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

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 ...

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

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

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

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

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

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.