The B Word

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!

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.

LucaTech Industries Unveils the GhettoMax 2000 and Filter Coffee in Australia

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!

Important Questions

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?