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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Vic Coffee Cupping 09 - Spoons at Dawn

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.

Ennui, WBC and Coffee

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.

ARC Opening

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.

Brother Baba Budan

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

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

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!

Coffeesnobs Brown Launch/Guatemalan Huehuehtenango

I haven't taken particularly detailed notes for this review, but I thought that I should post it simply to celebrate the launch of "CoffeeSnobs Brown." For those of you that don't know, CoffeeSnobs is a group of home roasters who buy green coffee together. The webpage is also home to the most active Australian-only coffee forum, albeit one that caters more to roasters than gear-heads and has quite a culture of supporting the site sponsors.


Andy Freeman owns CS and has recently set up a roastery, "CofeeSnobs Brown," as a commercial venture. To buy beans, you must be a member of the site, which enables you to post in the forums and exchange personal messages with other members. CS members also get access to good deals from the site sponsors. Beans are sold through "Bean Bay," which is basically a poll that is run. The green bean polls take place monthly, whereas the brown bean polls are always open. I presume that Andy is yet to work out the details for the brown bean polls, but it looks like he will roast and post when his roast batches are all polled out.


Anyhoo, work sponsors CS, so last week Andy drove a carload of green beans down to us so that CS members could pick them up. In doing so, he brought down my 1/2kg of Huehueh. I told him that if it was bad I'd eviscerate him on this blog and he asked me to do so, so here goes nothing ...

Actually, it was quite good. I picked it up as something to use as a base for numerous cappuccini to keep me going through the exam period. It delivered clean and chocolatey milk based drinks throughout. I have noticed that home roasted coffee tends to have a very short lifespan, so I subjected Andy's stuff to the "torture test" of producing espresso a week after I got it, which would be about two weeks out from roasting. The result was a pleasant clean cup with some decent acidity and not much else going on. This is not a criticism at all; last year's batch of huehueh was identical. It would make a fantastic ingredient in an espresso blend, but isn't a stand-alone star. The take-home message is that Andy's roasts, executed on a 10kg Has Garanti roaster, seem to have the lifespan that one would expect of a commercial roast.

Overall, an interesting experience. I'm wondering if CS members will start buying a 200g pack of CS brown when they buy their green, just to give them a frame of reference. I'm also looking forward to Andy offering some blends.

Australian Coffee Tasting This Saturday, First Pour

Apparently people pay more attention to blogs if they have photos.


Now that that's out of the way, I have roasted up some Bundja, Boomerang (washed) and Boomerang (natural) coffee from the famous Mountain Top to run through the grinders at First Pour this Saturday. The Bundja will definitely go through the espresso machine, as will one of the Boomerangs. The final Boomerang might fall prey to a French Press. Hopefully I'll be able to follow it up in a month or two with some of the new crop "Bin 35" that has had many rave reviews.

I'm hoping to be able to do a lot more cool coffee-related stuff at work, but for now I thought I'd start off with a small event ...

Taking The Plunge

The blend ...

As some of you might know, I recently developed a french press/plunger blend and entered it in the Sydney Royal Fine Food Show. The blend started off as some idle speculation when cupping a few months ago and, as far as I was concerned, ended there. Pete, however, thought it might be fun to randomly enter it into the show with the rest of his stuff. Long story short, we let it sit for ages and then I frantically pulled it together the week before it had to be sent in. I wasn't especially happy with the final product, and was quite shocked to see that "Dr Kalossus" finished in the middle of the pack, rather than dead last!

The show ...

Organising any sort of roasting competition is always going to be hard. From the little that I know, here's how I'm led to believe the SRFFS works:

-We enter and pay money
-SRFFS sends us a barcode
-We roast, stick it in a bag, slap the barcode on and post it off, along with a sample of green
-The coffees are all tasted and scored
-Medals are allocated based on points

On the whole, I think that they do a pretty good job. The barcoded bags are a great way to keep everyone honest and I love the fact that some years a stack of golds might be handed out, other years it's nothing. I'd like to see a few changes, though. The small one would be to give a bit more detail about the tasting process; ie. how much coffee is ground, how long it's steeped for, what temperature the water is, etc. The big one is running a few rounds. With 22 coffees in the category that Dr K was in, I think that it really is necessary to run an elimination round, then to re-taste the top six or so ... or maybe anything that is in the running for a medal. This would have had absolutely no impact on Dr K; I just think that the judges are probably tasting too much coffee at once.

Thankyous ...

Two thankyous are in order:

Thankyou to Pete for allowing me to burn your beans and trash your brand name ;P

Thankyou to Mark from St Ali for lending me some yellow bourboun at the last minute ... boy was that cutting it close!

The challenge ...

No doubt you're wondering why this post doesn't actually include any information about the blend itself. Simple answer; the final version wasn't worth speaking of and, more importantly,
I need to keep everything top-secret at the moment. Mark and I have beer at stake over the outcome of the next competition.


Suffice to say that in the coming months y'all will be seeing some plunger blends in the hoppers at First Pour!