark. Bin 549 is kicking butt and taking names on the Clover at BBB. Various people, including St Ali's Mark, have described it as having a "coffee cherry" flavour. Not having eaten a coffee cherry, I wouldn't know - I'll have to check out the Nez du Cafe kit again. I thought that it started off tasting of liquorice, then some sort of interesting flavour that I'm content to describe as "coffee cherry" emerged. Top stuff. I haven't tried it as espresso yet, but several people have recommended it.

I'll be keeping an eye on the new harvest Australian coffees to come ...

Give The People What They Want: October Espresso Gear

2007-10-21T16:37:00.001+10:00

OK, so I admit to being a tragic gear-head. That means that I always prick up my ears in October, what with many manufacturers debuting new stuff at the HOST convention in Milan. I'm sure that we'll get a deluge of reports, but I thought that I might get everyone in the mood with a quick overview of some relatively new stuff ...

Machines

Forget BHP shares, I wish that I had bought shares in words like "brew temperature" and "thermostability" - every man and his dog "knows" that you can only get a great espresso on a machine that can give you a rock-solid straight-line temperature profile that can be adjusted to 0.1 of a degree F. If you look around any manufacturer's or vendor's webpage you'll see that they all seem to be jumping on the bandwagon. Don't get me wrong; I change the temperature all the time on the FB80, but it does seem to me that people often lose sight of the basic goal - to get a coffee that tastes great. (Of course, if you put that claim to anyone the response is that it tastes the "best," the uninformed consumer gets a cup of whatever trade-show swill is on offer and the world keeps spinning ...)

From my perspective, the interesting thing is that the HX manufacturers seem to be pushing it a bit. After all, let's not forget that the original Faema E61 enabled people to run different and relatively consistent temperatures on different groups loooooong before Synesso did. The Brasilia Excelsior seems to be the machine that the Rossi group are pushing at the moment. It has an adjustable thermosyphon on each head. Last year there was a Brasilia machine with brew temp individually adjustable on each group head through a digital control panel floating around the roastery. I couldn't find it on the Brasilia webpage. The Elektra Kappa offers both adjustable brew temperature and, apparently, adjustable brew pressure through its front panel. Call me crazy, though, but I kind of don't see the point of having both steam wands on one side of the machine ;P Very interesting developments - but will the cool kids pay attention?

Well, if there's one thing that I love it's actually trying out new equipment. On Monday, Syd was kind enough to take some photos for us at Veneziano, after which we grabbed a bag of the same coffee that we had been drinking on the FB80, pulled by David Seng, and swung around to EES to run it through the GS3. Ben had only recently received the machine and was very accommodating, allowing us to basically pull shots on it for an hour to work out how it ticks. In a nutshell, we got the machine pulling some great shots. The ones that we finished up with had a bit less body than the FB80 shots, but had more complex flavours. Surprisingly, the GS3 seemed to produce more crema than the FB80. Fooling around with the various settings did produce notable changes ... exactly what you'd hope for.

So what's the dirt on the GS3? Chris Tacy famously put it that the GS3 takes the machine out of the equation, making it the barista's fault if anything went wrong. We found that to be true, except for two narrow circumstances that happened to represent the first part of our use. First, the machine seems not to like having the steam boiler temperature (and therefore the steam pressure) adjusted. The first thing that we did was to drop the steam pressure from 1.9 bar to 1.1 bar, which resulted in the subsequent shots tasting sour and the brew PID going out of whack. Presumably this had something to do with the fact that the brew water is preheated by the HX in the steam boiler. Setting the steam boiler back to 1.9 bar fixed the problem. Surprisingly, at that steam pressure steaming was still slow and restrained relative to the FB80. The second scenario in which we had to take the machine's needs into account was after refilling the reservoir, which also caused a temperature drop. After a few minutes, everything was back to normal. I didn't look at the PID, but perhaps the problem was that the elements switch off whilst re-filling. Other than that, there were a few niggling issues. This machine had the old water reservoir and guide holes for the drip tray that LM is replacing. Even after having worked on a Synesso I still find that style of steam wand a bit awkward, although the results were good. Besides, you buy an espresso machine to make espresso - most of them will steam acceptably.

Anyhoo, all up, I liked it a lot.

Photo courtesy of Syd:

Grinders

Proponents of grinder manufacturer Compak often say that their virtue is that they listen, whereas current king Mazzer sits aloof in its castle. As far as I can tell, Compak's big act of "listening" to pro baristi has been making a K10 without an auto-fill function and without the stupid tamper moulded on to the front. In other words, they made their star grinder more like the existing Mazzer Robur. (Not to knock Compak's product generally - the K10 is cheaper than the Robur and has been getting rave reviews.)

I guess that you do have to give something to the critics, though. If Mazzer really were a company that listened to its customers, surely we would have some sort of doserless Robur with a very accurate grind timer and built-in cooling fans.

... it just remains to be seen how it will perform. That said, I'd love one for home - it would be a great match for a GS/3.

Of course, I'm sure that Compak will also be showing off some new products at HOST. They seem to have dropped the A6 from their range and replaced it with the beefier A8. I suspect that they decided that the A6, being the same thing with 64mm flat burrs, was just too small and slow. Presumably we'll see an A10 version of the conical at some stage. The ability to select from grind on demand or grind one dose ahead seems pretty innovative. That said, they will have to do a better job of it than the single dose grind ahead grinder that I have used.

Tampers

I'll never forget Andrew pulling beautiful shots just by tamping with the palm of his hand. Coming from that perspective, it's sometimes difficult to take the hard work that tamper manufacturers put in seriously. Perhaps it's the backyard inventor nature of most tamper manufacturers that makes them prone to endlessly tweak their gear. I, for one, am very grateful that they all seem to seek feedback and, better still, act on it.

At the moment, I'm viewing new tampers as a race between the british dominions, with Mark Prince from Canada and Australian Greg Pullman both working on new designs. Greg's tamper is an attempt to make an ergonomic and durable design for commercial use. The prototypes that I have seen so far have definitely been a step in the right direction. Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, coffeegeek Mark Prince has been working on his "precision" tamper, to be made by Reg Barber, for quite some time. Both Mark and Greg are keeping their products very hush-hush, but emails with both of them confirm that rumours of their demise have been greatly exaggerated ;P

Meanwhile, relative Australian unknown Steve Bailey has pipped them both to the post by very slightly tweaking his already very good tampers. Months ago, Steve whipped up a tamper for me with a third spacer ring for additional height. He of the large hands - Simon James - liked it so much that my tamper took several months break from my hot little hands to accompany him on the barista comp trail. Drop the laser-etched bottom, add a spacer ring, drop the price slightly and you have the new coffeelab tamper, photo courtesy of Syd:

... well, all up I'd probably suffer a robur electronic, a gs3 and a coffeelab on my bench, but I'm still very interested to find out if there's anything of note at HOST ...

El Salvador San Emilio and A Tale Of Two Doses

2007-10-17T14:07:00.000+10:00

Two posts in two days? No, it's not so much because Mark wants it as much as that I'm in the mood to write. I have just had an exceptionally draining exam for an exceptionally uninspiring subject and, in contrast, have some rather interesting sample roasts at my disposal ...

Background

I have a bit of an interest in pulp natural coffees as a base for espresso blends. Last year's foray into the Costa Rican Santa Elena started badly, but once I got the roast under control it provided a reliably consistent high-body component that transformed a cappuccino into chocolate in a cup. In fact, I actually appreciated the very single-note syrupy body more than something like a Kuda Mas Mandheling.

Tasting Notes

This coffee appeared to be roasted to around second crack or just before - I don't know, I didn't roast it! These notes refer to four to six days after roasting.

Cupping: A balanced, unobjectionable, classic cup. Rather low in acidity. Good body and perhaps hints of nut, but nothing that would leap out at you. The sort of thing that I imagine would be a bit of a hit in a 1950's American diner as their breakfast drip coffee, with customers going for a second cup as they read their newspaper and relate the salient events to their illiterate, non-voting, foot-bound wives.

Espresso:

(a) Regular dose - overfill, rap three times on the portafilter fork, strike off level and tamp.

Again, a balanced and unremarkable shot. A bit of nuttiness, a bit of caramel and a bit of acidity. Vague hints of some sort of fruitiness matching the acidity - raspberry, wine, balsamic; something of that sort. A great base for an espresso blend (I mixed it with some Blue Horse earlier on) and quite enjoyable by itself.

(b) Low dose - overfill, strike off level, tamp.

I enjoyed this espresso more than the regular dose. I refuse to make a blanket commitment to one sort of dose or the other; over the past few months I have probably stuck with my regular dose 70% of the time and the low dose 30% of the time. I am yet to come up with any sort of guide as to when each sort of dose is appropriate.

This espresso had more pronounced fruitiness, but, somewhat perplexingly, I didn't feel that there was really any tradeoff. Neither did the body seem lower, nor was the acidity unpleasantly increased.

Cappuccino:

(a) Regular dose

I thought that the regular dose performed better in milk. In fact, like the other pulped naturals that I have tried, the strong point of the San Emilio seemed to be milk. It asserted itself well as a complete, balanced cup, tasting slightly of nuts. In fact, it was oddly reminiscent of the cupping experience. The surprise was the aftertaste, which was clean and long-lasting.

(b) Lower dose

Although the flavour was broadly similar to the regular dose, the aftertaste was completely different - fleeting and unremarkable, bordering on bitter.

The Wrap-up

So far, this has not proven to be the chocolate-bomb that the Santa Elena was last year. But it's early days yet. I'm sure that experimenting with the roast profile will deliver another milk bomb. Once the sample roaster is back online!

Harrar Blue Horse and Neighsaying

2007-10-16T15:25:00.000+10:00

The background ...

George Howell, one of the fathers of specialty coffee in America, has an interesting philosophy. For those of you who don't want to read the linked write-up by perennial Pour Quality reference favourite Jim Schulman, in a nutshell George's philosophy is that coffee ought to be a clean cup that reflects the terroir of the region in which it is grown, rather than the processing method. This means that George is definitely not a fan of dry processed coffee, as Jim explains:

"I've been advocating the dry processed Yrgacheffes (sic) in my reviews; and although I'll never know a fraction as much about coffee as George does, he invited me to set me straight. Yrgacheffe has always been wet processed for export, and to George, this excursion into dry is just another garden path that will ruin farmers. He never even orders dry process coffee from areas where it is traditional, since he thinks this tradition needs to be scrapped. According to him, producing truly high grade dry processed coffee is a losing gamble for farmers. Virtually all dry processed lots are spoiled when runaway fermentation occurs in beans whose skins crack; and if one sorted these out, the labor would be higher, and the yields lower, than with wet processing."

I simply don't have enough experience to make a blanket statement either way, but I do wonder if the difference between the two points of view reflects the different ways in which Jim and George consume coffee. In a nutshell, Jim seems to be more of an espresso guy, whereas if you take a look at the coffee offerings from Terroir, you will see that George's focus is more on brewed coffee. (By which I mean methods other than espresso.)

The coffee ...

This particular lot of Harrar is from the prolific "MAO" exporter, but is a special preparation. From what I can gather, this preparation usually goes to Japanese buyers and has not made it to Australia before. I presume that this is still a dry process lot, but you would be hard pressed to tell that it wasn't wet processed by looking at it - the screen size appears to be quite even and there isn't much chaff on it.

My particular interest in this coffee relates to my previous experience with Harrar, which has always been an exercise in frustration. Incredible cups were peppered with cups that just tasted tainted by excessive ferment to me. Over the past few years I have even had instances where I have thrown out a whole bag. In other words, I have been able to appreciate George Howell's take on dry processed coffees. As I have mentioned before, this frustration was compounded by the fact that descriptions of Harrar almost invariably seem to use the word "blueberry." Whilst I have certainly tasted blueberry on occasion, I can't help but feel that this particular descriptor is used where it really doesn't apply. All of this led to the question - 'what do you do if you want to get an awesome cup of Harrar?'

I have now had Blue Horse on three or so occasions, from different roasters, roasted to different levels and extracted on different machines. I am yet to have a cup that tastes ruined by excessive ferment flavours, which is great news. The cups do have that classic Harrar profile; last week I threw an espresso roast into a (sighted) cupping and although the roast level was not calculated to maximise the aromatics in brewed coffee, it was unmistakeable. As for the flavour itself, I'm happy to concede that you could say blueberry, although personally I like to think of it as "purple." Maybe even cantaloupe.

Two random points to ponder ...

(a) Is "blue" coffee producer parlance for "clean"? Blue Batak is reputed to be a cleaner Mandheling and "Brazil Blue Washed" keeps on cropping up ...

(b) So if Blue Horse is consistent ... and regular Harrar is not ... is it possible that they're throwing the crap from the Blue Horse lots into the regular Harrar lots? This highlights a classic coffee farmer's dilemma and draws attention to something that coffee buyers ought to consider.

# Update #

(a) OK, after sitting down with some blueberry yoghurt, dried wild blueberries and espresso I concede that this thing does indeed taste of blueberry.

(b) A quick excerpt from Tom's entry on Harrar Lot Number 14659 at Sweet Maria's:

"I honestly thought we would stock no Harar this year. It's not a rare coffee, there are tons of lots available from the usual coffee brokers. But the samples have been dismal for the new '07 crop; musty, dirty, moldy, fungusy, or just plain flat. ... I was surprised to cup a small lot of Harar at random and find it was not only free from those defective "dirt and rot" flavors, but was a really nice cup."

Espresso Wow

2007-10-08T12:48:00.000+10:00

Background

In the comments to my last post, I bemoaned the fact that I haven't written up coffee reviews recently. My grinder at home usually features a mix of coffee from work, coffee that I have roasted for myself at work and then coffee from a few of the roasters around Melbourne that I like. I have avoided reviewing coffee from work on my blog - you can find out about that on the Veneziano Coffee webpage. Recently, the sample roaster at work has been down, after five years of faithful service, so I haven't had much of a chance to roast stuff for myself. So you'll have to forgive me for dredging up memories of a coffee that I had several weeks ago for today's instalment.

Introduction

Espresso Wow is Andy Freeman's first foray into blending for CoffeeSnobs Brown, which itself is his first attempt at commercial roasting. However, both of these ventures draw upon considerable experience of home roasting. Andy's description of the coffee is as follows:

"This blend has been years in the making, 1000’s of roasts and samples and this is easily the best all round espresso blend for my taste.

Great as a double espresso with a creamy viscous body, a complete palate that oozes flavour throughout your mouth and an aftertaste that lingers nicely for a good length of time. This flavour profile works just as well in milk based drinks and the strong crema should make a great canvas for latte art."

Unfortunately Andy's roastery was broken into recently. Nonetheless, he managed to roast some of this up and bring it along to the green bean pickup a few weeks ago.

The Cup

As a result of the break-in, Andy and I were actually unsure how old the blend was. Pours at work as soon as we ripped open the bag were relatively bubbly, but, surprisingly, the resultant espresso had quite a heavy mouthfeel and was low in acidity. The flavour was rich and chocolatey, with a rather large salvo of aromatics. I can't remember them exactly, but I think that I said canteloupe (Andy raised his eyebrows) and blueberry (yes, I concede blueberry ;P).

Straight out of the bag, the blend wasn't as impressive in milk, but there was a dramatic improvement after it sat in my hopper at home for a day or two. I left the bag open and noticed a bit of a decline after a week or so. So if you are planning to have Espresso Wow sit around for any length of time, I would recommend splitting it into a few lots and putting them in airtight containers.

I used my standard dose for this, which is to say that I ground more than I needed, rapped three times to settle and struck off. I didn't try my down-dosing technique and would be very interested to see what sort of results that might produce.

Impressions

The thing that I like about this blend is that it is very Andy. There are a number of trends taking place in coffee blends in general. First up, I think that we can thank the various Cup of Excellence programs and Klaus' WBC blend for setting in motion a trend to have espresso that is light in body, sweet, acidic and aromatic. This runs counter to the trend that I had noticed in Australia of heavier bodied blends that are low in acidity, often pulled quite short to accentuate this even further. Next, I get the impression that many commercial roasters are going lighter in a bid to preserve aroma and increase shelf life. One theory that I have heard (from Mr Schulman, I think) is that roasting lighter starts you off with more aromatics, so you end up with more after you let the coffee sit around to age.

As I said, Andy's blend is the opposite of these trends. By going for heavier body and lower acidity, there is no need for you to wait for a lighter roast to age for a longer period of time to develop these qualities. I suspect that this means that Andy relies on freshness to get that fistful of aromatics into the cup.

Conclusion

Andy's espresso strikes me as a very good expression of his particular style, which makes it well and truly worthwhile trying out. It is a particularly good blend for home roasters to try out because it seems to perform very well after a short resting period, which I imagine would be quite useful. Personally, I like this style of espresso, but I basically appreciate any style of espresso that is done well.

The Search For A Decent Teapot

2007-10-01T11:58:00.001+10:00

Sometimes you have to laugh.

The tea industry has long been beating the coffee industry on the packaging front. Whilst we're all sitting back complaining about baggy coffee and marvelling at the foil packaging now being used for some Daterra and Mountain Top coffees, tea drinkers are sitting back and laughing - they abandoned jute sacks years ago.

But when it comes to brewing methods, coffee has it all over tea. To make a decent cup of coffee, you have to grind the coffee minutes before using it and come up with some way to efficiently separate the ground coffee from the brewed coffee when all is said and done. Whilst this is always a somewhat messy affair, the number of elegant solutions to the problem is simply mind-boggling. If you discount the mess caused by grinding, you can clean up after espresso, aeropress and drip in a matter of seconds.

Tea drinkers have definitely had it too easy. Whilst I appreciate that there is certainly a whole layer of art and science to brewing tea that will mirror anything that we'll find in espresso, the fact remains that you can steep tea quite effectively in a jar and strain it with a small sieve. I know because I have been doing it that way for years. Why? Because although it's a stupid way of doing it, it beats the hell out of the crappy teapots that have gone through my household. Let's examine the reasons why:

I don't want to brew a litre of tea. Is it just me, or does every teapot seem to need you to brew enough tea for two or three people. Where's the teapot for the thirsty bachelor?
I do want my tea to steep. What's the deal with these mesh filters that barely reach down into the teapot? I would have thought that it was perfectly bloody obvious that the tea needs to actually be able to be submerged in the water.
I want to control how long the tea steeps for, and I want an easy clean up. This one goes out to the teapots that I have used that don't have any sort of filter. If these abominations must force you to brew enough tea to be illegal under the current water restrictions, at least they could do it so that you can drink the whole pot without the leaves steeping for too long. And life is definitely too short to be spent scraping tea leaves out of some crappily designed teapot. (Although admittedly life is long enough to vent one's anger about said cleaning process online ;P)
I want the tea to end up in my cup. Seriously. This one just isn't difficult. Even a $0.005 cardboard milk container has a useable spout on it. Whilst designing a decent spout is a pretty trivial exercise, two rather elegant solutions spring to mind. First, check out the elegant Eva Solo pour system. Second, those silver spouts on some wine decanters are used specifically because they cut through the steam of liquid to stop drops. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. I can go across the street and buy a $5 plastic measuring jug that won't drip. There's simply no excuse.
I want to avoid battle-scars on my table. Hasn't anyone thought of putting rubber feet on a teapot? Or a dual-walled bottom? OK, so having a light coloured wooden table wasn't ever going to be a clever idea. In my defence, it was bequeathed to me - I didn't choose it. But am I really going to have to look around for a saucer or a place mat every time I brew tea? Call me lazy, but for $0.02, teapot manufacturers could fix the problem.
I want to be able to see the colour of the liquor. This point isn't terrifically important, but I would prefer a teapot to be white on the inside, or transparent, so that I could actually judge the strength of the resultant brew.
I would like the tea to maintain some heat. What genius came up with the idea of an aluminium teapot?

Presumably all tea pot manufacturers are not as clueless as those that have made the various teapots that I have used. So give me a clue, faithful blog readers! Where do I get a decent teapot from in Melbourne? (BBB seems to have some that are pretty good; I might ask them.) Do I have to design one myself? If so, here's the L-spec teapot:

400mL (enough for a large cup or a little bit more)
Non-drip spout
Large mesh filter that nearly touches the bottom of the pot
Space for storing said filter after removal
Dual-walled (both for insulation and so that you can plop it right on the table)
Dishwasher safe
Transparent or white on the inside

That's it. It's just not that hard.

(Oh, and for any moronic manufacturer that would like to rip off those specifications, please don't let your stupidity make you omit obvious things. I'd like the teapot to have a handle!)

Important Questions

2007-09-23T14:14:00.000+10:00

People have become more and more interested in coffee over the past five or so years, so much so that we are seeing heaps of small specialty coffee businesses open; both roasteries and cafes. That's great. But it does open up a few questions. None of these are new, but they are of such crucial importance that they deserve not to be swept under the rug ...

Question 1: What do people actually want in a coffee?

OK, so there are a number of different types of coffee consumers out there and they will want different things, hence most pro roasters offering different blends. For example:

(a) The office worker: who wants something that's going to cut through the milk-based takeaway drink that he/she is taking back to his/her desk

(b) The masochist: who believes that coffee should be bitter as hell

(c) The foodie: who wants different, constantly changing taste experiences

(d) The outsider (for lack of a better name): who hasn't been raised with espresso and wants something a bit lighter and more acidic

(e) The poser: who wants something with an impressive name and/or pedigree

(f) The beatnik: who wants something with fair trade and organic certification

So what's the distribution amongst these areas? How much does it vary according to location? How much market research are people in coffee businesses doing? Are they targeting the right segments? How severe can the impact of selecting the wrong blend or brand be on a new business?

Question 2: How much of it is marketing? How important is flavour?

Pretty self-explanatory. Say I were to open a store that looks good on paper; multiple boiler machine, big conical grinders, clover, large coffee offering, knowledgeable staff, etc. How important would it be to actually have good coffee? Is it worth doubling your expenditure to get a tiny increase in flavour? How easy would it be to talk up something like a generic "Brazil Santos" as a premium single origin offering, or a crappy espresso machine as a god-shot box?

Example 1; over the past few years, there has been an explosion in the number of La Marzoccos and Synessos in cafes in Melbourne. I wonder how much of an asset to their business those machines are for cafes - and, yes, there are a few - that own these machines but don't actually put out very nice coffee. Conversely, would cafes that do a great job with HX machines - and, yes, there are a few - experience a boost in business if they stuck same machine inside the shell of a LM or a Synesso?

Example 2; in testing the idea that "fresh is best" by blind-tasting some imported and some local coffee, Instaurator and I had broadly similar picks, which did not have all of the "fresh" coffee ranked above all of the imports. We tasted both terrible locally roasted coffee and terrible imports.

Question 3: How will the trends change over time?

So I think that it's fair to say that fresh coffee, however you define it, is starting to gain more market share over stale coffee, however you want to define that. I personally predict and hope that that trend continues. But what direction will our relatively young fresh coffee businesses expand in? Will more poeple want a generic chocolatey blend in future, or will they want fleeting floral flavours? Will the guys who put in the hard yards to deliver quality end up with more custom than those who focus on marketing? Will there be more or fewer home roasters in future?

Naturally I have my own points of view about all of these questions, but I don't want that to obscure the importance of the questions themselves. Anyone who buys, sells or drinks coffee makes up a tiny part of a broad marketplace. It's all very well to take your own point of view and be happy with what you are doing or drinking, but it would be the height of ignorance and arrogance to presume that this applies to the whole world.

Ignoring the whole market obscures a whole bunch of very interesting questions an possibilities. For example, in looking at the specialty coffee end, Jim Schulman has come up with two fascinating and insightful, if unpopular observations/questions:

(a) The "big boys," who buy coffee that would be completely undrinkable if put through a specialty coffee roaster's drum, have invested a considerable amount of time, money and research into making a silk purse from a sow's ear.

(b) What would happen if we applied those techniques to specialty coffee?

Hacienda La Esmeralda Especial

2007-09-11T23:37:00.000+10:00

About the coffee:

I probably don't need to write too much about this one. If you have been living under a rock, or if you just happen to be one of the few people who doesn't follow the coffee auctions, you might not know that this is currently the world's most expensive coffee. Previously, that dubious honour went to kopi luwak. (I'll spare you the jokes - google it if it's news to you.)

Esmeralda has an impressive back story; in a nutshell, the gesha varietal that makes up the Esmeralda Especial lot seems to have basically gone extinct except for a few random rediscoveries in Panama. It just so happens that this particular farm's gesha offering has won something like four Best of Panama auctions and every single other cupping competition it has been entered in. In terms of scores, the consensus seems to be that it's a 92 at a minimum, with some tasters going as high as 97!

So how much of it is hype? How much of it is mystique? How much of it is actually in the cup? Recently, a very generous person coming to Melbourne from the US of A offered to drug mule some coffee over for me. So naturally I asked for some Esmeralda. (Before you ask, no, this was not the auction lot stuff - it was the pre-auction stuff that sold for exorbitant but comparatively sane prices.) As fate would have it, the coffee arrived right in time for the first of this year's Melbourne Barista Jams, which I was running. (Perhaps I will blog quickly about that in the future; for now, you can take a look at my crappy photos and Syd's rather better photos.)

Strange shaped beans. Reminds me of a Harrar Longberry.

Tasting Notes:

Syphon/Vac Pot: Dominant and unnatural mandarin. This is a definite shock to the system. In Peter's words, "coffee shouldn't taste like that." Dry finish. Hints of Earl Grey tea (is this what they call "bergamot"?) in the first few days after popping open the bag, but these subsided. I didn't get the cornucopia of subtle aromatics that many others have waxed lyrical about, but I put it down to being ten days after roasting and having travelled half-way around the world. Most of the US coffee that I have tried just gives up the will to live on the plane trip, so the phenomenal coffee that we were producing really is a testament to either, or perhaps both, the inherent quality of the bean or Miguel's roasting and packaging.

French Press: Mandarin. Dry finish from the syphon wasn't really there. Creamy finish (I usually associate "creamy" with "vanilla," so I hasten to add that there was no vanilla flavour.)

Espresso: Yes, I couldn't resist the temptation to pull two shots with some of the remaining coffee. No, none of them were perfectly dialled in. The better pair had a fair whack of orange, but a slight astringency that I tend to associate with coffee being roasted a bit too light for espresso. This coffee has gained notoriety against a backdrop of Americans who drink drip, so it is unsurprising that it was more suited to preparations other than espresso. Indeed, a lot of the commentators online say so quite explicitly.

The Wrap Up:

A sensational coffee for anything except for espresso. Espresso is unique and interesting, but I didn't feel that it showcased the coffee as well as the brewed methods. Perhaps it would make a good foil to a rich, heavy style of espresso as a small component in a blend.

More Information:

Many of these people have tasted the coffee under fairer conditions ... ie. without it having travelled half way around the world. It is interesting to read their taste descriptors.

Hacienda La Esmeralda - the farm's webpage; quite a bit of info on gesha

Stoneworks - final auction results

CoffeeCuppers.com - tasting notes for green Esmeralda roasted by Jim and Bob

Coffee Review - Kenneth Davids tastes Esmeralda from multiple sources

Sweet Maria's - tasting notes from Tom

Paradise Roasters - where my lot came from

Digression 1: Syphon coffee - dryness + bitterness

The dryness of the syphon coffee warrants more investigation. To my mind, there were three possible causes:

(1) a taint inherent in the coffee;

(2) contamination from past brews in the hario cloth filter;

(3) the sunbeam grinder that I bought for non-espresso use not cutting the mustard.

Number 1 was eliminated with the french press preparation. However, I used the ditting at work to grind the coffee, so numbers 2 and 3 are still on the cards. I am now storing my cloth filter in a solution containing cafetto and doing a cleaning brew with just water before brewing, following some tips from Toshi. We'll see how things turn out.

Digression 2: Back to Basics

Well, it has been a while since I started this blog and I can't say that I have been prolific in generating a set of tasting notes for me (and others, I guess) to refer to. I will endeavour to correct this in future. This might entail me just putting up some basic posts; just the notes, with a minimum of chat and without photos.

Request: Nuova Point Cups

2007-09-05T14:32:00.000+10:00

Well, the Nuova Point cap cups proved to be a smash hit when I first bought them a few years ago. Today, they continue to be a smash. Literally! I'm down to one. I'd love to pick up a few more if anyone is buying a half dozen and doesn't want all of it. They're cheap as chips - only $30 for half a dozen, so if no-one is interested I might just buy some myself and be done with it.

A Feelgood Story ...

2007-08-16T19:31:00.000+10:00

Armed with a new charger for my camera, I wanted to post a quick reflection on three events that happened this week.

1. Biscuits?!

One of my regular customers brought in a bunch of biscuits for me, made using some coffee that I had roasted for her the week before. Note the exquisite work with the piping nozzle. (The textbook is pretty good, too.)

2. Catastrophe!

For some reason, I came home to find puddles of water all over my espresso bench, including all around my tampers. This stuff sometimes happens in a shared household. It only took a minute to clean up, but I realised that the handle of this tamper had rotted so that it no longer gripped the threads of the bolt.

Whilst I don't use this tamper any more, it still has a lot of sentimental value. I bought it from Greg years ago when I bought my first espresso machine and grinder combo. Back then, the tampers came with a really long handle, the idea being that you could grab it in your fist. The base was also just a well machined circle of stainless steel. The tamper traveled back and forth between Greg and I as various modifications were made. The first was cutting down the original Jarrah handle. In hindsight, we probably went too short. It didn't take too long until I met up with Greg in Adelaide and he showed me a zany new type of handle - I had to buy it and switched over to it straight away. I can't remember exactly what happened with the base, but at some stage I ended up with a version with the lines that I wished for in my review and the partly chamfered base that Greg Kaan suggested. Of course, along the way it has also been my pleasure to test out various tampers and designs that I'm bound to stay silent about.

Watching Greg's tamper and his business evolve has been a lot of fun. The tamper will continue to occupy a special place in my collection.

3. Syphon

In the photo; Syphon brought back from Japan for me by Pete, cup brought back from Sri Lanka by Nim and copious amounts of advice from the Barismoids.

I have met a lot of very nice people in coffee and I shall miss them very much when (if?) I leave it.

Sydney - Aroma Festival, Cafes and a Melbournite's POV (part 2)

2007-08-13T22:06:00.000+10:00

My last post on Sydney promised a second part. Now that I sit down to type it up, I'm surprised by how little I have to say ... I'll also warn everyone that this is probably just going to be a rather uninteresting list of things that happened, more just so that I don't forget it than anything else. I also only recently recovered the charger for my camera, so no photos. All of this means that I'm not even going to pretend that this entry will be up to my usual lofty standards. So bail out, while you still can!

Faithful readers will recall that I was recently up in Sydney for the Aroma coffee festival. The idea was to relax, kick back and enjoy the latte art competition, so I turned up on the day with the three lovely people who had graciously lent me their couch over the weekend. The weather outside was unappealing, as were all of the stands, so we made our way to the latte art comp and I scabbed a few coffees for us from Corinne, the first ever Australian barista champ. The comp itself was surprisingly packed and I was distracted by a multitude of lovely people from around Australia, who I caught up with in five minute snippets. My friends and I stayed to watch Reuben from Mecca compete; his stuff looked great, but not brilliant, and I later found out that he lost to Tristan from Dalla Corte.

After leaving the barista comp a few minutes through, it was time to wander around without responsibilities and enjoy myself. We detoured over to the ECA stand and scabbed another round of coffees from Chris, then my friends bounced off to their meeting, leaving me to wander over to the Di Bartoli stand and check things out. It was great to finally meet Renzo in person and pleasantly surprising to see Aaron confidently demonstrating the Rancilio machine packages to everyone. I had sold Aaron my Silvia/Rocky package second-hand only a year ago!

Of course, it was inevitable that I would get sucked in to scoping out gear. Renzo and I played around with the Ascaso i-Mini, which is to say that we took a look at it and I pulled a single shot off it and the expobar machine that was around. Amazingly, that single shot was one of the best this trip - second only to the shots that Rube had pulled me at Mecca! This little grinder is certainly going to be a thorn in the side of honest espresso equipment retailers - I don't think that anyone can seriously contend that the more expensive domestic grinders produce a better shot, though they are superior in practically every other way. None of the new prosumer espresso machines impressed, which was disappointing because we had sold out of all of our prosumer machines at work. Still, better to sell nothing than risk selling something that we don't know about, I guess. That said, I'm not going to completely dismiss everything from two minutes' use, particularly not at a coffee festival. I also talked to Peter and Charles at ECA about their new stand-alone steam machine. This thing is basically a boiler with auto-fill and a steam wand, so I think that there's definitely a place in the market for it. It would be great for coffee carts, or busy cafes that have two benches meeting at right-angles; have one person stand at the corner pouring drinks and handing out coffee, have a barista making shots and pass them towards the corner and then on the other side have another barista steaming milk on the steam machine and passing the jugs to the corner. Perhaps a niche market, but a good idea.

The coffeesnobs shoot-out at Di Bartoli drew a huge crowd. It looked like great fun, although, again, I absconded in order to say hi to still more people that geography has conspired to keep away from me ;P

Coffee was definitely a bit better than your average coffee festival. The best of the day awards go to the unexpected coffees. I'll toot my own horn and say that the random shot that I pulled won shot of the day ... which was a pity, because no-one had kept track of what coffee was in the i-Mini, so I couldn't buy any of it! The milk drink of the day award went to Zane, who randomly presented me with a short macchiato whilst I was locked in conversation at the ECA stand. (Sidebar; I'm terrible with names and had actually forgotten Zane's, so I'll come clean now and confess that I am not 100% sure that that is actually his name. But it's a pretty cool name, so I will bestow it on him from my lofty blog, anyway. I'd welcome corrections from the bloggosphere if I'm wrong. I'll also add a further confession, which makes the whole situation even more absurd - I was actually talking to a management academic about the importance of remembering peoples' names at the time!)

Anyhoo, I'll leave this poorly structured, quasi-incoherent and disinterested account there without even making an attempt to acknowledge any of the people who I met or talked to. Chances are that I'll forget a few names ;P

... and, with that, my moral obligation to fulfil my promise to provide a second part to this story is fulfilled.

Some somewhat relevant links:

Espresso Company Australia - formerly ECM Australia, but now stocking Vibiemme instead. And a nifty steam gadget. Home of Peter Cairis, espresso machine tweakologist to the max, and a bunch of other dudely dudes.

Di Bartoli - sellers of domestic espresso equipment. By the bucketload!

AASCA - AASCA. I don't know how else to explain it. Check out the webpage for competition results.

Forsyth Coffee - Rob Forsyth is the chairman of AASCA. This is his business. I mention it because I have never actually tasted his coffee, nor have I ever heard any discussion of his coffee. Has anyone tried it?

Brother Baba Budan

2007-08-13T00:22:00.000+10:00

Just a quick note to let my readers know that I'm aware of this. I'll leave it to someone else to blow their cover. In the meantime, those of you that are scratching their heads might enjoy reading this next sentence for some background information.

Worshiped by both Hindus and Muslims, legend has it that Baba Budan was responsible for smuggling coffee seedlings out of Yemen.

That is all for now.

The Hoff Wins WBC 2007 / Milking It For All It's Worth

2007-08-05T15:05:00.000+10:00

Massive congratulations to James Hoffmann for winning this year's WBC. Be wowed by his genuine writing style and general coffee knowledge over at his blog or, better still, check out his incredible mastery of milk, right here:

... or you could check out video feed of his performance at zacharyzachary. Aspiring WBC competitors might want to continue the Hoffmannia by checking out an article that he wrote on one of his sinfully delicious signature drinks.

Out of the loop: WBC 2007

2007-07-31T00:23:00.000+10:00

Those of you on a student's budget and with study to do, like me, will no doubt either be blissfully ignorant of the geographically nearest WBC ever or frantically devouring every shred of WBC related media. If you fall into the former category, click here. If you fall into the latter, you will probably be interested in the links at the bottom of this post.

So is Japan the land of milk and honey? Or, at least, espresso and ... err ... honey? Honeys? Well, according to Simon's photo above they seem to have no problems dropping an additional $10k on a freakin' Mistral for looks, then shoving it in a corner.

According to Em, the Aussie contingent is at 37 at the moment. And I'm jealous of every single one of those bastards. In fact, half of the guys at work are off in Japan, so I have been enlisted to be on the bar on Wednesday and Friday. Faithful readers bringing me consolatory offerings of tempura, teriyaki and tsukemono will be given free coffee.

Enough ranting; on to the links:

ZacharyZachary: these dudes managed to raise funds to travel to the WBC on the promise that they would video blog the living crap out of it. So log in and see if they live up to it.

Simon's Flickr: not only am I jealous that he's in Tokyo, but I'm also jealous that his camera is evidently functional, whilst my charger has gone AWOL.

Jimseven: UK WBC competitor James "the Hoff" Hoffmann somehow seems to be the most prolific blogger of the lot, despite that whole competing thing that is presumably looming over him.

I'm sure that Peter has taken his camera along, so once he's back I'll make him write up a news item and upload a new gallery to venezianocoffee.com.au

Did I miss anything? Add a link in the comments!

Sydney - Aroma Festival, Cafes and a Melbournite's POV (part 1)

2007-07-23T15:55:00.000+10:00

With the craziness of university and several jobs all demanding my time and attention, I booked in a holiday to Sydney on Friday to Sunday. Naturally, any of my holidays involve a lot of coffee, and this one was no exception, with the Aroma Festival on the Sunday. The camera stayed at home, as the charger has gone missing, so those of you with short attention spans might want to put Harvey Birdman on in the background.

The Cafes

A quick list of the spots that I hit up, in order of how awesome the coffee was (ie. best to worst, although all of them were quite good).

Mecca Espresso - near the corner of King and York, CBD

Always a pleasure. When I asked for a shot, Rube asked me if I wanted a ristretto or an espresso. I said "or?" The ristretto was thick and rich, without a hint of the burnt flavours that can sometimes develop when your barista decides to try and make it the consistency of play-doh. That said, the smart money was going for the espresso. Blueberry and melon flavours predominated. Although I wouldn't say that it struck me as juicy, there was definitely an "I'll have another" sensation. Quite unique in Sydney and definitely a vindication of Paul's idea of shipping coffee up from Tony at Rio Coffee in Adelaide every week, rather than buying locally.

(As an aside, I hear the descriptor "blueberry" used a fair bit and never really know what people intend by it. I pondered this question last time that I ate and smelled blueberries. It seems to me that the descriptor is sometimes used when people mean something closer to raspberry or cherry. By blueberry above, I mean something closer to the smell and flavour of blueberries when you eat them, rather than the synthetic blueberry flavour found in confectionery, which is closer to the whole berry family of flavours.)

(As a further aside, Reuben went on to come second in the NSW latte art competition a few days later.)

Cordial - 130 Carillon Ave, Newtown

What is it about milk around Sydney at the moment? The dairy farmers' stuff that I think Cordial was using, and a few other places definitely were, seemed to have way more of a buttery finish and unctuous mouthfeel than the dairy farmers' that I have had in Melbourne of late. It's as if the cream from Melbourne is being skimmed and transported to Sydney!

Digressions aside, the piccolo latte and regular latte that I had were both very good; rich and chocolatey, with a hint of nuttiness. I also had an "espresso," which was actually a double ristretto. The crema had aniseed and nutty flavours that I didn't enjoy all that much, but the rest of it was quite chocolatey.

I liked their 1950's diner type decor and their no-nonsense menu. There was no need for the bowl to be too cold or too hot; my porridge was just right.

Cordial are using Golden Cobra coffee, which is roasted by some dudes formerly from ...

Campos - 193 Missenden Rd, Newtown

Just around the corner from Cordial, this is the cafe that started it all. Every time I'm in Sydney I usually end up there for an espresso. I don't know why I do it ... I actually don't like their blend at all. To me, it is usually thin and overly acidic. The sort of thing that would make for absolutely sensational drip, french press or syphon coffee, but insipid espresso. Perhaps this is the result of buying coffee that is rated very highly by the world's top cuppers, all of whom seem to cup with non-espresso use in mind. Anyhoo, enough wild speculation. The reason why I keep on coming back to Campos is that it is just such a smoothly run operation with a fantastic atmosphere. Like their sign says; "specialty coffee professionals."

I ordered an espresso and received something that was a bit more liquid than I expected. In other words, another double ristretto. Drinking it was a strange experience. The first third had some body to it, the middle third was thin and the final bit picked up some more body to it. There was a hint of orange to the shot and a vaguely herbal, syrupy characteristic. An improvement from days gone by. Strange, since consistency is the strong point of the Campos team. So was it a one in a million shot that tasted different? Or was it something to do with the new GB5s or a change in blend? Who knows? Go there, chug a few shots down and make up your own mind.

Toby's Estate - 129 Cathedral St, Woolloomooloo

A great, creamy latte, leaving a slight buttery sensation in my mouth. I think that I'm going to have to try my luck with some Dairy Farmers' milk in Melbourne again to see if it lives up to the Sydney stuff. My espresso shot was, again, a bit longer than I expected, with the richest mouthfeel of anything. However, there was a relatively prominent wet sock/musty taint to it that I found a bit unpleasant.

What's with the double ristrettos?

OK, maybe I'm wrong with one or two of the places above, but it seems to me like the better places in Sydney are sending out double ristrettos to people who order espresso. I don't really have a problem with that, but as a customer I'd like to know that that's what is happening. As Reuben so vividly illustrated at Mecca, espresso shots sometimes bring out flavours that are completely hidden in ristretto shots. Particularly if we're talking about ristretto shots on a machine that allows for a slow pressure ramp-up (e61 heads, I'm looking at you).

Two quick thoughts came to mind after all of this. First, this trend sits well with my impression that some of the major Sydney roasters are focusing on fruitier flavoured, more acidic espresso with less body. There's nothing wrong with that per se, but if cafes are responding by throttling down all of the shots to put some more body into the cup at the expense of the more subtle flavours, it seems to me like the barista and the roaster are working against each other. Why not just create blends that are naturally more chocolatey and higher in body? The second thought is that this helps to explain why ECM machines seem to be a million times more popular in Sydney than in Melbourne - the preinfusion helps to plump up the shots a bit more. Although, to be fair, this is surely at least partly to do with the fact that ECA and its wonderful people are based in Sydney.

I'll round up this section by adding the caveat that my speculations are hardly based on an intense review of the whole Sydney coffee scene - just on impressions that I have gotten here and there. Further, the comments above are obviously not intended to apply to all coffee in Sydney. Now, with that aside, I'm hoping for some interesting and enlightening discussion in the comments to this post. Sydneysiders; have I missed the mark completely?

... I'll leave it there for now and come back in a few days with a post about the aroma festival ...