Buffalo Brewing

Making a cupping form

2011-11-25T06:58:00.000-08:00

(This post was originally intended to be the first for a blog over at Spot's Official Page, but we're doing some reformatting, look for some official-type-posts from me over there. In the meantime, didn't want to let this one languish, because I'm pretty excited about this cupping form.)

There always seems to be one area of coffee and coffee preparation that stands out to me for a given time period. Last year was the “Year Of Use Scales All The Time, For Everything”: getting obsessive about figuring out the relationship between the taste of brewed coffee (and espresso) and the actual mass of coffee and water used to get there.

This year, if I had to pick a theme, it would be: “Cup Everything, All The Time.”

I like doing things by the numbers. If I’m baking something at home, I like the recipe to specify every ounce, every temperature, every time exactly—it’s a way for me to get a handle on it even if I’m not the most confident of bakers.

Learning about the objective parameters of good coffee has allowed me to brew coffee, and pull shots, a little more by the numbers. Getting a grip on the basics of brewing allows one to quantify some of the important parameters; just being consistent with how much coffee, how much water, and the brew time is enough to take you a long, long way towards significantly better coffee. And you can do that with a decent scale and the stop-watch function on your phone. I’m hoping to get even more quantifiable data on brewing this coming year, using a refractmeter and maybe a better way to talk about ground particle size.

All that said in praise of quantification, though, quality is really where it’s at: the subjective experience of what’s in the cup. Being in control of your basic variables is a great starting place, but it’s no guarantee that it will take you someplace tasty. And the tools most of us have at our disposal—a scale, a stopwatch, a thermometer—are incredibly crude compared to our palates. The human olfactory and gustatory abilities, our senses of scent and taste, are fantastically precise and complex.

Something I say a lot in my trainings is: you can’t just go through the motions and assume that good drinks come out the other side. I never trust that my current technique for making a cup of coffee in the morning, or pulling a shot of espresso in the café, is working that day, until I’ve had a taste.

The barista competition this last spring, and various spro/brew-downs, have really opened my eyes to how much fun “rapid dialing” is: getting a new coffee, making a shot or a cup with it, and having to use your sense of taste to quickly decide what you want to change in your preparation to improve the final beverage.

In addition, I’m always trying to improve my ability to accurately describe coffee, which makes me think a lot about what I’m actually tasting/smelling, even when it’s not coffee. I approach apples, beer, and mustard a lot differently than I did before I got serious about coffee.

So, although I’ll probably always be a “by the numbers” guy, and not some virtuoso who can just wing it, this year I’ve really tempered that with focusing on taste, and realizing that the information I can get with my palate is way more intense and, in many cases, way more relevant than any data I can get with other tools.

Working in the roastery, that dichotomy—numbers vs. taste—has been driven home a thousandfold. I can start with a green coffee that hopefully I know a lot about—what varietal it is, where and how it was harvested and processed, maybe the altitude of the farm and how that affects density. (It’s remarkably hard to get all that info for every coffee, and something we are always pressing for). And we can specify and record a lot about how it roasts: how big the batch is, what the loss percentage out is, and the drop temperatures. When the bean goes through certain phases in the time/temperature “recipe” is important and quantifiable, particularly when it reaches “first crack”. There’s even a special color system, the Agtron scale, to specify how dark it is at the end.

But none of that tells me how it tastes. We always hope to figure out how all that information correlates to the taste, but we’ve still got to taste it. And, in the roastery, that has some pretty big consequences. Are we happy with the roast profile? Can we use this coffee in a blend? How do we describe it for customers? When we’re sampling a new coffee, we have to figure out: do we like this enough to spend thousands of dollars on it, enough to put our name on it?

So, tasting the coffee is pretty serious in the roastery, and we want to make sure do it in a way that’s serious, that provides some definite feedback that we can use, and that is fair to the coffee. The best coffee in the world will taste awful if you brew it wrong, on the one hand, but on the other hand we want to make sure that the way we’re brewing doesn’t obscure defects. Cupping is a formalized way of tasting coffee that tries to minimize variation in brewing and tasting technique as much as possible, so you can actually get a good idea of what’s going on in that coffee. Cuppings work better as a group activity, because multiple people are more likely to catch everything going on in the cup. And while people’s individual preferences vary, it’s remarkable how easy it is to reach consensus on a score with a small group of cuppers. When I was at the MANE conference this past October, one of the cupping instructors put it very well: “The best evaluation won’t come from one supertaster; a group of experienced people with average taste abilities will do a better job.”

To be really useful, a cupping needs to be accompanied by a form that everyone fills out separately, so you can compare notes at the end, and to make a record for future buying/roasting/brewing decisions. (One of the biggest skills in coffee, I’m realizing, is just having a long memory of tastes and coffees you yourself have experienced; there’s no way to fake it or just read a book about it. I imagine that’s true to some extent for wine and the culinary arts as well.)

But cupping forms are rough! In a few different ways:

They are often clunky and crammed full of things to fill out.
That can make them intimidating for people to use, or difficult to fill out properly.
They need to balance objective and subjective evaluation along a few different axes. Just because you’re tasting something doesn’t mean “it’s a matter of taste.” A good cupper can separate intensity and quality from personal preference—but both are important to record. At the end of a cupping with the roastery team, the most important question is: “are we happy? Do we want to buy this, do we want to sell this?”
They need to yield some kind of score, probably numeric, but trying to cram the real world in a box always winds up shaving off corners more than I’d like—and can change the way you think about the subject in the first place.

There’s an additional quirky bit with cupping specialty coffee—by definition, “specialty grade” is supposed to be the top 20% of coffee, quality-wise. That means that on a 0-10 scale, none of the coffees in Spot’s roastery should average out to less than 8—which means that I get pretty nervous marking any score less than 6. But a “10” acidity, for example, means I am literally having a hard time imagining it could be any better, which means I’m going to mark it very rarely. So even though it looks like a 0-10 scale, it’s very rare we’ll be marking outside the 6-9 range—and that in turn means we need to zoom in on those points, give half points and quarter points and so on. It’s easy to forget sometimes that even the worst coffee we have on hand, if it’s specialty grade, is leaps and bounds ahead of genuinely bad coffee, the stuff we never even buy. (Which is one reason I try to drink bad coffee every once in a while—bad chain coffee, ancient grocery store stuff, instant, etc.: helps keep perspective).

All those issues in mind, I’ve known for a while that we need our own cupping form to fill out and keep on record. After looking at the SCAA form, the Cup of Excellence form, Coffee Geek’s, Intelligentsia’s, etc., I had an idea what I wanted, but none of them were quite what I thought was appropriate.

So! This week we’re going to be testing out the fairly simplified cupping form I’ve made. It tracks:

Aroma/Fragrance: the dry/wet scents. 10pts for quality, with a space to record intensity. The complexity of coffee’s taste is primarily derived from volatile aromatics (gases), so scent is a major factor in appraising a bean.
Sweetness: if it ain’t sweet, it ain’t good coffee. 2pts per cup. We do sets of 5 samples per coffee, so if all 5 are sweet it will be 10pts.
Acidity: Maybe the most commonly misunderstood term, acidity in coffee is a good thing; it’s the bit that reminds us that this comes from a tropical fruit! 10pts for quality, with a space to record intensity.
Body: Not a taste per se, this is the tactile “mouthfeel” of a coffee. Along with acidity, one of the core features of any coffee. Can range from thin or watery up to heavy, buttery, syrupy. 10pts for quality, with a space to record intensity.
Clean: pretty self-explanatory, it’s the absence of dirty flavors (“earthy” if we’re feeling generous), and the clarity of the cup characteristics. 10pts.
Consistent: Extremely important to us as buyers/roasters, since an inconsistent coffee can leave customers wondering what’s going on when it changes without us noticing. 2pts per cup, so if none of them are noticeably different from each other (whether or not we think they’re good), that’s 10 points for consistency.
Finish: The “afterglow” of a coffee. A good finish either lingers pleasantly or vanishes cleanly. 10pts.
Balance: How well the different parts play together, particularly acidity and body. Coffees with fairly mediocre qualities can still impress if they are well-balanced. 10pts.
Defects: This is the hardest category for me right now. There are a number of well-known, well-defined, definite defects that can occur in coffee for a number of reasons…and I haven’t encountered them all yet. A good example would be the “potato” defect that broke my heart out of a Burundi last spring. In this section, I’m just leaving us space to take off some points for things we can definitely point to as being “off.”
Overall: The cupper’s personal, one-number evaluation of the coffee. 10pts, multiplied by 2.

Add all those up and we get a score out of 100, with room for comments on specific flavors or things we noticed. I’m really hoping that we’ll be able to build a better library of cupping records, to match up against buying and roasting decisions.

It sounds pretty dry, I know…but cupping coffee is one of my absolute favorite things about my profession. Actually, cupping vies with Chemex & espresso as my favorite way to DRINK coffee, it’s so much fun—you really get the feel of a coffee from start to finish, from all angles. And it’s incredibly useful and vital to us as craft roasters.

Cupping sounds geeky, but there’s a really interesting thing that happens when you’re serving coffee to lots and lots of people: big groups of people are better at tasting things than any one person. So what we’re doing, by getting very technical and focused in a cupping, is to get a feel for how the coffee will be perceived once it’s out being served to customers. Is it ready, is it good enough, how do we talk about how good it is? That’s what we’re after.

I run cuppings for new employees as a training exercise, and we’ve done a few public ones connected to jams and throw-downs. With our new roastery facility coming this spring, look for a lot more chances to join in!

A noble Fraternity/Sorority

2011-10-13T07:01:00.000-07:00

Is there a better way to say that?

http://www.baristaguildofamerica.net/instructors.html

Very excited! Also I will be posting some stuff about MANE later this week, it went incredibly well this year.

Other things I should probably write about:

Actually learning how to roast a bit, like, for real.
Compak K10 Fresh, the auto-doserless: I am in love I think.
Spot Coffee opening on Hertel!

That last one is actually why this is so brief, I have to go jump into training with both feet. Brew strong my friends, I'll update soon!

all grown up

2011-09-20T14:09:00.001-07:00

I take my tiny share of responsibility for creating this wonderful monstrosity.

If you have any ability to vote for this man to go to Camp Pull-A-Shot II, please do so.

Living on Borrowed...Roaster...Time?

2011-09-16T20:26:00.000-07:00

Hey! It's been a while! The coffee business in Buffalo has been pretty crazy-busy! And also, there is some cool coffee community stuff going on...

That worked out in my favor when we had to do some big mechanical work on our roaster. We wanted to play it safe and get some more coffee roasted while the repairs were taking place, so we started asking around to borrow some time on another roaster.

We wound up using the San Franciscan roaster of the Buffalo Coffee Roastery, in the main place mall! The staff & owners were extremely friendly and helpful and I really can't thank them enough.

My end of the day was mostly logistics: weighing coffee out, binning it, loading and unloading the van, wheeling stuff hither and yon, getting Michael what he needed, trying to keep everything as clean and unobtrusive as possible. They roast on-site at this cafe, and there were tons of people coming through the shop. Very interesting--but I can see why they try to roast after the rush.

Michael's job was doing his wizardry on an unfamiliar machine, focusing in despite lots of distractions. Pretty interesting to watch.

And quite the learning experience, given that all our experience is pretty much just on our one machine. We had to use different batch sizes, and Michael had to really tune in on every nuance of sound, sight, and smell.


Air temp as we warm up

Really made us think about what we want out of a roaster. This machine is an interesting contrast to ours, because it has more controls--more ability to control heat--while having less direct information on conditions (no thermal probe to the drum). It's a pretty machine, though, and really ideal for this kind of in-shop operation.

Also, we love love love the cooling tray. Better heat sinking than ours, more surface area, and the squeegee actually works. You have no idea how excited this made us.

A thousand thanks to Kate, the owner/roaster. I'm really hoping we can do some coffee events with these folks in the near future.

Meanwhile, back at Spot...

Turns out those bearings are really hard to get off sometimes!

But, our Primo is back up and running, which is a major relief. We also found a really good technician through this whole process, and while Michael is quite handy at fixing & maintaining most everything on it, it's nice to have a tech on call for the big jobs.

In related news, Spot has started the long process of looking into upgrading our roasting facility...possibly including a newer, somewhat larger roaster. That has me & Michael feeling like we're waiting for Christmas morning. It's probably going to be quite some time before we are actually on a new machine, given the complexity of selecting and installing one, but I look forward to reporting any progress there...

Whew. It has been a long couple of weeks in the roastery. Lots of cleaning, lots of scrambling around, but it is shaping up. We've got two assistants now, Robin & Marquita, as well as some occasional assistance from other interested baristas in the company.

And! The MANE Conference is right around the corner, and Pull-A-Shot not long after that.

That's all I have at the moment, friends. Brew strong. I will be updating more soon.

Losing my trust in naturals...

2011-08-06T06:40:00.000-07:00

And why, friends? Variance. Particularly, whatever the heck kind of defects are afflicting this Ethiopian Guji we've got in.

(Meant to post this a while ago actually; we're pretty much done with this Guji now.)

See all those lighter-colored beans? That's what I'm worried about.

Now, with anything that's not a micro-lot, particularly with Ethiopian heirloom varietals (heirloom is code for "it's been growing here for a while and it's tasty but we don't really know what it is", I think), I'm not surprised to see a lot of variance. Different sizes and shapes of beans, different densities affecting the roasted color, etc. And I'm not freaked out about one or two defects: we're buying good coffee, but not the super high-end micro-lot stuff. Standing over the cooling drum and picking out a few weirdos isn't the end of the world.

But this Guji was bothering me: too many light-colored beans. So, I spread it out and sorted it one day after all the production was done.

Hand-sorting beans is oddly soothing if you're a little OCD and given to making up little songs about what you're doing. And if you feel like you don't get to use the word "winnow" enough.

And here's what I wound up with. Now there were a big range of beans I was pulling out-- elephant ears, popcorns, a few faced or charred beans, fragments-- but primarily I was paying attention to color, pulling out these light gold or straw colors. Some of them are quakers maybe?

The spooky thing about this coffee is: there's so much variance, that the more you pay attention, the more it looks like you should pull more out. It's freaking fractal. You pull out all the super-obviously light beans, and then your brain resets its parameters, and then the pile looks like it still has a ton of light beans. So then you pull those out, your brain resets another shade, and on you go. Eventually, I would probably wind up with only like 10% of the original pile.

And it would taste delicious.

And speaking of taste: what to do with all these light beans? Well, I wanted to know what exactly they were doing to the cup, and to what extent. So the next day we set up a cupping with the unsorted beans, just the sorted, and just the defects.

Results: the cups that had the defects removed were definitely better, with cleaner, sweeter, more defined tastes and much less bitterness.

The defects themselves were INTERESTING to cup. We were actually worried about our health for a second. Some of these are relatively minor defects, physical variances that caused them to take the roast differently. But a lot of them are issues in ripeness and/or fermentation (not sure how to tell on this end), and I think those are where the weirdness comes from.

Nasty, weird, bizarre flavor. I've never encountered it isolated before, I don't think, but it's extremely distinct. Michael compared it to chewing on aspirin, which apparently I have never done.

And even weirder than the gross flavors: the berries & chocolate were still there, peeking out from under the nastiness.

This experiment, plus our quality concerns, means that I've been putting aside some time to hand-sort at least the worst outliers from this coffee, which gets really fun after 30lbs or so.

And the weirdest thing is: this is still one of my favorite coffees we've roasted all year. Phenomenal espresso bean, so much so that we're using it as an SO espresso for a local cafe here, Sweetness_7, and I'm super happy with the shots they're pulling.

More so since I've started sorting.

All I can think is: how much better would this be if it were picked better, sorted better, and, maybe the biggest thing: wash-processed to prevent fermentation variance? Wish I knew more about coffee at origin to talk about this, but comparing this coffee against good washed process beans we have in stocks, I can't get over the difference.

Anyway that's my rant! I'm not trusting naturals much now, but maybe someone can change my mind...

What's on my brain

2011-08-04T13:28:00.000-07:00

Strada EP tour

2011-08-01T18:50:00.000-07:00

(which is funny because really this one is more like the LP but I'm not going to elaborate on that metaphor if you don't get it already)

So, Counter Culture is hosting these little show-and-tells for the new Marzocco Strada EP. So, Mike & I went to NYC to check it out!

First time on a Greyhound bus, incidentally, not sure how I dodged that in the past. Wasn't too bad! Particularly since I already spend 10 hours+ in the company of my head roaster. Mike & I were keeping a mental tally of how many people we thought had us figured as coming in to the city to get hitched, but that's another story.

Hardest part of the trip was NO CAFFEINE. Made our way to the Ace Hotel before the event, fortunately.

The Strada! The Strada EP! What's the big deal here?

If you haven't been following it, the big deal is Pressure Profiling.

Most espresso machines you'll meet use an electric pump to create pressure while pulling a shot--usually about 9 bar.

(A "bar" is a little more than an "atmosphere"; 9 bar is about 130 psi if you're interested in that kind of thing. Unit conversion!)

Lever machines create pressure differently, using the released force of a spring that the barista sets with a big-ol' lever. Instead of a flat, on-off pressure of 9 bars, lever machines create a curving profile, almost but not quite a bell curve.

When Faema started using electric pumps in 1960/61, they simply took the average of the entire duration of a lever-created pressure cycle, and came up with: 9 bars! Which works pretty well for espresso, let's be honest here, and it became more or less the standard for all machines.

(But by the way, as a guy who works on weird espresso machines sometimes: check your pressure! I run into a lot of older and even newer machines that for whatever reason are pulling low or high, which can do weird things to shots. Most machines have a pressure gauge on them somewhere, but if you don't have one, or don't trust it, you can use a SCACE device (or a technician who has one) to check the pressure right at the head. Most pressure adjustments is done mechanically, right at the pump--you just keep your eye on the gauge and turn a screw. Make sure you pull your test shot through a packed espresso basket, otherwise you won't adjust the pressure correctly.)

So, the electric-pump machines create the same pressure consistently, they're easy to use, great. But there is still among our kind the Legend of How Lever Machines are Great. I can't speak to this personally, not having had a lot of experience with them, but it seems like I've seen periodic discussions/arguments about if and how and why lever machines do some things a little better than pump machines, in terms of how the shot actually tastes coming out.

So, some effort has been given to replicating aspects of lever brewing in modern pump machines. In my understanding, this is part of the reason that espresso machines have started incorporating "pre-infusion": a short period of un- or low-pressurized water contact before the full brewing pressure is applied. This starts saturation/extraction, and causes the bed of espresso to expand. The latter reduces the impact of small bed density irregularities, in theory, while the former changes the brew process slightly and seems to improve flavor.

But the big difference between lever machines and, say, that classic Faema E61, is the pressure profile during extraction. Flat plateau vs. almost-a-bell-curve.

(By the way, there's an attendant theory that bean selection, roasting, and blending practices for espresso have shifted since the introduction of pump machines, much as they probably did to accommodate the drastically higher pressures of lever machines in the '40s. How true this is I don't know, I don't know if the data exists even anecdotally on that (I don't know if the various roasters' organizations have been around or organized long enough to have secret vaults full of that kind of info), but it does kind of make sense. If a roaster is tasting finished, brewed product and then going back to tweak selection/roasting/blending, than a consistent shift in one brewing variable (like everybody switching to flat 9-bar espresso brewing) should in theory create a change in that philosophy. How many roasters actually do that, and how well the habits of great roasters are noticeably successful enough to inspire imitation by the larger community, I don't know.)

Specialty Coffee in all its guises right now is all about difference. Terroir. But the intensity of espresso, the way it exaggerates coffee, and (maybe) the way that the brewing process kind of bottlenecks what tastes good, have encouraged a less-flexible, less varied approach to espresso until recently. That's one of the reasons that espresso has been the Bastion of Blending in the specialty world: pretty much any bean worth the money will taste good brewed up by itself, but not necessarily as espresso. Many is the single-origin bean that just tastes gross as espresso. And so, espresso is blended, for balance, and ideally blended to the (very similar) brewing profile of modern machines.

(Incidentally, I wish I were placed higher in the echelons of specialty, because Michael & I both are waiting, maybe mistakenly, for the Great Blending Renaissance. That's a future post, maybe.)

Regarding espresso, I'm fond of putting it this way in my training classes: the old (Italian) idea was that there was One Perfect Espresso, kind of a Platonic Demitasse. You get your beans right, your technique right, you climb the mountain, and there it is, radiating light, the single (well, probably a double) Paragon Shot.

But now, of course: I don't quite believe that, any more than I believe there is a Platonic Cheese, or Platonic Beer. There are many, dozens or hundreds, of mountains, with phenomenally good and significantly different espressos sitting atop them.

But to get there, up those mountains (anyone familiar with Dennett's probability-space?), we need to be able to explore a lot of different variables. SO Espresso is hard.

Arguably, better temperature control has already started to affect this. The shift here--from One Blend To Rule Them All to the Many-Mountains Paradigm-- is only possible if the brewing variables are both a.) stable enough to be trusted and b.) able to be modified. Temperature instability through the brew cycle creates inconsistent extraction--so you want a blend that tastes okay even if a little over-or-under extracted.

In particular I think this has caused many espresso blends to be hamstringed in terms of acidity, because the beans that create awesome incredible lick-the-bottom-of-the-cup brightness when pulled right are also the ones that create PHREOW bad flavors when over- or under-extracted, so most espresso blends play it safe and don't go broke for tasty acidity.

That problem has been steadily chipped away at by better temperature control technology, everything from the dual-boiler design, better heat exchange machines, to the PID heat controls (arguably the biggest thing since the move from lever machines).

So stable temperatures ought to open up the range of things-that-will-taste-good as espresso. But, point b.), how easily is that temperature adjusted for different coffees? The newer PID machines can be (fairly) easily adjusted, and the highest-end machines now have separate boilers & PID controls for each head. I've even heard some rumblings about machines with dynamic PIDs that allow for temperature to be programmed through the extraction cycle.

Which may be something that Marzocco looked at, I'm not sure. Scott Guglielmino from Marzocco, our narrator for the evening, told us that the Strada resulted from a long period of seeing what variables could be controlled at the machine level, and what had the biggest impact on flavor. And the answer they came up with was not modifying the heat throughout extraction, but modifying the pressure--being able to recreate different profiles.

I've been seeing the first incarnation of the Strada, the MP, around for a bit. At trade shows, at a shop in Montreal, and so on. The MP uses a paddle-group and creates true variable-pressure profiling by (in my understanding) a really tricky system of pressure release valves. Fun to use, but of limited use in a shop setting in this kid's evaluation, both because the profiles are hard/impossible to recreate, and because I really can't imagine not being able to multi-task milk while pulling: you need to have your hands on the paddle the whole time.

(By the way, I really don't know enough, anything at all really, about how the other pressure-profiling machines there, especially the Slayers, compare technically or performance-wise to the Stradas. Comment if you do; I'll have to look into this.)

The EP, now... I admit that I walked into the room (Counter Culture's training center) with a lot of scepticism. The MP didn't impress me, and given how tricky I think espresso already is--so sensitive to the variables we do control--I wasn't sure how important adding another variable would be for on-the-line baristas.

Consider me woo'd.

The EP allows you to manually create a pressure profile using the paddle on the group, or on a computer and then transferred by USB. No, really. After Scott gave a brief background and technical overview on the machine, he turned us loose to play with it. Many variably-profiled shots of Apollo 5.0 later, I have seen the light.

Didn't even intend that joke, I swear.

You can make shots drastically better, worse, different by controlling the pressure. There, that is my position.

The shots that are better, here's my theory, gathered from my experience and everyone in the room and THE INTERNET:

Infusion vs. percolation brewing. Or saturation vs. washing, however you want to put it. In an on-off pressure situation, you are slamming your coffee with a lot of high-energy water, probably getting most of your extraction yield by physically washing stuff off the particles. Lower pressures at the beginning or end of the extraction should allow more time for the coffee to soak up water and lose solubles through diffusion, possibly changing the composition of the end yield--higher percentage of things that dissolve more easily than they wash and vice versa. I'd really like to see the science on this one.
Fines migration. This one is so complicated my head hurts already--fines location indirectly affecting a lot of things about the extraction. PROBABLY IT IS AFFECTED BY DIFFERENT PRESSURES.
Variable extraction rates. Scott put this one forward as one of his main theories, and it makes a lot of sense. We're looking to extract a certain percentage of the bean, not all of it, and we know a lot of the undesirable flavors come from the latter part of the extraction--that 22-35% range that takes a little more time/energy/surface area to extract. So, by ramping the pressure off from a high peak, we can slow extraction and effectively lengthen the window within which we can kill the shot while it tastes good, before it's overextracted.

I'm also really intrigued--Scott hinted at this--that being able to control the pressure like this is taking some of the blinders off espresso parameters a little bit. He said that they have gotten really good results with shots outside the 20-30 second box, which makes sense if you think about it. I'd like to be able to leave that box.

The Strada EP is loaded up with other design features, all of which are selling points:

All-stainless PFs. Yes, your PF is actually chrome-plated brass, that's why it's so hard to clean. These suckers should be REALLY easy to keep shiny, which keeps your shots tasty.
VST (or whoever) baskets (and screens?) I will not flip out about this right now but this is MAYBE A REALLY GOOD THING.
PFs have a flat bar along the front--they were specifically designed to be tamped with the edge on the counter, the way most good baristas do. The spouts are removable for ease of cleaning, which has the wonderful side-effect of causing the spout to pop harmlessly off if you try to tamp with the spouts on the counter.
Adjustable drip tray. I will here refrain from slandering 20oz cups.
I asked Scott about the possibility of volumetric display with this machine (I remain interested in volumetric control and display) and that's when he broke out the big guns. Built-in scales for each head with auto-tare feature tied to the shot ARE YOU SERIOUS. Yes. They're talking about tying that into the programming so you could set a dispensed-mass condition in addition to the pressure profile. (As a tiny niggling point, I'd still like to see a volumetric read on what's going into the shot, just because that's more accurate a way to work with brew ratios than what's coming out. But I digress. Built-in scales of this nature are freaking ridiculously cool and useful.)
They've switched the way the steam-wand valves work to a solenoid, which means (gasp!) people like me won't have to spend the better years of their lives rebuilding steam wands. Also, the steam wand (works on a lever) has really nice variable pressure itself because of the new controls, which is very cool.

I almost hate to say this, but the Strada EP also has one more thing going for it that really sells it:

It can work like an Auto-Volumetric.

Meaning, off a reasonably consistent dose/grind, you can use it as push-button machine. OR geek out with it the way you're supposed to. But for the kind of shops I know, where the ability to multi-task can be paramount, and where in all honesty not all baristas (not all owners) are as quality focused as we would like--this ability is a life-saver, because it means that the machine is capable of the Highest Geekery without sacrificing its utility for sheer make-drinks mode.

All told, very, very impressed, and surprised: I wasn't expecting to be sold this hard. I may angle for this machine at our next location.

Otherwise: it was very good to see coffee people, haven't been to any events since Houston. Counter-Culture crowd & NYC folks are very awesome as always. Wound up not hitting as many coffee-bars as I'd planned in New York but that was okay too, had a nice getaway.

I did make it into Everyman, had an incredibly grapey Aeropress of CC's Finca El Puente. Also apparently I mainly take pictures of Sam with his hands on a paddle am I right?

Blog has been dead! And I apologize. But I have a backlog of topics, so we'll see if I can't crank a few more out before the seasons change.

In Which I Am Not Dead

2011-03-18T06:40:00.000-07:00

So, it's been a long and pretty a-social three months since my last post. But believe me, I am still in the trenches. And they are filled with pretty good coffee, it turns out.

Florida! Spot had been talking about opening a branch café all the way down in Delray Beach for a long time, and this winter the doors opened. This was really exciting for me, because it's the first time I've been able to contribute significantly to a new coffee shop, deal with equipment providers, train a whole first generation of workers, and evaluate a new customer base. Lots of fun, lots of stress, probably a lot less of both than the team down there has had through the first couple of months.

Highlights of my time in Delray: seeing ex-pat Buffalo baristas Scott, Jenn, Kristen, & Andy again. Getting a GB5 up and running with Compak grinders and decent water filters. Meeting a lot of neat people: like a lot of coffee shops, the Delray Spot attracted an odd blend of people with cool interests, bicycle people, science people, art people. They were also lucky enough to pick up a really awesome homeroaster/barista.

And training, and training, and training. Basic coffee education classes, introductory cuppings, espresso & milk classes. Delray was a marathon education-fest for me, to the point that it really changed my approach to a number of training issues. Running the same class 2 or 3 times consecutively really made me look at what was working, what was sticking, what differences came from the students and what areas I need to improve in my approaches. Good stuff.

More Florida pics here.

And cupping. I've cupped more in the last 3 months than I did in the previous 4 years. That's been really satisfying, and has just made me realize that: I need to cup more, I need to cup more frequently, I need to construct some more training for myself to improve my abilities.

I had my first encounter with potato! Which was crushing, because Michael & I were cupping samples for potential competition espresso, and my first cup of a Burundi blew me away, it had a lot of the juicy brightness I love out of natural Ethiopians, with none of the mud. I was ready to sign up for the bag...and our next cups had potato in it. Really a bummer; I'm trying to write it off emotionally as "educational encounter with a defect".

Oh yeah, competing. I'm going to be competing, frighteningly soon here, in the NERBC. Expect a few posts on that. I'm really pumped about it.

What else? Went to Montreal for a Decemberists show, survived the cold, had some good bagels, had some good coffee. The folks at Myriade were outstanding, I had three great coffees there as espresso, vac-pot, and steep-and-release. Really good service, too. Toi, Moi, & Cafe was a bit underwhelming, particularly since I've had such outstanding shots of their coffee from Sam James.

Coffee shop that stole my heart in Montreal, though, is newcomer St. Henri.

It's early still, but the tastiest shot I've had in 2011 was definitely their "Godshot" espresso. Pulled on a Strada! The first I've seen:

I waited until my barista turned away and then very gently caressed it. On a plastic bit, so I wouldn't leave a fingerprint.

Actually, the barista on my first visit had pretty much the same comment that I've heard from others: the potential is great. The implementation is difficult. St. Henri has the first generation Strada, no ability to electronically record and replicate pressure profiles, and the barista said they'd probably need to trade up or trade down.

I also had a really banging Guatemala on their pour-over, described quite accurately as "Oreo chocolate". Good stuff.

Things are busy in Buffalo! There's a new coffee shop opening near my cafe on Elmwood, no idea what they're going to be like quality-wise. The Spot on Hertel is getting closer. Elmwood's moving fast towards a brew-bar, which is going to be this massive headache and I'm going to love every minute of it, we'll be the first in Buffalo and I'm really excited to get it out to the good coffee drinkers of the city.

Lots of training, lots of cupping, Coffee Cabal has started up again, lots of good stuff coming. And I've got to bike to work right now, actually. As a parting shot, I'm kind of excited about the first time a GB5 steam wand breaks on me, because surely they are designed a little better than the old Linea style. It seems like that's the only thing I repair any more. I leave you with my favorite tool that really shouldn't be necessary, the snap-ring plier. More updates soon, I promise!

Coffee Cabal: Bonmac vs. V60

2010-12-05T21:18:00.000-08:00

We've been wanting to get the coffee cabal going more regularly, and with a larger base of participants, for a while now. Finally making some headway on that!

Wednesday's meeting was mainly to lay out some ideas for future cabals, including:

Getting everybody familiar with basic cupping protocol.
Sensory training with wine/beer etc. tastings, "cupping" chocolates, fruits, etc.
Brewing jams to learn different methods.
Coffee benders in Buffalo and other cities
Organizing some throw-downs, maybe a bigger jam late in the spring or early summer.

A big concern I'm having is finding a good space. Once we get beyond 6 people or so at a meet, holding it at somebody's apartment gets problematic. Right now my three top ideas are the Unitarian Universalist church, Sugar City, and Sweetness_7, which closes early so we might be able to use that space if their baristas are involved. Or...we'll find some other space that works.

But! For this meeting, we did a little brew-off to compare the Bonmac brewer against the Hario v60. Coffees were a decaf Mexican by Spot, and El Salvador Finca Alaska by Social Coffee.

The Bonmac and the v60 are very similar drippers. I got a plastic Bonmac a while back just to bump my Sweet Maria's order into the minimum order, and it has since become my go-to brewing method of choice. They're both v-shaped drippers with relatively large drip apertures, and grooves on the inside. The Bonmac filter, which fits either V dripper (and I'd guess would work in a chemex as well), seems pretty nice. The only major difference seems to be that the v60 grooves are much more pronounced and move in a swirling pattern, while the ridges in the Bonmac are vertical and much more shallow.

At this cabal we started talking about brewing variables, getting scientific about trying to replicate or test brews. So: the main variable we wanted to test here was if and how the cups from these brewers taste different, where the only real difference seems to be groove pattern. However, Michael's v60 is ceramic, giving it better heat retention. Also, our pouring patterns were slightly different, though we tried to match up after realizing that. Also also, I didn't have my good gram scale or an accurate thermometer, so we may have had some small variances in dosing and brew temperature as well.

All that said, it was interesting to taste the difference. My Bonmac + pour method seemed to really nail it on the Mexican, bringing out more brightness and a little more interesting flavor. On the El Salvador, though, the v60 got the general thumbs-up: Michael's batch seemed to have more pleasing fruitiness.

I may have said it before, I'll say it again: I love brewing by mass ratios instead of worrying about volume. Brewing onto an accurate scale and using a 1:17 coffee:water ratio makes hitting delicious brews really easy, and also allows repeatable pouring techniques if you're keeping an eye on the timer.

Closed the meeting by doling out some samples of KA-POW! from Sahagun Chocolate. This. Stuff. Is amazing. "The world's first single-origin coffee bar", it's coffee processed like chocolate. The flavor and texture are amazing, incredibly rich and flavorful. I'm really hoping some more chocolatiers get on this.

Good meeting! What we need for next time is a bigger space. We also need more baristas to start home-brewing! These meetings will get really rocking when everyone can bring a kettle and a brewer of some kind.

I'm off to Florida this week to help set up shop, I'll keep you posted!

New Espresso Blend!

2010-11-24T22:53:00.000-08:00

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: Puckslap, 1.0. Dry Brazil, dry Sumatra, wet Sidama, pretty delicious.

Spot's head roaster, Michael Burke, has put together a new espresso blend for us. Same basic flavor profile as our old house espresso, but with 3 beans instead of 5, better balance, significant improvement. I'm pulling 1.85oz, 18 gram shots, getting a nice little citrusy note up front, followed by chocolate & nuts, with more of what Michael calls the "sneaky currant". Less bitterness, more brightness, still lots of punchy body to cut through the milk drinks. The biggest difference thing I notice with this blend versus the old style is tons more sweetness; it makes a superior drinking espresso while still holding up in milk.

We've been pulling Puckslap for a week today, getting a feel for it, and I am very happy with it. I've got my sights set on really freaking good spro, which I see as resting on a tripod: good beans, good equipment, good technique. This blend firms up one of those legs a good deal. Training, PIDs, and better water filters will be making themselves felt over the next month or so. Gooooood stuff.

When Michael & I were taste-testing different prototypes for this blend, I was really excited by a few that were using an Ethiopian East Harrar, getting some real interesting muddy fruit notes. Unfortunately, they vanished in milk. If we wind up with a 3-grinder situation in more stores soon (knock on wood), hopefully we can play around with some different drinking espressos. A lot of the best espressos I've had this year have been very central-heavy, Hondurans & Guatemalans, I'd like to taste what Michael can whip up in that direction.

Taste-testing espresso is pretty challenging, and fun. I think the hardest part, but also the most interesting, is remembering how variable the process is. I need to taste multiple extractions at different doses to feel like I'm giving the blend a fair shake, and even then I'm wondering about heat in the head, what the coffee will do as it ages, etc. Michael and I have started kicking around some ideas for a competition espresso this spring, which is a bit of a logistical puzzle given our roasting set-up. We'll have to figure that out once we actually have some dates & locations for our region.

In the meantime, super-excited about this Puckslap. At least one customer is already buying it for home use, which is cool. Roshen Carman is putting together a design for us, I'll get the final version up soon. If you're in Buffalo, stop by and tell us what you think of the spro!

Much-Delayed L.A. Notes

2010-11-18T19:15:00.000-08:00

Since returning from Barista Camp, I've been hit with a slew of craziness. Not least of which was an unexpected parting gift: a severe but delayed reaction to some poison ivy. The reaction and the steroids/antihistamines it took to get me back to normal pretty much knocked me out for a week and a half.

Lots of exciting coffee stuff here in Buffalo: getting new training and testing implemented, Bunn loaned us a Trifecta, wheeling out a new espresso blend, getting the Cabal going again... Lots of news there, but first I want to get up my notes from LA.

One of the other baristas from camp, Cameron Peterson, joined me for some coffee scouting before his flight left. Picking up the rental car I had reserved turned into a crazy series of delays and problems, but we finally got some wheels and started tracking down some food.

Seed

1604 Pacific Avenue

Camp had prompted me to be less than a perfect vegetarian, and the long ordeal of getting to LA and getting a car left me starving. We were lucky to stumble on this place in Venice beach. Yes, hunger makes everything taste better, but this seitan "sirloin" burger was amazing:

Also tried these non-alcoholic wine soda things they had, I could definitely get behind it:

Fainting spells temporarily averted, we headed out to find some joe.

Intelligentsia Venice Coffee Bar

1331 Abbot Kinney Blvd

I'd been curious about the design of this "coffee in the round" approach, and my barista-sensei Amy Lawlor had told me to get here if I was in LA, so I was pretty excited. Cameron & I had some coffee, and I wound up coming back in the morning just to see how they worked through a rush.

The design here is great. The place seems almost massively overequipped: 4 custom 2-group Synessos, two dedicated pour-over stations, a tea station, some kinda custom 4-group Marzocco, and what looks like another bar for manual methods like Chemex and vacuum-pots. The idea here seems to be to eliminate the cashier-and-queue approach, favoring a direct customer-to-barista interaction, more like a bar.

We got to chat with the immensely friendly and knowledgeable Charles Babinski for a while, and of course had some awesome coffee. Intelli's Kenya Thiriku is my latest knock-my-socks off cup, wonderfully complex, berries and peaches and this this silky, almost milky body (a bed-spread or a quilt?)

Caffe Luxxe

11973 San Vicente Boulevard, LA

After another cup of Thiriku at Venice Beach, I started checking off other LA coffee points. I was supposed to meet up with barista and Buffalo expat Jessica at some point, so I headed up that way, stopping in at Caffe Luxxe in Brentwood (I checked out their Santa Monica location real fast, but it was line out the door so I kept moving).

Really glad I stopped in here! Tiny store, awesome service, very nice coffee, and some cool baked goods.

Luxxe clearly is shooting for more of a "traditional European" vibe, particularly the Santa Monica location, which to be honest always puts the wind up my back a little. This smaller location, though, really nailed their design: it seemed to fit perfectly in a very small space.

A "Nico": espresso, cinnamon, candied orange rind, and a dab of steamed light cream. Pretty rich, but an interesting little desert drink.

We need a better way of mapping worthwhile cafes for tourists like me. A lot of coffee people I talked to seemed to think that LA was pretty much "dead" outside of the Intelligentsias. And, compared to some other cities, maybe that's true; but nobody even mentioned Caffe Luxxe. At any rate, glad I made it.

Intelligentsia Pasadena Cafe

55 East Colorado Blvd, Pasadena

I picked Jessica up and we went up to Pasadena to check the Intelligentsia there. I really like the space: dark and warm, lots of dim lighting, and a prominent bar. We ran into some other Pull-A-Shot survivors, which makes me think that next year we should all get a secret tattoo or hand-sign or some such. I made Jess get a cup of the Thiriku, I got some Black Cat, and I decided to try some a lasagna "cupcake":

Um, awesome. Intelligentsia doing food, wine, and beer is an interesting move, and I'd like to know how it's organized.

Something that I've come to believe, at least half-heartedly, is that you can never do two things as well as you can do one thing. To put it another way: there's good reasons to specialize. Since most cafes have relatively small staffs, I think we tend to try to specialize at the level of the entire store: all employees are expected to be kind of interchangeable in terms of skill-set. That's part of the reason I always like leaner menus: the fewer things on there, the more that everyone involved will be able to focus on those items.

Clearly, the Pasadena offerings require a lot of thought and skill on a number of different fronts: beer and wine selections, food selection and preparation, in addition to a really high standard for excellence in espresso and manually-brewed coffees. How much of these areas are shared by all staff members, how much is delineated to different departments? I didn't really think of this question until later, so I didn't ask.

Definitely a cool project. I still feel like I'm getting my feet wet in terms of understanding coffee, brewing, expanding my palate, so it's pretty cool to see people actively taking that world and seeing how well it interacts with a larger culinary world. Case in point, Jess & I were invited in for the tail-end of a cheese and coffee pairing, featuring really fancy cheeses whose provenance I forgot to write down. Pretty great.

Jameson Brown Coffee Roasters

260 North Allen Avenue, Pasadena

Grabbed a quick cappuccino from Chrysti Chaney at her shop. Team Heather Perry!

Diedrich roaster, right up front, pretty bad-ass.

Pretty cool shop, very much the kind of chill-all-day-with-boardgames kind of environment that got me hooked on coffee shops in the first place. It sounds like Chrysti has a lot of plans for the place; it'll be interesting to see what happens in a year or so.

Jessica had to get home, so I dropped her off and headed to the Craft and Folk Museum for their coffee exhibit. Pretty cool. The museum's right across from the Tar Pits, so I checked that out as well. Science!

Totally not coffee-related, but I'm a sucker for giant ground sloths.

Espresso Cielo

3101 Main Street, Santa Monica

I still had a few hours to kill before my flight, so I headed back to Santa Monica & Venice, hoping to find a book for the plane and maybe a fish taco or something. Happened to remember that Ben Brown from Nuova Simonelli had recommended a joint down here: Cielo.

Glad I stopped in, not least because after a coffee-intense week I don't develop a caffeine tolerance so much as a caffeine metabolism: I need a fix every two or three hours just to stay human.

Cielo is using 49th coffee, which was a nice surprise. Their barista pulled me a really lovely shot of Epic.

He also gave me a cup of iced Yrgacheffe off their cold-drip tower for the road. Kind of mind-blowing: bright, lemon-candy acidity, balancing out the typical sweet-cream body of good coffees brewed cold. I've never got high notes like this off any cold-brewing techniques, Toddy or drip; definitely something I want to try to replicate when Spot starts cranking iced coffee again.

I found my fish tacos, wandered the Venice boardwalk for a while, and remembered that Small World Books has a really world-class SF selection, which is so nice I want to send them flowers or something.

LA was fun! Camp was crazy! I'm back in Buffalo, healed up, and I will hit you with some more updates soon.

Camp Pull-a-Shot

2010-10-28T20:57:00.001-07:00

I hit the ground running when I got back from California, haven't had time to update, but I need to get this down. Camp was fantastic, jam-packed, barely slept the whole time, my brain is still trying to digest everything I learned. Baristas, listen up, I'm serious here: if you're thinking about coffee as a profession, even a little bit, save up your tip money, get to this thing next year.

Barista camp was created with the idea that one could knock out a lot of education, and one or two certifications, in one fell swoop. Since a big selection of SCAA/Barista Guild/Roaster Guild classes are only guaranteed once a year at the SCAA event, and since they're pretty pricey to take piecemeal, this is a pretty good deal.

Now, first off, what are the BGA certifications worth? At the moment, I'm not really sure, outside of bragging rights—which is not insignificant for someone in my position: since I'm handling more and more of my company's training, for our staff and for outside accounts, it's nice to have my abilities verified by a third party. What I'm hoping is that the certifications will start to affect the way that the coffee profession works at the barista level. Right now, when I interview someone and they say “I'm a barista,” that doesn't mean much to me unless they've worked for the handful of companies I know take training super-seriously. However, if someone can prove to me that they're a level 1 BGA certified barista, then I know that: they've spent some money, and a fair amount of time. That they take this seriously. And that they meet certain basic requirements for the job. I'll still probably run through training with them, but it could save me a serious amount of labor dollars to bring in a serious barista—plus, I just know they'll be more invested in doing a good job, be less likely to do something flagrantly bad, etc.

I suspect, and I hope this isn't imputing too much purpose, that the BGA & SCAA have some wily long-term plans for the certifications, industry-changing things, but they need to build a good base of certified instructors and a big pool of certified baristas first.

I'll come back to the certifications later. The classes were the main thing. The first day, we had the chance to take the Level 1 Exam, after which we were split into two tracks. I've already taken most of the level 1 classes in different incarnations, so I was really happy to pass the level 1 test and move into the second tier of classes.

Classes, classes, classes. I filled notebooks like crazy, for a few different areas. Something I've come to realize more and more is how woefully ignorant I am regarding everything coffee goes through before it gets to my grubby barista paws. These classes didn't exactly abolish that ignorance so much as make me painfully aware of its extent, but as a philosopher that's pretty much all I ask of an educational system anyway, so, I'm happy. Jamin Haddox from Cafe Imports gave a long talk on issues affecting coffee quality before roasting—growing, processing, shipping. Tip-of-the-iceberg kind of stuff, as he kept reminding us.

It was really eye-opening to have so many perspectives on the larger coffee industry that I don't typically hear about. In addition to Jamin's talk, Peter Giuliano, Sarah Kluth, and Aida Batlle kept throwing info around. The background buzz to the camp was how much we just don't know, scientifically, about coffee, and Peter kept bringing up the GCQRI, which just started this week (check out James Hoffman's blog for a play-by-play, btw).

The hands-on classes were the most immediately relevant, of course. I went into the class on espresso extraction not sure what I would get out of it—and came out pretty much yelling and overturning tables, so excited about basic things I can do to improve espresso preparation at my shop. I've spent the last 4 days since I've been back with gram scales and timers, zeroing in on spro. There are some equipment and blend issues I want to tackle as well, but being able to make such a huge difference in basic manual techniques is more exciting for me than I can readily explain.

The class on milk steaming and latte art was pretty cool. I still can't pour a good tulip, but I know what areas to work on. (I can't get my head around the “heart” concept. Laugh it up, everyone who has accused me of being a robot.) The manual brewing class needed way more time and instructors; what I mostly got out of it was a few coffee professionals showcasing their favorite brewing methods and a few tips for each, including Sarah Kluth on the Chemex & Jason Dominy on the Clever. Vince Fedele's presentation on brewing and the Extract Mojo program mainly convinced me that I really need a refractometer.

One of the biggest perks for me at this shindig was the ability to play around on a lot of equipment. I'm usually restricted to my Lineas & Super-Jollies (and one sweet Compak). This was the first time I've ever spent any serious time on the Nuovo Simonelli Aurelia, and I was pretty impressed with it. Gotta restrict my anti-heat-exchange comments in the future, at least as it regards this machine.

I also think that, yes, timed doserless grinders are the way of the future. Consistently accurate dosing is awesome, and a grinder that does it well leaves the barista that much more able to focus on other skills. The Mahlkonig's I found a little messy but basically cool, and I really liked the Nuovo Simonelli Mythos, it seems really well-designed. Well, I really like the ease of dose adjustment, and the angled burrs tells me someone in their company is actually paying attention to barista concerns. I'm a little weirded out by how they hide the grind adjustment, but I've also noticed that you “need” to adjust a lot less frequently when the dose is more consistent, which makes so much sense that I'm almost embarrased to mention it.

In addition to sweet equipment, we had some awesome coffees to work with, from Verve, Topeca, Cuvee, Counter Culture, Batdorf & Bronson, I'm sure I'm missing some. But, really, it was the people that made this trip amazing.

4 years ago I was your typical arts & humanities grad, not sure what I was doing, hating how much I liked the Garden State soundtrack, know what I mean? To have found a passion for something that actually has job opportunities, and then to meet this whole community of people who are passionate about the same thing—it's immensely affirming. It's really nice to run into people from around the country who I've met at industry events months or years ago, touch base, see what we've learned, what we're focused on right now. I think that's particularly important to us as baristas, since we don't work in a field that automatically comes with a lot of respect or remuneration.

Plus, the geek in me was squealing at all the coffee celebrities hanging around, too many to list. Nick Cho administered my level 2 exam, which was nerve-wracking beyond belief, but also all the more satisfying when I passed. Heather Perry was in my group for the team competitions (Team Heather Perry, really not sure how we only got second place, come on now).

I was turned off by the idea of team events (school reflexes: “group work” always meant I did all the work.) But, by the end of camp, I gotta say, the team plan was inspired, and I hope they incorporate it even more into future Camps—it gave a nice structure to the week, and helped people with mild social retardation, such as myself, to get the ball rolling on meeting people and networking earlier than we would have otherwise.

This event could easily have gone for two or three weeks. Our days were jam-packed, we were up and running with the sun, I never went to sleep before midnight, and every bit of “free” time between sessions was hardly less intense: we were all running on this crazy passionate high, realizing how little time we had, and how extraordinary the level of passion and knowledge around us was. In the future, I hope Camp can run longer, or use a lot more buildings and instructors to break the classes up into smaller chunks.

If you follow coffee news at all, you've probably heard a few of the more notorious highlights: Peter on accordion, Papa Simonelli doing a kegstand, Sammy Piccolo (dot com) whipping out some disco-barista moves. I think my personal highlight was the way everyone freaked out when Aida Batlle got her barista certification: emblematic, to me, of the way that us coffee-folk are trying to get the scene more holistic. I've landed in one particular subset of the coffee world, primarily concerned with preparing and serving it, but to see a coffee farmer getting certified and then more than a hundred baristas (and importers, roasters, tech guys, etc) whooping and hollering about it—really epitomized, for me, just how connected we are, how vital the whole seed-to-cup idea is.

On a more personal level, the biggest thing I'll remember from camp is trying to shake out the adrenaline overdose after my level 2 exam. I'm pretty sure I nailed the written (go-go eidetic memory), but the practical part of it was really intense. I've been thinking a lot about whether I want to compete this spring, and it was pretty enlightening to have to perform with a high level of precision and cleanliness, under close professional scrutiny.

Camp was not vacation, but it's the biggest, most energizing and enlightening thing to happen to me this year. I'm back in Buffalo, convinced we can fix our espresso with some equipment stuff, some blend stuff, and a lot of technique improvements. I'm more convinced than ever that we can and need to get brew-to-order systems in place in Buffalo, for a host of reasons. My head is swimming with long-term concerns and hopes for the world coffee scene and specifically the future of the barista profession. Above and beyond all this, I met fantastic people (and drank fantastic coffee) that remind me why I'm so crazy about this field in the first place. Insert Kerouac quote here.

Thanks to everybody who made this happen, instructors, organizers, sponsors, there were a ton of them, a lot of whom apparently don't need to eat or sleep. Marcus Boni & Scott Lucey in particular, many thanks. I think Marcus might actually be Batman or something.

Still gotta write up my Los Angeles coffee experience real quick, and then hopefully fill you in on some Buffalo developments.

Flickr Photos:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/15458246@N00/sets/72157625263905870/

utter zombie mode

2010-10-17T20:19:00.000-07:00

I love going to these coffee events, but being away from my shop for even one whole day is kind of nerve-wracking for me. To compound the issue, this last week was maintenance time, meaning: I spent a lot of weird overnights at different locations, taking stuff apart and putting it back together. I really like working on the equipment, nearly on the level with serving awesome espresso in terms of satisfaction for me, but the vampiric necessity of doing all major work when the cafés are closed has been kind of rough.

But! Within a few weeks things should be back to normal, and I can focus back in on the café. Heading to Santa Barbara tomorrow for Camp Pull-A-Shot (yes, that's really what it's called), planning on soaking up as much knowledge and technique as I possibly can.

I leave you with this: mopeds are the new fixies? Apparently, these folks meet up by Caffé Aroma every Sunday. Huh.

MANE!

2010-10-11T23:34:00.000-07:00

I am still digesting all the ideas and energy from this weekend in Rhode Island. Before sun-up Friday morning, I set off for the Mid-Atalantic/North-East Artisanal Coffee Conference in Providence, with 10 other Buffalo baristas packed into the van.

This conference was different than other coffee events I've attended in two big ways. One: it has absolute zero dilution with crap vendors. Everybody attending, speaking, teaching, talking is focused on quality coffee, not selling you something. Two: price. Registration was $60, meaning it's something a persuasive coffee geek (ahem) can talk a barista into. Classes I've taken in the past have been totally worth it, but a weekend of SCAA classes jumps into the hundreds of dollars real fast. Sixty bucks, plus a hotel, in driving range of Buffalo, means that a lot more people were able to go.

Friday evening we checked into our hotel and then came down to Pawtucket to find the event. New Harvest was our host, and their facility is awesome: a huge repurposed mill with lots of great space. Sarah Allen, editor of Barista Magazine, gave the keynote address. Ending on a story of taking Marzoccos to origin so that farmers could taste their own crop as espresso for the first time, she had at least a few of us kind of choked up out in the audience.

After that, it was time to get hands-on with the machines, and sweet, sweet machines they were. Our tools for the weekend were three 2-group Lineas with manual paddles and PID retrofits. I'd never had a chance to play around with a paddle-group for any length of time, so that was pretty cool.

Spro down! I'd heard of it, but never participated: a sensory (rather than art-based) competition, we were given a grinder full of Flat Black espresso and allowed to pull one shot. After observing and tasting it, we adjusted our variables and served the espresso to two judges who quickly scored them.

Kristen won the spro-down! She won a big bag of swag, and made me quote that whole “when last we met, I was but a student” line a lot. Seriously, super-proud of her; Kristen was the first person to go through my new barista training at Spot. And now, in addition to winning the first Buffalo latte throw-down, she came out on top of about 60 pros, including me, on new machines and a new blend. Dang.

The night continued with much revelry, but we turned in fairly early so we could get back at it for classes on Saturday.

Class structure was a little odd, but I got a lot out of it.

-Tommy Gallagher of Counter Culture Coffee led 2 sessions of machine maintenance and discussion. I'm pretty sure he has my dream job, and I'd like to go shadow him for a while. He did a phenomenal job of explaining how espresso machines work in a very systematic way. I saw a lot of people in the class, mostly manager types, get this “aha, demystified” look over and over again while he was talking.

-Jay Caragay of Spro Coffee (might be my dream shop) led an alternative brewing class and lab, which was one of the main reasons I came to the conference in the first place. Hearing him talk about the logistics and financial realities of this kind of coffee was exactly what I needed. I'm still kind of ruminating on it. Awesome brew-to-order is something that NEEDS to happen in Buffalo; it's one of the biggest missing pieces we need to add to get a real quality scene here.

-Sarah Kluth of Intelligentsia (continuing the dreamy trend) led a cupping class: not how to become a better cupper, but how to organize cuppings better. Amazing session; Sarah's passion for coffee, and her eloquence in expressing that, was almost literally stunning. I wish I'd had a tape recorder for that...and also because it was the first time I've cupped with a large number of experienced cuppers, so I was very amused and satisfied with the volume of the slurping going on in the room. I really can't wait to get the Buffalo Coffee Cabal going again: I want to do some "cuppings" with chocolate, fruits, spices, start getting creative with palate training.

Other highlights for me:

-Cascara! This is the dried outer part of the coffee fruit. Somebody, I'm assuming Counter Culture, dropped off a bag on the alternative brewing table, and I think I was the first to spot it.

This stuff is amazing! Definitely the biggest sensory learning experience for me the whole weekend. I opened the bag and stuck my nose in: immediately slammed with this rich aroma of raisins, oranges, pipe tobacco. Seriously, why the hell is coffee this complex? I chewed up a few pieces right away, intrigued by the changing flavor profile as it softened. Somebody at the table suggested a ballpark brewing method of 20grams to 10oz hot water, steeped for 7 minutes, which worked well: we passed around a cup of the sweet, citrusy, tea-like infusion. Really interesting stuff, I need to get my hands on some to keep messing around with it. I'm thinking this stuff could be CRAZY popular if served right.

-As always, I'm intrigued with equipment. Paddle-groups are cool, PID kits are something I need to make happen at Spot, and Tommy pulled apart a GB5 for us to look at, which is cool for me since that's the next machine we're buying.

There was a Marco Uber Boiler on display, but something was wrong with it and it never actually worked. And, there was a Luminaire Bravo prototype at the brewing lab, but it still has some pretty massive problems. Precision, on-demand hot water supply, with programmable options (and, with the Marco, built-in scale) is something that will make artisan coffee much more repeatable—but these machines don't seem to have the capacity or the price-point to hack it in a commercial setting yet. Still, interesting.

Saturday night was a crazy, semi-free-for-all of head-to-head latte throw-downs. I won a couple, lost a couple, felt pretty great about it. Sunday, Drew took the BGA Level 1 test, we hit a couple Providence cafes, and did the long drive home.

The classes and events were cool, of course, but as per usual it was the people that made this worthwhile. Being in a room with a hundred other coffee professionals makes you remember that: oh, right, we are professionals. That camraderie and shared purpose is the biggest thing I wanted the other Buffalonians to pick up on, and I think they did, in a big way.

There were people at MANE who have made a huge impact on me personally, whether or not they know it. There are people who I think of as my peers, who are doing really cool things in different parts of the world and the business; getting to shake hands and share a drink with these folks once or twice a year keeps me from turning into a giant ball of existential angst. And I was continually impressed by how I just saw these kinds of friendships being struck up all around me, people jumping into intense technical discussions or amazing anecdotes at the drop of a hat. This is a really exciting time to be in specialty coffee, period, and that can be easy to forget when we're focused in on the problems and frustrations of our particular coffee-shops. Getting excited about new things, getting excited about old things all over again, meeting so many people of all ages who have the same goals and respect at the core of what they do: that's why we need more events like this.

Thanks so much to New Harvest & Cosmic Cup for getting the ball rolling on this, and all the sponsors and volunteers who made it happen. We NEED more events like this! I'm hoping really hard that the knowledge and excitement that came back in the van with us is really going to start a new chapter in the Buffalo coffee scene. We will see.

I took a thousand pictures, and I will get them online as soon as I can get my computer to wise up. Thanks for reading.
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Update: got a bunch of photos up on flickr!
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Update: other people's write-ups and pics:

Boston: Flour, Aroma, Pavement, 1369, many others

2010-10-07T19:09:00.000-07:00

Saturday was our wander-about-town-day, so of course I managed to steer us past a few coffee joints. One huge winner, a couple of interesting places, and a bunch that I walked out of without ordering.

Started the day off some of the Honduras coffee I'd purchased from barismo. Skerton grinder & the Clever make good travelling companions, although in the future I think I'll just pack a v60: I like the Clever, but I'm not always as happy with it as other methods. What I really wanted to bring was my vac-pot, but between the fragility and the troubles with transporting/fuelling the burner I just didn't want to mess with it.

After wandering about Cambridge for a bit, we took the T over to Boston proper, where I was hoping to track down S I P Cafe. Took forever to find it, and then it turns out they're closed on Saturdays (contra their website)! Bummer. They have a literally ridiculous location, right in this park downtown, I'd love to know how they got it (and what they pay for it).

There was a local food festival going on by the Children's museum, so we wandered through that for a while and got some goodies.

Chatted real briefly with the woman at the slow food tent, mostly just to give a little moral support. It seems to me like, at least in theory, specialty coffee folks should be talking with the slow food folks.

I saw some people with an espresso machine cranking in the middle of the festival, which excited me: a few people at Spot keep talking about going mobile with a cart for festivals, farmers markets etc. However, after watching the operator for a little bit, unfortunately, I didn't want to order anything. Short shots, appeared to be resteaming milk to temp over and over again. Alas.

Flour Bakery & Cafe was just around the corner, so we went there for a quick bite. It was crazy busy and were fiending for food, so I didn't take any pictures. My espresso was decent, the staff was very friendly despite the madness, and the food was excellent. The French Toast might have been the best I've ever had--my brain's having a hard time coming up with a contender.

L'Aroma Café

85 Newbury St, Boston

L'Aroma hadn't been super-prioritized on my list, but we were walking about that area anyway so we stopped in. I noticed latte art going out on pretty much all drinks, which I took for a good sign. However, even more exciting:

Sarah's a Buffalo native and a Spotter in the summer and holidays. I knew she'd got a job as a barista somewhere in Boston, I'd even talked to her boss when they were checking references, but I actually had never heard which café it was. Turns out, it's L'Aroma! It was really great to catch up with her for a minute a two--neat to hear what she thinks about the job and the coffee scene now that she's been a barista for a while.

Aroma was also packed, looks like a good café--again, my espresso was decent, Jessica & Anthony reported good things on their cappuccinos. It seems like a more European-style café, though it's hard to point to just one thing to explain that. That can be a bad thing--people using "Europe=Fancy" logic to cover up mediocre product and service, but here you can tell that somebody has a clear idea of what they want out of the café, and it's working. Lauren got an iced London Fog, and it was pretty bad-ass: they used a cold-foam technique for the milk (didn't see what they did exactly), and layered that over the superbly-iced tea (again, didn't see how they did that), with a little layer of vanilla syrup at the bottom. Great presentation, and the cold foam was really nice.

Through our journeys around town, we popped in to a ton of little cafés, and after a quick inspection I bailed on most of them. Anthony seemed very curious about this process, so I tried to quantify it for him. Basically, I have a loose point system, with a few things that just seal the deal in a bad way. I can drink bad coffee if I need the caffeine, without complaining; what I won't do is pay $2 and up over and over again for really bad coffee when I'm hunting for something extraordinary. I particularly won't pay for multiple bad espresso drinks if I can help it, and, like most baristas, I've learned a few "tells" that can warn me away from a shop's product. I'll have to do a write-up on that.

However, all the wandering paid off at the next serious shop.

Pavement Coffeehouse

1096 Boylston Street, Boston

Obviously, they're going to pull in an awesome crowd on the name alone (and it leaves them open to doing something with "Jicks Café" if they open another one or break up or something). But, name aside, this was my favorite stop on the whole Boston tripe, for a number of reasons.

Cool artwork all through the shop, by a lady named Alexa Guariglia. It's rare that I comment positively on art in a café, so, there you go. I really dug all of it.

Really love the set-up and décor in here. A lot. Lots of light, clean, nice mix of seating, cozy without being shabby, hip without seeming pretentious. Nailed it.

But, of course, you could have the prettiest café in the world and I wouldn't really care. It's coffee I'm after, and Pavement delivered.

First off, they're using 3 roasters, and proud of it. Square One, Atomic, and Counter Culture. Menu pic's blurry, but you can see what they're doing:

This "slow bar" menu is separate from the batch-brewed options and their (wonderfully limited) light fare. Awesome. The service wasn't slow by any standard, but just calling it the slow bar is a a great way to gently alert people that, yes, quality coffee takes a little longer than the other kind.

They have a house espresso (they were using Counter Culture's Toscano), and also have a rotating "featured" or "guest espresso"--this day it was Opus 11 by Square One. I actually opted for the Toscano for my macciato, because I'm a fan. Pavement baristas' espresso-craft is solid, I had a great shot, and art in a macciato tells me that they care.

But what really sold me, it's practically a bribe actually: awesome Ethiopian coffee, brewed to order, in this case in a Hario v60. Boom, blueberries to the face. Their sizes for v60 coffee are 8oz, or a "large" 12oz, hallelujah--no soul-crushingly giant cups in sight. This is the cup I've been waiting for all week. (To be fair, the Guatemalan vacpot I had at barismo was also world-class; I'm just a sucker for a good Ethiopian brew).

On top of all this, the baristas were also friendly, professional, knew their coffee and weren't afraid to talk about it a little. Pavement, good job, I'll be steering people your way.

We took a long walk home on Massachusetts ave, and I hopped in to a couple coffee houses real quick on the way:

Toscanini's Ice Cream

899 Main Street, Cambridge

I heard these folks have drastically upped their espresso game, and that their coffee is even better. Unfortunately, it was packed to the gills when we stopped by, so I didn't order anything--still hoofing it home. Their barista totally looked like he know what he was doing, though, rocking out on a GB/5. Definitely gotta make it here next time.

Clear Conscience Cafe

581 Mass. Ave, Cambridge

Clear Conscience Café or "C3" is playing up the Fair Trade/Organic angle real hard to the co-op shopping kind of crowd, know what I mean? Yes, I'm guilty too. I wish they were Direct Trade, and I get a little skeeved out by Fair Trade being touted as such an awesome ethical thing (lack of transparency etc.), but other things being equal it's a good thing, and I'm glad someone is selling coffee so well on that point. My espresso was okay, nothing outstanding--but I find that drinkable espresso is already in like the top 10% of all espressos being served out there, so I'm happy with that. Getting to maybe the top 5%, where I actively like it, is actually just about as rare as a plain old, decent, not-horrible shot.

The baristas at C3 weren't too clear on where there coffee is actually from (transparency issues in microcosm?) but I don't think they roast it themselves, just re-brand it or something, apparently sell it around town as well. I ran into it the next morning at the place we had brunch. Where, total side note, Anthony got one of the more amazing breakfast pizzas I've ever seen:

1369 Coffee House

757 Mass. Ave, Cambridge

I was impressed with this location when I visited Boston last year: got some great latte art, and struck up a good conversation with the baristas. My visit to the main location this time around was decidedly ho-hum; the Cambridge location was better. Don't know if that's some kind of micro-culture of training, or just luck, but my cap was definitely better here. I thought they roasted their own, but, cruising their website, I can't really tell where they get it from.

Kind of a weird note to end the coffee part of the trip on (well, I did make it into Crema a few more times). The Boston trip as a whole was fantastic, Jessica & Anthony are among the coolest people I've met in the last 5 years, and I'm ridiculously glad we've stayed in touch even after they left Buffalo. Lauren & I haven't had a vacation in a while, and my work & coffee schedule has been so nuts that we haven't had much bf/gf time, so the trip was nice for that. Plus, saw Scott Pilgrim again (higah!), saw The Tallest Man On Earth again (double-higah!), saw the Boston Museum of Bad Art (all 3 in the same theatre, incidentally), had many awesome foods and coffees, went to Walden Pond, and watched Hush as our Buffy re-affirmation or whatever. Great trip.

What did I learn, coffee-wise, this trip?
-Saw some neat tea shops. Specifically, I was very intrigued by the equipment set-up at Tealuxe in Harvard Square--multiple hot-water towers at different settings for different teas, stand-alone steam stations, big cold-brew iced-tea dispensers...pretty neat. I'm not super into tea at the moment (yet?), it kind of scares me actually.
-Red Spro, rooibos ground so it can be run through an espresso machine to make a totally decaf, supposedly very healthy...substance. I actually like it quite a lot, have thought about running it at Spot. Boston's the only place where I've seen it present in any significant percentage. It's a cool decaf option.
-Lots and lots of shops with multiple roasters. That's awesome. I think it should become standard to see this unless you're roasting your own. Maybe even then.
-Obviously I learned a lot about chocolate.
-Baked goods! They are huge here. The bar for pastries is just much higher here; or a better way to say it might be that the bar for coffee at places that are primarily bakeries is much higher. That actually might be the biggest thing I noticed in Boston.
-And the best brews were brew-to-order, at barismo and Pavement, no surprise. Pavement is the only high-volume shop doing brew-to-order, which is surprising and a little disheartening. However, they seem pretty successful, Simon's is doing it at least some of the time, and Hi-Rise appears to have a decent following and are brewing all day, so there is hope.

Lots of places I didn't make it to, so they're on my list for next time: Cafe Fixe, Taste (which I hear George Howell just bought), and if I can get a tour or something I really want to see the George Howell/Terroir facility.

But! Good job, Boston, thanks to the many baristas and other professionals at all these locations.

I have to throw a bag together and hit the hay, me and a van-ful of Buffalo baristas are heading back towards Boston for the MANE coffee conference in Providence, RI. I'll keep you posted.

Just a barista, today

2010-10-06T19:09:00.000-07:00

A lot of my time these days is spent on managerial stuff. I like learning the business, and trying to run the café as best I can, but it adds up. Ordering, inventory, banking, staff & schedule issues have sort of crept up to take up most of my week.

So, it's a really nice change of pace to just work the bar for a while. I had to cover the morning shift today, no real managerial duties, just pulling shots and steaming milk for six hours.

It still astonishes me, how many areas I can still improve on. Speed, consistent art, cap texture are all things I was working on today, but the big thing is dosing. Getting a method where I can grind, dose, distribute, tamp, exactly the same, with minimal waste, every time, is really something I've been focusing on. It's hard to practice in vacuum, so it was really nice to just have dozens of shots, one after the other, through the morning rush. I also want to figure out the combination of equipment and technique that will allow me to brew shots at the temperature that tastes the best, but that's a more involved post for later.

Working morning bar brings me back to the 3 reasons I've stayed in the coffee business, instead of going back to school for philosophy or whatever: the coffee itself, the physical act of making espresso & steaming milk, and serving customers.

Some days I feel like I kind of have to hide how much I like this aspect of my job. The finished product is something I could be obsessed with whether or not I'm making it. The physical act of making espresso has this level of complexity, subtlety, sensuousness, that I find really absorbing. I like working with my hands, generally, but particularly where I can see and evaluate the results. With espresso & steaming milk, I've been getting obsessive about one factor or another for years now, and trying to maintain my standard of excellence while preparing multiple drinks in a hurry is something that is kind of like meditation for me.

The customer side of it is huge, for me, and it's nice to just serve drinks instead of being the trouble-shooter all day. When I first moved to Buffalo from my tiny town in the sticks of PA, I was more than a little nervous about city-life, but, boom, first day working at Elmwood, I was thrust into this community, this village, on both sides of the bar. Getting to know regulars, chatting about crap like the weather, having these conversations that take place in 2-minute intervals everyday--really makes me feel like this is where I ought to be.

And it's just really gratifying. A paycheck is great, but the feeling of making a tangible product, handing it out, seeing them enjoy it, getting genuinely thanked a few times an hour--that is one of the big reasons I've stuck with it.

Of course, when I'm working the bar these days I can't help but notice things I'd change or tweak if it were my show. I wish there were a way to steer people away from 20oz, ludicrously sweet drinks. After making a string of as-close-to-flawless-as-I-can-manage lattes and caps, the unavoidable drop in quality when I have to make a 4-shot drink with huge amounts of syrup is just kind of a bummer. I understand that we make a lot of money on those drinks, and I've made my peace with serving blender drinks; I also notice that we get very few repeat customers on the sugar-bombs, whereas the regular lattes and cappuccino drinkers come back every day, like clockwork.

But, quibbles aside, a really good day. Then, at the end of my shift, I remembered that Michael had some samples in from Royal that he wanted me to come try, so I got to end my day (well, almost) with a cupping.

We had three coffees from the Pacific region to try today. I've never had any coffees from Timor before, so that was interesting--nothing too weird, just what I look for in a decent Indonesian (lots of body, low acidity, not too muddy). New crop of Bali is in; it isn't last year's honey, alas, but it's still a good coffee, unusual Indo, tons of flowers on top of earth. I was most impressed with the Papua New Guinea sample, which had this real caramel sweetness that was colored with some surprisingly snappy, apple-like brightness that came out to something almost juicy as it cooled.

I've still got to post my notes from my last day in Boston, and there's a bunch of exciting coffee stuff on the horizon. Stay tuned.

Boston: L.A. Burdick, Taza

2010-10-04T14:42:00.000-07:00

Boston, Day 3! I had planned to use this morning to run around on a lightning-fast coffee foot-tour, but hurricane winds and rain kinda put paid to that idea. Instead, I limited myself to finding a worthwhile umbrella ("Windbrella", it turns out), and then bunkering in until Jessica got out to chauffeur us around. I did stop in at Burdick's on the way back from my umbrella-hunt, and it wound up being a pretty chocolate-centric day from there.

L.A. Burdick

52 Brattle Street, Cambridge

Burdick's is a pretty elegant space--lots of pale wood-grain, mirrors, and gold tones, nice benches and tables. I like the old botanical color-plates a lot. I hear that they are thinking about removing some of their cases and shelves to allow more seating--I never saw it slammed when I was walking by, but their always seemed to be at least a handful of people enjoying a drink.

However, what really grabbed my attention was a sign in the window offering "single-origin chocolate", hot or iced. I really like sipping chocolate anyway, so the idea of an SO is definitely intriguing.

The person who served me (chocolatier?) was extremely helpful and informative, pretty much the perfect mix of service and education. When I asked about the single-origin chocolate, she first grabbed me a little sample of their standard chocolate blend to compare against, and then suggested a few of her favorites, with flavor and production notes.

I decided to try the Grenada, and I loved it. I've never really thought about coffee having nuanced flavors beyond cocoa content and added ingredients, so it was interesting to sit and try and actually notice the complexity of this coffee (the banana was up front, and a lot of complex spicey/fruity things going on under that).

I kind of knew, at the beginning of the day, that chocolate has a ton of parallels to coffee. Now, here I am, realizing that my appreciation of chocolate has been about as superficial as the people who are fixated on roast level and added flavors in coffee. Interesting. The Burdick's chocolatiers are the first people I've heard talk about terroir relative to chocolate (one of the reasons they like cacoa from Grenada), and my server had the perfect mix of knowledge and passion about the product without overwhelming me--something that I still encounter very rarely even in coffee shops that are serving great coffee.

Burdick's has a lot of chocolate confectionary for sale, and they looked like they knew what they were doing with espresso-based drinks, but it's really the drinking chocolate bar aspect that appeals to me. The sizes range from 4 to 12 oz, I believe, with prices in the $2-5 range. It's a nice change of pace, to sit and slowly drink some awesome chocolate instead of an espresso drink--and the atmosphere is a nice change too, classy without being scary, quiet without being library-like.

Taza Chocolate

561 Windsor St, Somerville

Braving the rains, we made our way up to Somerville, where we grabbed a quick bite at the All Star Sandwich Bar. I had a falafel "burger"--good idea, much less sloppy to eat, easier to load up with other goodies. Thumbs up.

Then, we wandered around trying to find our way to the Taza plant for our tour. It's kind of set back on a weird street, and we walked past it a few times before Lauren's Droid came to the rescue.

I've seen Taza chocolate in nearly every café I've visited in the Boston area, and saw them at a little farmer's market as well--they've got very good coverage. I liked the samples I'd had last year when I visited, and the fact that they are using a coffee-type "Direct Trade" model for chocolate is pretty interesting, so I was really looking forward to the tour.

Okay, so, I haven't had a tour of any big artisan coffee roasters, but this blew away any coffee tour I've ever heard of, while at the same time focusing on pretty much the exact kind of thing I'd like to focus on for a coffee tour.

Parallels galore.

Our tour guides were excellent, and we had two for just three of us, so it was very relaxed and informal, with lots of time to ask and answer questions. (I was mentally comparing it to the Hershey Park tour the entire time, which most Pennsylvanians endure at one point or another. The Hershey tour is totally automated, pretty fake, I'm pretty sure you never see chocolate actually being produced, but it does include animatronic, singing cows.)

I actually had to rein my geek in a little bit when our tour guides whipped out phrases like "bean to bar" or emphasized that ~~coffee~~ chocolate is a fruit, with that range of flavors and seasonality. I'd never thought about the fact that there must be different species or varietals of chocolate, but, of course, there are. Taza is using mostly (totally?) the criollo cultivar, which sounds a lot like Coffea arabica in that it is more finicky, less productive, and way more sweet/aromatic than other varieties.

I really wish Michael, my roaster, could have been here to check out their roasting set-up. Pretty cool machine. I was also kind of flabbergasted by their "winnower", which separates the meat of the bean from the shell:

Apparently they got it used in the Dominican Republic somewhere, went down and disassembled it and shipped it back.

You can tell that this is a cool company, real committed. Apparently, founder Alex Whitmore spent a lot of time in Mexico ("Oaxaca is his food mecca") learning about traditional stone-ground chocolate techniques.

Hand-dressed ~~burrs~~ millstones? My inner equipment geek is bouncing off the walls, not sure what my outer geek was doing.

We basically got to walk through the whole facility, except for the hot-room where the coffee is milled. They call this room the "fishbowl", though, because it has windows on all sides for us touristy types.

All in all, best $5 I've spent in a long time. We probably ate that much in samples along the way, which were geared towards showing off the way that different production methods affect flavor. Two things jump out at me with Taza's chocolate--first off, just the complexity of the chocolate flavor. It's kind of an unexpected rabbit-hole for me, actually, because one of the big epiphanies for me in coffee has been realizing that there is no "coffee flavor": that's just the total averaging out of many other flavors. "Chocolate" is one of the words I use to describe some coffees, and now I'm realizing that chocolate is the same--it's actually a complex mix of flavors that just average out, particularly in mass-production stuff, to "one" chocolate flavor. Second thing that jumps out is texture: Taza might be the only place I've encountered chocolate with interesting texture, due to their coarse grinding methods.

So, yeah, fantastic tour. I've been trying to decide for a while if I want to compete in the barista championships this coming spring, and I might want to do something with chocolate for a specialty drink--Taza has me thinking that I need to really do some research on espresso/chocolate pairing. Maybe unsweetened--I'd never tasted straight cocoa nibs before, and I was getting all kinds of complexity out of it once my tongue got past the slight bitterness.

At the end of the tour you're pretty much bound to buy a ton of chocolate anyway. These are the "Mexicano" disks; they have a range of interesting and simple ingredients added. I really like the Salt & Pepper.

A good day for chocolate! Single-origin, direct-trade, bean-to-bar focus...I'm impressed. Coffee scene today was not so good (checked out 1369's main location, and while my cap wasn't bad it wasn't anything to blog about), but we've still got some places to check out in the city proper.

Boston: Hi-Rise, Crema, Sofra, Barismo

2010-10-02T21:28:00.000-07:00

Day 2 in Boston!

Hi-Rise at the Blacksmith House

56 Brattle St, Cambridge

Hi-Rise seems primarily to be a bakery and sandwich-centric café on 208 Concord Ave, which I haven't visited, but they also have this café just around the corner from me in Harvard Square. As soon as I walked in I could tell this place was kinda third-wave, and I was very impressed with my cap, pulled once more with barismo's 7 espresso.

I was served by their main barista/manager for a little bit, and once I'd self-identified in the coffee geek direction we talked about the local scene a little.

The space is small, but interesting, with seating outside and upstairs. I really liked the upstairs section, since it's just a house, and feels like it.

They also do brew-to-order coffee using Clevers. In addition to a few coffees from barismo, they were also offering a selection from Ritual: score another point for multiple roasters. All in all, pretty impressed.

Crema Café

27 Brattle St., Cambridge

Crema is kind of the stand-by coffee shop in Harvard Square, and I'm pretty impressed with the quality. I've been happy with all the espresso drinks: latte art and excellent shots. They do some sandwiches and light fare in addition to pastries, all pretty great; I tried the rosemary goat cheese & walnut sandwich, quite nice, and all the pastries were excellent.

I think what impresses me most with Crema is the quality relative to how busy they are: I haven't seen it less than packed, and the line seems unending. Nonetheless, the service & bar quality have always been high for me. It's a shame they're not doing any brew-to-order other than espresso, but they are using some excellent Terroir coffee, with lots of origin photos on the wall--courtesy George Howell, I'm assuming. I wish I had some more pictures in here, but it's always pretty crowded and busy. Definitely worth checking out if you're in the area.

Sofra Bakery

1 Belmont St., Cambridge

Sofra's primarily a Mediterranean bakery and restaurant, but they do their coffee well, and it seems to have a good dose of that third place thing going on.

Spinach & cheese flatbread, kohlrabi pancakes

Breakfast and lunch options are good, but the bakery case is even better. We wound up taking a bag to go, just because we couldn't try enough in one sitting (and because otherwise I'd have to pretend that earthquake chocolate cookies are an acceptable meal option).

Given the size of their menu and baked good selection, and the huge amount of other stuff they have on sale (cookbooks, spices, various prepared foods), it's really kind of amazing to see them also pull a great shot of espresso.

With an orange-glazed cinnamon "morning roll"

They offer the usual assortment of espresso drinks using Rao's coffee, and Turkish coffee is also on the menu. Is there a non-nationally-biased word for that? Sofra's also has "red spro" lattes, which I've seen a couple places in Boston--Crema offers it as well.

I definitely like rooibos tea, and red spro is an interesting total decaf option--and I like that it allows a barista to serve a drink with perfectly textured milk, when otherwise the caffeine-fearing customer would just get an herbal tea. I looked into getting this going in Buffalo, got some samples and messed around with it... The only real issue I have with it is committing a group-head on the Marzocco to it (well, that and seeing if enough of it sells to make buying it in bulk worthwhile). Still, something to look for at Spot in the future, even if only as a temporary featured drink.

barismo

169 Massachusetts Ave, Arlington

Up to this point, the most exciting new coffee I've had in Boston is barismo's espresso. They've got a pretty good rep, and they're also one of the key conduits for Hario's awesome coffee equipment right now in the US. I emailed them about visiting their roasting facilities and was invited to "come geek out", so I was pretty stoked to go check them out.

They have a full café set-up, with a GB/5 and a slew of grinders and brewers. However, it's pretty clear that they mainly use all this to test coffee, not to actually exist as a café--there's a menu board, but no chairs or tables. I actually really like that they keep the option of selling coffee by the cup to anyone who happens to wander in, even though they're not trying to be a coffee bar.

What impressed me most about this facility is the small size of the roasters: they are working in 7 pound batches. 7 pounds. I thought I misheard at first. This is really artisan coffee, and it shows in the cup.

I had a singularly awesome cup of a Guatemalan coffee (El Bosque), prepared in a vac-pot. A really distinctive cup, with lots of floral sweetness. I grabbed a bag of their Cup of Excellence-winning Honduras to take home.

I also got to check out a prototype of the Luminaire hot water dispenser. If you had told me, 5 years ago, that I would be this interested in exactly controlling the temperature and flow-rate of hot water, I don't know what I would have thought. Since getting a brew-bar of some kind rolling in Buffalo is one my highest priorities, I'm real keen on checking out all the options, and this LB-1 is the less expensive, maybe-superior counterpart to the Marco Uber Boiler, which I think is STILL not exactly on the market. (Check out a review of the Luminaire prototype on Jay's Strange Blog.)

The barismo guys love it, which I can understand in terms of dialing in a coffee as exactly as possible. Still not sure how useful this thing would be in a busy commercial setting, though. I'm having a hard time picturing Spot Elmwood work effectively with less than 4-cup rail system--would I need 4 water dispensers? Also, I really like the show of the pour-over rail, and the ease of talking over it to the customer--a row of water towers could take away from both of those. That said, this kind of precision water delivery will definitely have a place in some coffee environments--roasters testing coffees, slow-coffee bars, niche shops, maybe restaurants who just want to do the occasional cup with gourmet exactitude.

Anyway, I'm really glad I got up to check out barismo's place. This is easily the most third-wave, artisan approach to roasting I've seen in action.

I still have a few more days in Boston, with many coffee things on my list...I think I need to find a better way to do these coffee-benders-and-then-blog things, because I keep trying to write smack in the middle of a massive caffeine crash every night, which I realize is not the best way to generate outstanding prose. Next post, look for a slight detour away from coffee...

Boston: Simon's, Diesel, Canto 6, Ula

2010-09-30T15:16:00.000-07:00

In what I hope is becoming a tradition, Lauren & I are in Boston, in the fall, to visit Buffalo expats Jessica & Anthony. Cambridge, actually, and I like that the whole city is constantly if subliminally telling me to go back for the doctorate. Naturally I need to check the coffee scene. My map has a fair amount of shops to check out, it's barismo & George Howell's turf, I'm excited.

Simon's Coffee House

736 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge

Squeezed right next to the best video store I've seen in a long time, Simon's was a very pleasant surprise for me. Googling around the internet hadn't revealed too much about it, so I wasn't sure what to expect.

They have a surprising amount of seating packed into a long, narrow bar. Beans hail from both George Howell & barismo, so I'm already a little impressed: cafes using more than one roaster are, I think, very definitely a step in the right direction, and not as flash as other developments in third wave but pretty crucial, I think, towards getting coffee bars in the specialty wine/beer direction. (Imagine if bars only served beer from one brewery, and only admitted of "dark" vs. "light" brews, no more complexity at all.) At some point I do want to talk to a multi-roaster cafe (Spro in Baltimore being the best example I've seen) and ask how that works out financially, if they're taking a big cut in their mark-up by not having the larger orders and hence larger leverage with one provider.

Baked goods looked excellent, and I had a maple-oat scone that did not disappoint: just the right mix of density, moisture, and sweetness. When I do opt for scones, they tend to go too far in one direction or another along all three of those axes, but this scone was pretty much perfect by my standards. Simon's also has a really nice tea selection (didn't catch the company), and the loose-leaf pot is a nice option you don't always see.

I saw Nick Cho's "50 ways to improve espresso" posted on the front of the bar, which I took for a good sign. My cap was excellent, perfectly textured, and the espresso interesting enough to send me back for a ristretto (which they have on the menu, at the same price as espresso, just to get people to order it as a viable option: score another point). Turns out my barista was Simon himself, so we chatted for a little bit about the espresso (barismo's "7", heavy on a washed Guatemalan, very tasty).

Simon's has a 4-top pour-over bar with v60s, but they don't use it before 2pm, which I thought was a little backward. I didn't ask about the rationale, which I assume has something to do with staffing and wait times--still, it seems a shame to have an awesome set-up and not use it for the core coffee crowd, which is to say, in the morning. I'm particularly interested in this since I'm trying to figure out the logistics of implementing brew-to-order in a high-volume setting. At any rate, I got a chance to swing back after 2pm and get a cup of a Costa Rica, very tasty. Overall, very impressed with the café, and I hope they can get the pour-over working all day.

Diesel Cafe

257 Elm St, Somerville

Diesel seems to have one of the biggest reputations of the Boston area's cafés, so I was pretty intrigued to check it out. Unfortunately, I wasn't allowed to take any pictures inside.

It's definitely a neat café, but I think the rep has a lot more to do with the space than the coffee. They are using Intelligentsia beans, and my cap was well-made, but they only offer batch-brewed coffee and the menu features a lot of sweet, syrupy drinks. Nothing wrong with that, just not the progressive, coffee-focused scene I was hoping for.

The space is pretty cool though, with a ton of seating, tables, cushioned booths, pool tables, all kinds of stuff. It's actually very bar-like, just taken over by lots of people studying and working on laptops. I didn't try the food, but it looked pretty good, your basic upscale light fare.

Canto 6 Bakery & Café

3346 Washington St, Jamaica Plain

Jessica had heard this place was pretty good, and we were kicking around going down to see the Arnold Arboretum, so we stopped in. Glad we did! This is definitely a bakery first, café second, but the food was totally worth it.

Seating is pretty minimal, but the service was quick, and the food was excellent. I didn't try any espresso drinks, and while the coffee was just batch-brewed, it was brewed appropriately and pretty fresh, which is rare in my experience (they're using Equal Exchange coffee; I had an El Salvador Las Collinas).


Spiced Apple Cider Soda, Salted Chocolate Chip Cookie, Apple & Blue Cheese Brioche


Sidestep: smoky tempeh, roasted squash, tomato, cheddar, chipotle-honey vinaigrette & black-pepper mayo on fresh ciabatta. The best veg I've had in Boston so far.

Ula Cafe

284 Armory St, Jamaica Plains

Ula is set in the corner of the very impressive-looking Brewery Complex in Jamaica Plains, and I failed to get a good picture of the whole building (which also houses the home offices of Bikes Not Bombs, which is pretty sweet).

It's a pretty neat cafe, inside, with an interesting contrast of brick, industrial-looking piping, and tons and tons of blond woodgrain. They have a great logo featuring the brewery in red, and lots and lots of good merch. Including a sippy cup!

We tried an apricot bar and their house granola: both excellent. I got an espresso, and although it took a while to get it I could tell that the barista was really being a perfectionist with every aspect of his technique. The shot was really good, well balanced, from a blend made especially for Ula by New Harvest Roasters.

Ula & Canto 6 are both a stone's-throw from the train stops in Jamaica Plains. I was hoping to find another café worth my dime in "JP", but no luck this trip. I was intrigued by the fact that JP Licks, the ice cream joint, roasts their own coffee, but I had the good fortune of seeing one of their baristas make a latte before I ordered--causing me to not give that one a try. I'm sure their ice cream is fantastic, and maybe I'll try the coffee at a different location. Anyway, a pretty successful coffee day, and I have more coming up before we head back to Buffalo.

Queen East Cafes & the Canada Coffee & Tea Show

2010-09-26T21:12:00.000-07:00

Te Aro Coffee

983 Queen St. East

First off, fantastic set-up in this cafe. They've clearly spent a lot of time thinking about décor, customer flow, ambiance and retail. Finding a way to present and sell coffee-centric products (grinders, brewers, miscellany) is on my list of things I want to make happen back in Buffalo, so it's interesting to see it done so well, from the packaging of their coffee to the shelves and equipment displayed. The flow of the cafe encourages you to kind of stick to the corners before finding a seat, and the retail is unintrusive but everywhere. They roast their own beans, have a small but tasty-looking sandwich selection, and there's quite a bit of seating, inside and out.

We really liked the low counter/bar and seats at the serving side of the Marzocco: a comfortable place to sit for a sec while you wait for your drink, so you don't feel so rushed in the few minutes it takes to prepare it. The baristas were very friendly and approachable, as well. My espresso was good, Ben's French-Pressed Nicaraguan was better.

Mercury Organic Espresso Bar

915 Queen St. East

Pulling Intelli shots off a Synesso—I'm already onboard. Mercury has a nice corner location, with interesting décor (love the sink-lights), and they were offering a featured espresso in addition to Black Cat—I had a latte with a Honduran SO that was nice, very mild, milk-first, a little bit of chocolate up front, a nice little touch of coffee-bitter at the end.

Dark Horse

682 Queen St. East

A lot more relaxed than the Spadina location; I also noticed that they were using Detour coffee roasters in addition to 49^th. Ardi Ethiopian Sidama in a French-Press for the win. A sip of Michael's spro revealed a crazy-bright, sharp shot, very interesting, quite the ristretto.

We ogled the Mirage for a while, and I got to chat with one of their baristas for a while, Pete West (check his website for used equipment, espressotoronto.blogspot.com).

Tango Coffee Palace

1156 Queen St. East

Mainly stopped here because of the name, and because we happened to drive past it while trying to circle our way back onto the expressway. Very dark, comfy-looking cafe, lots of baked goods, pretty Electra. Seems like it would be a good place to sit and read/write for a long time. Unfortunately, I have to break my “only positive” rule, because our espressos here were undrinkable. Shame.

Canadian Coffee & Tea Show

We weren't here for any classes, so mainly we were just checking out the trade floor, seeing if there were any interesting vendors. I did sit and watch the competition for a while, but distance from the competitors and poor sound made that a little hard to get into. The video-work and projection was better than I've seen, though, and you can check it out online.

Highlights of the trade floor:

-Social Coffee and Tea Company. I had never heard of these guys, and I am, uh, really impressed. Best shot of espresso I had all day/show (Honduran SO again, oddly enough). They have a social-revolution theme going on that is EERILY similar to what I've been idly planning for my dream-cafe (I call dibs on the “May 68” blend, goddammit). They appear to procure and roast really excellent coffee...and they have really, really nice equipment.

I got to talk to one of their guys (maybe the guy? Caffeine-buzz has pushed his name out of my memory) for a bit, particularly about one of their grinders. This is the Versalab M3, the name of which I've seen kicked around, but I've never really paid it much attention. Granted, it's not dosing by mass, but it's adjustable-volume dosing seems...really neat. The Social barista emphasized that it's a little slow, but he also obviously thinks it's a great grinder.

And of course, the Slayer, the sexiest espresso machine ever, with the matching wooden PF handles and group paddles, not to mention all the pressure & temp control under the hood. Gah. Great coffee, storm-the-Bastille attitude, and an apparently perfectionist take on equipment: I need to get out to Richmond Hill sometime. They're opening a shop in Toronto proper soon, which is exciting.

-Bunn Trifecta, in action. Ben & I talked to a guy from Bunn for a while, he walked us through the whole operation. It seems like they've cleaned the machine up a little and smoothed out some glitches. I definitely like it, in theory: it made a good cup of coffee, it eliminates a lot of the user-variables of manual brew-to-order methods, and I like the ability to program in and save different settings for each coffee.

However, I can't help noticing a few things: they're using a really high dose, imho: 26-30 grams for 8oz of coffee. You would definitely need multiple machines to keep up with demand in a busy shop environment, but there's no way to electronically share brew variables—you'd need to manually reprogram each machine (how hard would it be to include some USB capacities or some such?). I'm a little weirded out by how much plastic is involved in the construction: maybe it's tough modern stuff, but I know equipment gets banged around a lot, and I know coffee oil loves to gunk stuff up, so anything other than metal or glass makes me wonder. Plus the whole hot plastic thing, I'm sure it's food-safe but it just rubs me the wrong way. Finally, price tag: list price of about $3,700 (Canadian, granted), per machine. So, to keep up speed-wise with a 4-top pour-over rail that costs just a few hundred dollars (less if you build your own rails), you'd need to spend upwards of $16k. Hm.

All that said, it makes a good cup, brewed to order, with a pretty neat level of control over brewing variables. Definitely something I'd play around with given the chance, even in a shop environment if I had unlimited money; as it stands I'm not sure who exactly this machine is made for.

-Unfortunately but not surprisingly, the trade show is not really focused on coffee quality. I did get to meet a few interesting people and try some neat products (including a fruit smoothie that I might push for to replace our current provider). I was hoping I'd be able to get hands-on with some grinders, but no luck. Still, a good trip, got a lot of good ideas. My body is finally scrubbing all the joe out of my blood, and I am crashing, so I will catch you next time.

Two More In Toronto

2010-09-23T12:41:00.000-07:00

My sis, my gf & me decided to meet some friends up in Toronto and check out the zoo (it's fantastic, btw), so of course I found some time to check out a few coffee joints.


Mr. James on the Linea

Since I've been talking up the Sam James Coffee Bar so much, we had to stop there. The cap, once again, excellent.

We wandered towards Kensington looking for some food and scarves, and, coming around a corner, we ran into the Sublime Espresso Bar. I'd been in here before, but it was quite a while ago. I love the interior here--they sell vinyl as well as coffee. My espresso was pretty good, a nice touch of sweetness but nothing super-crazy; actually it wasn't too far off the better shots I pull at Spot. The barista told me they are using beans from a local roaster called Classic Coffee who do a lot of business in the Toronto area.

Definitely love this machine, though: a really beautiful lever-operated Victoria.

After wandering around for a while, we decided on a crepe stand: the Krepesz European Palacsinta Cafe (whew). The crepes were excellent (Hungarian style? The thought that I need to explore multiple crepe-cultures is really exciting), but I was really pleasantly surprised with the coffee. They're using 49th Parallel coffee and, a secret crush of mine, a Synesso espresso machine.

I know a couple locations that have switched from Synessos to other machines for various reasons (hard to get service out East, I hear), but since encountering them I've always liked a few things about how they're set up: the exposed groups, the steam lever, and particularly the "faucet-style" double-walled steam wands. They seem like they would allow a lot more flexibility in steaming stance.

Regardless, I got a really excellent cappuccino--a little more wet than I might have made it, but I like lattes just as well, so it wasn't an issue. The barista was very knowledgeable and friendly, threw some impressive rosetta-work on the cap, and the shot came together with the milk very nicely.

Some more Buffalo-centric posts coming up, I promise, but, fair warning, I'm going to be running around a lot to a few different cities this month, and coffee is as always on my agenda.

Ritual's Kenya Kiandu

2010-09-17T08:54:00.001-07:00

James Hoffman mentioned he was “jealous” of this Kenyan lot, so I figured it was worth a try.

Love the Ritual logo.

Vac-pot brewing, 12oz water, 20g coffee, 3 minute brewing before removing heat. The draw-down was a little fast on the first batch and it tasted slightly underextracted, so for the second brew I fined the grind slightly on my Skerton and upped the brew-time to 3:30, which got much better results.

Grapefruit is the thing that jumps out at me: a distinct tartness with that slight bitter edge. There's also a layer of much mellower, juicier fruitiness, like a peach-juice blend. As the coffee cooled, the acidity stayed around but had more sweetness right up front. With the finer grind and longer brewing, I got a much nicer body, not very heavy but distinctive; it seemed to soften and balance the tart fruit flavors. This is definitely a sip-and-consider coffee, outstandingly complex, not a cuppa-joe-f'the-road kind of bean.

Really, really like the Bodum Pavina glasses for this kind of thing.

I also used this coffee to try out my Vinturi aerator for the first time. I don't think that a vacpot coffee is the way to test it: the siphon draw-down already looks like it's aerating the coffee a fair amount. I definitely noticed a difference between the aerated and non-aerated cups, but it wasn't huge. The brightness and tart notes in the aerated cup seemed to pop out more, which for this coffee isn't even really necessary. I'll try the aerator again when I use a press or pour-over or some such.

Regardless, fantastic coffee, I'm going to take some down to the roaster today and see what Michael thinks.

Sweetness_7 North Opening

2010-09-16T19:56:00.000-07:00

I'm a big fan of Sweetness 7. On the rare days I can get away from work, it's my number one choice to go and do some reading and writing. Owner/operator/pioneer Prish Moran has done an awesome thing on Grant St.; we need some more people with community vision like that in Buffalo.

And, of course, I just support the rise of a cafe scene in this town.

So, I was excited to hear that Prish is opening a new cafe in North Buffalo--on Parkside, right by the entrance to the zoo. I took her up on the invite to the opening party, and I am impressed with the space--I guess it's been mostly empty for years, except for occasional employment as an art gallery. The feel is similar to the Sweetness on Grant--lots of details, hand-painted wood, warm dark colors.

Of course, it's hard to judge accurately, since the new cafe was crowded to the gills with all kinds of people. It's inspiring to see that many people excited about a new space like this.

I snapped a ton of pictures, most of them super-blurry, and somehow managed to not get any good pictures of Prish, the woman behind it all. Anyway, check out the gallery over on Facebook.

Sounds like a few of the best Sweetness baristas will be starting out at the new cafe, so hopefully everything will be on par with the original location. I'll get up there soon and do another post on it. Best of luck to them!

Check out Sweetness_7's website and Facebook page.

Brewing San J

2010-09-11T08:25:00.000-07:00

So, as I might have mentioned, Spot bought a microlot from Costa Rica, the San Juanille estate. We're finally getting around to brewing and selling it, and I'm pretty excited about it. Direct Trade might be a little out of our reach right now, but we can still grab some awesome microlots now and again.

View Larger Map

Buffalo has a few places now that serve good espresso, lattes, caps, etc. We definitely have a few cafes that take their atmosphere and customer service seriously... What we don't have is a cafe scene for high-end, brewed-to-order coffees. I'm pretty sure that once enough people get a chance to try some really phenomenal brewed coffee, it will pick up a momentum of its own. This San Juanille lot, I'm hoping, is a stepping-stone to that.

At least behind the counter, and over in the roastery, Michael's got us calling this batch “San J”, which I like. He's probably going to change the roast a little bit for the next batch, but I'm pretty happy with this as is. One of our baristas & shift managers, Matt Measer, is also a graphics dude, making a poster for the San Juanille, so we broke out the v60 to try the first sample Michael sent us.

Couldn't find my normal papers so I threw a Chemex filter in there. Worked just fine.

I really need to a.) develop my palate skills more, and b.) hire a super-taster or something to write up them fancy tasting note lists you see on high-end coffee. Still, definitely impressed with this coffee. It doesn't taste like what I've come to expect from Costa Rican coffees: lots of chocolate in the body, and I keep picking up a little bit of peanut-like flavor as well. There's some nice acidity with a little fruitiness that I can't quite pin down, but most Spotters tasting this coffee for the first time are describing it as mellow—the brightness isn't so dominant as in many of our other centrals.

Jenn did up some boards while we wait for Matt's graphics.

Lots of exciting coffee stuff coming up in the next few months, I've finally got a decent camera, so hopefully I'll be posting a lot of interesting stuff. If you're reading this and you're a Buffalo area barista, roaster, coffee/food enthusiast, etc., I'm starting to brainstorm for some kind of event in October or November, let me know if you're interested.

Toronto Coffee Bender

2010-09-08T20:20:00.000-07:00

Coffee Bender: Like a pub crawl, or a wine tour, but with coffee.

Rolled out of my house at 6am this morning to head to Toronto for the day: Scott, who is going to be managing the new Spot in Florida this fall, is jumping around to different stores to see how they work, and I needed to get up there to calibrate their Fetco and fix a few computer things. After a whirlwind of banking/ordering at Spot Elmwood, we hit the road. Finally listened to that Radiolab on numbers that we never seem to finish.

I like the layout of the Spot in Toronto: it has a lot of nice over-the-bar interaction space, and I like the Marzocco's placement relative to the customers. I want to convert the big long bar-space into a brew-bar: the first time I saw the cafe, I thought: halogen siphon bar @ la Blue Bottle.

After spending the day doing kitchen stuff, Fetco calibrating, CPU adjustments, we decided to do a whirlwind coffee bender in Toronto. Good golly Toronto is a good coffee town. I kept forgetting to take pictures, and I also kept forgetting to make Scott take pictures with his far better skills and equipment.

For the latter part of the tour, we picked up Ambrosia of My Tiny Tank (I hear she's got a cookbook in the works). Grabbed some lunch at Sneaky Dee's: pretty good! I agonized for way too long, total geek moment, trying to find an awesome Mexican dish that was a.) meatless, and b.) wouldn't mess up my palate with spiciness. Wound up with the Vegan Burro Favorito, which hit both my requirements.

But! The tour, in brief:

Manic is my stand-by third-wave shop in Toronto, typically the one shop I suggest to people. Plus it's close to Kensington, and let's be honest, everyone I know fits somewhere in a Venn diagram of hipsterdom: they're going to Kensington if they have time and they're in Toronto. Manic uses Intelligentsia beans, they've totally got their act together, I like it. Always surprised by how laptop-intensive the place is, though. I had a Sidama coffee brewed in the Clover. Lovely berry notes with a surprising amount of body. Scott & I talked about Direct Trade for a bit. Scott speaks Spanish and has a fair amount of time in Central America under his belt, which always gives me ideas when Direct Trade origin trips come up.

I finally got to Sam James Coffee Bar and OH MY GOSH NEW COFFEE MECCA. Sam James and his shop are an inspiration. Amazing service, amazing coffee, simple, beautifully presented, I think any barista worth the name has got to wonder: “Why aren't I doing this?” I got to talk to Sam for a little bit and, insult to injury, he is a super-nice guy. He's using beans from Toi Moi & Cafe roastery, and I got what I'm pretty sure is the best cap I've ever had. Probably I need to go back and just take notes on his technique for like 3 days. Incidentally: awesome chocolate orange croissant with little bits of chewy orange rind folded in, I forgot to ask where they were from.

Next stop: Lit Espresso Bar. Love the décor of this place, oh my gosh! Super-heavy on wood grain, the bar appears to be a polished pile of lumber, and I love it. I also really really like their awesome, folds-up-to-business-card-size menu. That is a good idea. The Marzocco Mistral is a beautiful machine, I like the low-slung body particularly, but the baristas there said they'd had a lot of problems with it. Scott, Ambrosia & I all got cortados made with Stumptown's Hairbender. I don't think anybody in Buffalo has cortados on the menus (or flat whites for that matter)...that's a blog post for another day.

Ran into James Tso at Lit; I don't know James' position exactly but he seems to be the go-to guy for all things Marzocco within a few hundred miles of Toronto, doing sales and maintenance for Patera/Tace, as well as judging barista competitions. James was one of the guys who started me into the joys of basic espresso machine maintenance and repairs, realizing how the mechanical aspect affects the palate side.

Blondie's was a super-surprise, I knew they were part of the Toronto Coffee Conspiracy, but that was it, until Sam James & others pointed us that way. It's actually in a (beer/liquor) bar, I guess the baristas just rent the space in the morning/afternoon, then they shut down and the space turns back into a bar. Actually kind of brilliant, and efficient! Why don't more people do this? Regardless, they have Origins Organic Espresso, which is ONE OF MY FAVORITES. Got a straight-up shot of espresso, and I was not disappointed: the barista pulled me a great shot, and this stuff is lick-the-bottom-of-the-demi delicious, bright and sweet and fruity.

Our last stop was the Dark Horse on Spadina—I'd only been to the Queen East location before. This one is considerably bigger and way busier. Again, a theme in Toronto, I really like the décor. The bar is gorgeous, lots of wood and brick, and the artwork on the walls was good enough to comment on. They use 49th Parallel beans, and I decided to end the bender on a cup of French-Pressed El Salvador. A very nice cup, with some spiciness and raisin/fig-like fruitiness. Phil, one of the baristas, chatted with us for a while about the Toronto coffee scene.

Then it was time to high-five Ambrosia and get back on the QEW. My one complaint about Toronto, every trip: getting in and out of the city is nightmarish; they need to get some awesome train system going (of course, I say this about every city). Coffee bender: success! I still have a big list of shops to hit for the next time I'm up there: Balzac, Cherry Bomb, Crema, Te Aro, and Mercury Organic high among them. I'm actually surprised we were able to fit so many shops in without freaking out, especially given that Scott & I were taste-testing coffee at Spot as part of our calibrating process.

Four hours later and a long philosophy-rich QEW-ride home, my body is finally metabolizing the caffeine and I am crashing hard. A couple quick comments on the Toronto scene, and then I'm out:
-Disloyalty card equals awesome.
-I really like the awareness of the scene that all the baristas seemed to have; see above.
-I'm still surprised that there aren't more brew-bar options. Manic has a Clover, which is the probably the best option I saw; Sam James has vac-pots & others had press-pots, but no pour-over rails in sight. Seems like the progressive coffee in Toronto is all espresso/macchiatos/cappuccinos, with less emphasis on non-espresso coffee.
-Ambrosia tells me that almost all milk up thereabouts is lactose-free? Weird! It's almost like they don't want to shame people for their differences or something. Still surprised to see her break veganhenge, though.
-Love the mix of roasters available! It's great to see that level of variety of really high-end beans.
-I saw no non-Marzocco machines at the shops we visited; the Linea is still the workhorse, which is kind of cool to see. I didn't ask if any of them were PID retrofitted.
-Roburs, Roburs, everywhere. I really like the red-body Roburs Sam James is using; I wish I could mess around with the timed doserless they were using at Manic. Saw a couple Anfims also.
-Sorry again for the no pictures, I'm getting a new camera and, assuming I can work it, I will put some pretty ones up.

By the way, check out blogTO, awesome blog and "Best" listings for Toronto, I use it to rough out a lot of my plans when I'm heading that way.

Egg Cream Espresso

2010-09-04T17:26:00.000-07:00

Following a discussion on Barista Exchange, I've been thinking about espresso, crema, foam and carbonation, and I decided to give a chocolate egg cream soda a try, and then add some espresso to the mix.

Egg cream, by the way, contains neither egg nor cream (discuss): it's milk frothed up with seltzer water, with chocolate then stirred into the bottom to make a layered drink. Full disclosure: I've never had a “real” egg cream soda, so I can't be sure how close I'm getting to the real drink.

I don't have a seltzer siphon, but we have a soda “gun” at work, so that is what I'm working with for now. I used about 4oz of milk in a 16oz cup, then went to town with the soda gun. It foamed the milk up a lot more than I was expecting, which I'm taking to be a good sign.

Then I carefully stirred in 1oz of Ghirardhelli chocolate sauce, making sure not to upset the head of foam. This, in theory, is the completed egg cream soda. I took a drink, and I was surprised by how not-gross the combo of soda water and milk is, especially with the chocolate milk/soda to chase any bitterness away.

The problem came when I tried to add espresso. The milk foam was subsiding pretty quickly, and the hot espresso seemed to melt it even faster, so it very quickly seemed like a watery iced mocha, with just a little bit of foam on top. I tried making another and adding the espresso earlier, right when I added the chocolate, but I got pretty much the same result. I don't know if this would be any different if I were using a seltzer siphon.

Not a terrible drink, but: not what I was hoping for. I'd like to get something that uses carbonation/foam to emphasize the texture of espresso crema.

Flat within about 5 seconds after adding espresso.

At Spot we have a “drink bible” that might better be called the “cabinet of curiosities” because it's full of bizarre drinks people have made up over the years, using whatever ingredients and techniques they can get their hands on. Once of the perennially popular ones, at least on the barista's side of the counter, is the “Chilly Hillbilly”: espresso and root beer.

I find that the best way to make this is to mix the espresso and root beer at about a 1:2 or 1:3 ratio. I'll take a large rocks glass (7oz, I think) and pour about 3 or 4oz of root beer. Make sure it's ice cold, and try to pour it very carefully so that it foams up as little as possible. Then I'll pull a shot (sometimes I'll split it so I can just take a single), and as soon as its done pour it into the root beer. As soon as the espresso hits, it seems to spark some kind of weird reaction. Something in the espresso, the heat, the oil, the crema, I'm not sure, seems to release all the carbonation in the root beer, and the whole glass will quickly foam up—as Brady says in the bx thread, it's like the whole drink is crema for a second. A sweet, root-beer-infused crema. You need to drink it the split-second that it starts to foam.

It's very, very weird—you can feel the reaction still going on in your mouth, sometimes even in your stomach. But also very tasty.

I think maybe the thing to do is to pursue some variants of the chilly hillbilly. I'll have to do some more research on how root beer is made, see if I can find some significant variations. I know that Virgil's root beer is much creamier, and tastes more like sasparilla, than most standard brands, so I'll have to try that out (haven't found a place to get sasparilla in Buffalo, to my sorrow). I also need to figure out why espresso reacts differently with different carbonated beverages: I used to know a customer who asked for “sparkling” Americanos, and the espresso never foamed up the same way. Maybe something to do with the sugar content? If I could figure out what's needed to make the "uber-crema", then we could just add different ingredients to that to make interesting flavor/texture combinations. If I make any headway, I'll put it up.

Three Tons of Coffee, Two Green Thumbs

2010-09-01T19:43:00.001-07:00

The shirt was his idea, I swear

Tom Halloran is an active organizing member of Buffalo's Garden Walk. Now in its 16^th year, the Garden Walk has grown to include 355 participant gardens in the Buffalo area. Each year, thousands of visitors come to Buffalo for tours of the Walk, and there are more every summer—this year saw visitors from as far away as the UK, Sweden, and Thailand, as well as Hawaii and Alaska. In addition to a free tour of hundreds of diverse gardens, attendees see the other sights of Buffalo, including architectural landmarks like the Darwin Martin House, and often comment on Buffalo's food scene.

When walkers got within about a block of Tom's Richmond Ave. garden this summer, they started asking: “who's making coffee?” The reason for the rich coffee scent, and for the profusion of Tom's garden, are one and the same: he has been doing a near-daily pick-up of used coffee grounds at Spot Elmwood, and using the coffee as the base for his soil-enrichment program. We sat down and tried to figure out how many pounds he's taken this summer, and came up with a figure somewhere in the range of 3 or 4 tons of coffee.

The front island prepared for the Garden Walk over the course of 3 weeks.

Tom was good enough to share some gardening tips with myself and Scott (fellow Spotter and, more importantly, way better photographer). The primary advantages of using coffee grounds, Tom says, are three. Coffee improves drainage of Buffalo's clay-rich soils, while still retaining some moisture. As the coffee decomposes, it naturally cycles organic nutrients back into the soil. Finally, earthworms love coffee! Increased earthworm activity in Tom's gardens results in more aerated soil, and earthworms' natural processing of organic matter is great for plants.

Perennials thriving in good soil, despite Buffalo's short growing season

Tom's soil preparation method:

Dig down to the clay layer, which is about 3 inches down. Break this layer up a bit using hand tools.
Add 3-4 inches of coffee grounds, and rototill in.
Then Tom adds 3-4 inches of two products, Bumper Crop Organic Soil and Garden Magic Manure. He then rototills this into the coffee/clay mixture.
Let the soil sit for 2-3 weeks. Then, plant away!

In the fall, Tom lets his plants die back with little maintenance—it's much easier to clean up in the spring, and this allows the dead plant matter to cycle back into the soil. Once spring rolls around, he loosens the soil and sprinkles a small amount of coffee grounds on the surface to encourage earthworm activity—which you can do whether or not you have access to several tons of spent coffee. Don't overdo it, he warns—too much coffee on the surface can lead to acidic conditions.

Tom is a big fan of gardening over lawn maintenance. Quoting Elizabeth Licata, he says: “Grass is nothing but a big fat pain in the ass.” Tom plants perennials almost exclusively, so he doesn't need to replant each area every year. The dense, lush vegetation keeps weeds down without need for herbicides or hand-weeding, and Tom says he only needs to spend about a week and a half of work each year to keep his garden beautiful—compared to the near-constant mowing, weeding, and watering required by grass.

Carefully maintained greenery surrounds the in-ground pool

If you're interested using large volumes of coffee grounds in you garden, you'd do well to follow Tom's method: bring your own buckets, ask if the baristas would mind dumping their used grinds in there instead of the trash, and pick it up promptly the next day! Most coffee shops will be happy to help, and some might have a composting program already in place. For more composting options, you can check out Urban Roots, Grassroots, and Buffalo Reuse.

Links:

Buffalo Garden Walk

Jim's Gardening Blog

More pictures courtesy Tom Halloran & Scott Tompkins on the Facebook page.

Update: I was curious about what other coffee shops in the area are doing with their compost, so I did a quick informal survey. Caffe Aroma on Bidwell donates their grounds to the Mass. Ave. Project, while Sweetness 7 on Grant & Lafayette sends their compost right across the street to the Urban Gardens greenhouse there. The barista I spoke to at the Starbucks on Elmwood said that they bag their coffee grounds and are happy to reserve a bag for any gardener who asks. If you have any more info on coffee & composting in the area, let me know!

Back, and back, and back to Rochester

2010-08-22T13:49:00.000-07:00

Between Fetco calibration and Marzocco repairs, I've been spending a lot of time in Rochester of late. Yesterday I headed back there yet again, this time with Spot's roaster Michael in tow. What a weird day! Between all the driving, some persistent upper respiratory thing, and the non-drowsy medication I'm taking for it, Rochester felt pretty surreal. It doesn't help that Rochester is kind of like Buffalo's sibling separated at birth, or better yet maybe an adoptive sibling raised in the same house...just familiar enough without really being the same.

We rolled in to do another version of our home brewing lab, aka “1 coffee 5 ways”. The idea here is pretty simple: hand out some free coffee, demonstrate how brew methods affect the cup, and give some tips on making better coffee at home. In addition, we've got the brewers available for sale in the stores now.

Merchandising, where the real money from the movie is made!

Unfortunately, the good people of Rochester were just not into it on this day. We had a few people come up early on and be suitably impressed by the difference French Press vs. Chemex makes on the same coffee, but after that we didn't get a lot of takers. I'm given to understand that we were competing with Wedgestock; not sure how much that is to blame. I'm re-thinking the show, wondering if there might be a better way to do it. At any rate, Spot hasn't offered any coffee equipment for sale since I've worked here, so we've at least got a few attractive methods for sale now.

Michael & I used the opportunity to lay out some coffee plans—better ways to advertise and sell our varietals & blends among them. We're switching to better bags and labels soon, and we've just got in a micro-lot that we're pretty excited about, so it's time to get rolling on this stuff.

San Juanille Micro-Lot

After making sure Spot Rochester is set up to sell, and bidding their baristas farewell, we decided to check out some of the other coffee-shops in the area. Michael wanted to try the coffee at Boulder, so we headed there first for some coffee and food.

Boulder's “Genessee Greek”: egg, greens, onion, balsamic, swiss, feta, olives on a bagel.

After learning that Boulder roasts their own coffee in Rochester's Public Market, we decided to track that down before heading back to Buffalo. I had no idea the Public Market here was such a big deal! We don't have anything like this in Buffalo—the Bidwell Farmer's Market is really nice, but it's once a week and about a tenth the size.

We found Boulder's location, but their roastery was tucked away somewhere out of sight, and we were more curious about just seeing what the market had to offer. All fresh produce aside, I was most impressed with this “Lil' Orbit” machine, which combines a.) mechanized production with b.) donuts.

This thing could revolutionize Casella family camping/reunion cuisine. And chop about a decade off each of our life expectancies.

I'm not giving up on the home brewing lab. It's really pretty easy to get a drastically better cup at home, or the office, with just a little more attention. We just have to get that info out there.

Most people in these parts haven't had really double-take good coffee, ever, and I think if we can expose a few people in Buffalo to it they'll come around. The show of making good coffee one cup at a time is a lot of fun, and draws people in, so ultimately I may need to just focus on getting some kind of brew-to-order in place—kind of becoming my refrain, isn't it?

Edumucation

2010-08-19T19:42:00.000-07:00

Today I delivered the first live version of the revised coffee education I've been working on for a while, Power-Point & hand-outs & all; four new employees got to be my test subjects. We came out to about an hour even, which is probably a little longer than I'd like. All in all it went very well, though, and I'm looking forward to revising the program further. Given how much I'm into coffee, it's a little terrifying to be the main conduit for all this information. Basically I'm just trying to get new hires started on the road to coffee-geekdom; I feel like the time I spent in coffee before getting the bug is kinda time wasted, and I'd like to get them there faster.

Head Roaster Michael Burke leads the newbies' first cupping

Trying to condense every book/forum I've read and every workshop I've attended down to 40 slides or so is pretty rough. It often seems to come down to a choice between simplifying things to the point that they don't convey anything useful, or just skipping them entirely so we can focus more on a few things. Well, I guess that's what the hand-outs will have to evolve to cover.

It's been a long time since I've done this kind of structured, lecturing teaching. I used to do various kinds of tutoring and some student-instructor kind of things back in college, something I've always really enjoyed, and it's really nice to get back in the swing of it.

Teaching this stuff really gets me to think about the areas I don't know enough about in coffee, which can pretty much be summed up in one word: origin. An origin trip is probably on every serious barista's to-do list, but until I really started evaluating the gaps in my knowledge I never really put too much priority on it. I've read books, looked on the internet, kinda-sorta have a clue about farming and processing, but I can just tell that I don't really get it, and I probably won't until I get there. Interesting.

Work has been pretty busy of late; there's a lot of pretty exciting stuff coming up, ArtFest, new locations opening, lots of training & education stuff to do. I haven't been able to do as much with the blog yet as I'd like to, but I'll be getting around to other cafés soon to try to set up some community stuff. If you're reading this and you'd like to help set something up, let me know! That's it for now.

A quick Rochester visit

2010-08-15T12:50:00.000-07:00

I love this store! It's enormous:

Originally a car dealership, the Rochester store is still called Spot “Chevy”. It somehow manages to feel comfortable rather than cavernous, despite the size. This store doubles as a gallery space for many artists, and they have lots of room for doing music acts as well.

I drove out to Rochester to do some Fetco calibration, some Marzocco maintenance, and chat with their managers and baristas a little. One of their strongest baristas is going to Norway for a few weeks; hopefully he can make his way to the Nordic Barista Championship to check that out, maybe drink a lot of Aeropress'd coffees? So jealous! That lecturer list is impressive. I've thought for years that Northern Europe might be the place for me, and after finding out about their coffee culture I am even more convinced.

Fetco calibration went pretty smoothly. I talked to Jessica, Spot Rochester's awesome manager, about what I'm doing with our grinding and brewing parameters, and she seems sure that it wouldn't be a problem to train everyone up to different grinding practices if we decide to do that. So that's cool.

I think I want a “naked” Fetco basket of some kind so I can watch the brew cycle and check the temperature in-basket. I know I've got some old baskets kicking around in storage somewhere; I also might just see if I can disable or trick the sensor that requires the basket-magnet.

My TDS meter and scale, they comfort me.

It's a bummer that Fetco output rarely matches the electronic controls. It's stable, so all you have to do is measure the water and reset until you hit it right, but, still. Also a bummer that some of the parameters you can change have relatively broad settings—like only being able to control brew time in 30 second intervals. My respect for these auto-drippers has gone up a lot since I've adjusted them, and thought about how consistent they are compared to manual methods; it seems like just a little more work could allow them to make a really awesome cup. Forget Clovers & Trifectas: why aren't we seeing really good, highly customizable 1-cup auto-drippers? It seems like you could make a fairly compact machine that could compete with a pour-over rail system.

Spot Dog! I hear he had a sibling at Elmwood who was KIDNAPPED and probably still sitting in someone's garage now.

While in the store I also discover a stash of weird parts to add to the Sacred Linea Graveyard I'm constructing in Buffalo. I think I might up my estimate to 2 working machines I can cobble together, but we'll see. As soon as I get through Elmwood's Art-fest I'm launching into project Frankenlinea: from a few machine-corpses I want to patch up an old brass-group 4-head and totally refurbish it, with PID controls. I'd also like to see if I can split the 2 group boilers so they both have their own pump, allowing faster use without compromising pressure. In a kind of morbid, masochistic way, I am looking forward to descaling the boilers.

Jessica & I finalized some plans for this coming Saturday, August 21st: at 10am we are going to hold a home-brewing demonstration, “1 coffee 5 ways”. We're going to take a coffee—maybe the Guatemala Limonar?--and brew it in a Mr. Coffee-type devise using their dosing instructions (haven't decided if we should grind the beans a day or two in advance just to really skew it towards realistic). Then we're going to taste that by comparison to French Press, Chemex, Aeropress, and Toddy. That might be a bit much, so if things look crazy we'll probably chop the Aeropress. My goals are legion! Educational goals: get people to realize a.) preparation changes the flavor of the same coffee, b.) brewing well at home is not hard or expensive, and c.) please grind fresh. I also want to raise the public awareness of Spot as a center for all things coffee, and for that matter raise the public awareness that there ARE interesting things going on with coffee. And while I'm at it, maybe sell a few Chemexes or presses, a few bags of coffee.

Sadly, I had to jet back to Buffalo to take care of work stuff there, no time to check out any other Rochester cafés. There seems to be a growing coffee scene here that I'd like to get more familiar with—a few months back I did a lightning café-tour with some other Buffalo baristas, and we noticed some good things going on. I don't think Rochester's ever done a barista jam; organizing one of those might be a goal of mine before too long.

That's it for now! Grinders & brewers doing up some delicious coffee, cutest Marzocco humming along, and I am heading back to Nickel City.

Espresso Apollo and some thoughts on 'spro culture

2010-08-14T10:10:00.000-07:00

One of the guys that works with me at Spot Elmwood was headed down to Philadelphia for a few days, to visit the Mutter Museum of Medical Oddities among other things. When I learned this, I immediately gave him directions to go to Ultimo coffee (it's possible I may have also instructed him to hit on Aaron Ultimo for me if possible). And, knowing that they have Counter Culture coffee, I was hoping he could pick me up a pound of that Espresso Apollo that everyone's been talking about. Kevin came through on all counts.

I got the Apollo dialed in, gave it a stir, gave it a sip. Initial reactions: phreow, sweet! Tart and juicy, ridiculously bright. The first food association I made was some kind of lemon bar or pie: definitely not sour but pointed that direction, with a kind of buttery-sugar thing underneath the fruit. I'm not so good (yet!) at pulling out individual specific flavors out of the mix, unless it's a hit-you-over-the-head kind of flavor, and this is a delightfully complex espresso. Four of us gave it a try yesterday, and after the initial “phreow!” we all stared off into space making chewing motions for a minute or two trying to figure it all out. The shots I pulled today were a little more mellow, still very sweet and juicy, but more “round” if that means anything. Unfortunately, at this point the beans are going on 10 days old, not in the best container for at least a few of those, so I may be missing some of the clarity of flavor other reviewers have been talking about.

I'm hoarding my 1lb too much to use this blend for milk drinks (plus I'm doling it out to other baristas), but I can well believe that it would vanish under the cow: everything interesting here is the front-end, acidy stuff that gets muted in a cap or a latte. This is a drinking espresso, indeed, and I've never tasted its like in Buffalo.

So! Rant on espresso: what elements might help create an environment where we could see more awesome espresso options in the café scene around here?

I'm most familiar with Spot's Espresso blend, of course, and while it makes a very decent drinking espresso, where it really shines is as the base for big milky drinks: it's got a big heavy body that can punch through 10+ oz of milk and syrup and still taste like coffee. I'll occasionally grab an espresso straight at other Buffalo cafés; most of them seem to be what I think of as very Italian-style. In many ways I think this “traditional, Italian-style espresso” (excuse the scare quotes) is rated higher the more it resembles Turkish coffee without the sludge. One of the things I hope to ask other baristas in the area is: does your espresso blend have a goal, and what is it? Do you pull normale, ristretto, or even on the long side?

I always get a little excited on the rare occasions we run low on espresso blend, because that means dialing in an SO espresso for a couple hours. I'm lucky enough to have a third grinder now at Elmwood, which acts mainly as a training tool and back-up, and allows me to pull shots of different coffees for palate training (comparing the component beans of our blend, for example, so trainees can taste what each is contributing). Sometimes our roaster will mention that one of our single-origins might be interesting as an espresso, so I'll give that a try, maybe even sell a few shots to customers—but it never takes off.

People don't buy that much espresso! At least not at my store. They buy lots of lattes, cappuccinos, brewed coffee, sweet drinks, but not straight espresso. We have a few regular spro drinkers, but it's only a handful—espresso (and macciatos) are a really small percentage of our drink sales.

A couple theories on the relative unpopularity of this most wonderful beverage: price & drip competition, atmosphere, and perception.

Price & the Comparison to Drip Coffee

Espresso is kind of a steal, price-wise. I've never seen espresso much out of the $2 range, probably because café owners instinctively know that people are going to hesitate to spend more than that for such a little cup, unless of course it's alcoholic. Thinking about cost, espresso uses somewhere from 14 to 20 grams for a shot; drip coffee is chronically underdosed, and even at good ratios might range down to 12 grams or less per cup. Plus, coffee waste is higher on espresso due to adjusting the grind, waste at the dosing level, and chucking a bad shot here and there. Then you factor in the cost of espresso machines, grinders, and related equipment, and the training and labor cost of a skilled barista, and that $2 spro is really starting to look like a bargain. But, from the perspective of the drinker, you can get a fairly large coffee for the around the same price, and you know you'll be drinking it for much longer, maybe bulking it out with lots of sugar and cream—so, from the buyer's perspective, spro doesn't necessarily look like the better deal, especially depending on their perception of it. More on that in a second.

This isn't to say that espresso isn't profitable for coffee-house operators; it certainly is, and as an ingredient in more expensive milky drinks it's vital. But, if the majority of customers see drip coffee as what they want, and so don't create a big demand for a variety of high-quality espresso blends & SOs, why should owner/operators invest more in what, by itself, is basically a fringe menu item? This is a serious question, and I know part of the answer is: chicken and egg problem, get better spro options in place and visible and people might come around. Right now the standard set-up in most Buffalo cafés is to just have 2 espressos, regular and decaf. I'd be delighted to see that expand just to 3—keeping the decaf, and then having one blend/bean for milky drinks and another for straight drinking—exciting espressos like the Apollo that started this rant. If that took off, then maybe eventually we'd see the demand for more than one drinking espresso at a time. But, catch-22, by my calculations you probably need to sell somewhere in the vicinity of 500+ straight drinking espressos to pay off the decent grinder you need to make it. Totally doable, but it's a big number when you're comparing grinder prices to your average daily espresso orders.

Atmosphere and Culture

I'm really interested in the atmosphere and culture that allows/demands a good espresso scene. I haven't been able to spend much time people-watching in the major coffee centers of North America, and of course I hear about the espresso scene in the World Where Drip Coffee Never Took Over, aka Not North America (Australia/New Zealand I find particularly intriguing in terms of their coffee scene for some reason). I'd like to see that in action—not to abandon non-espresso coffee in the least, but just because I think espresso is getting a bad rap in most of America, and I'd like to see it on its own turf, where it's the expected way to drink coffee. Spot Coffee is opening a shop up on Hertel, which is very much the Italian part of town, so I'm really crossing my fingers in the hopes that there is a dedicated espresso-loving crowd up there.

I think if I were designing a café to maximize espresso consumption there are a couple things I would do. First, make the process of making it more visible—use lower counters and/or low slung machines so the barista is more visible. When I first switched over to using naked portafilters, I had a brief day-dream of some complex system of mirrors or video-monitors to really show off those extractions—obviously not very practical. I don't really like turning my back to customers, but if there is a way to keep the machine angled so that they can see the shots as they're pulling, great—instead of hiding the action behind a machine that gets between the barista and the customer anyway. Going along with that, use multiple machines if necessary, and really make the bar a comfortable place to sit and drink. Abolish the line phenomena as much as possible; a booze-bar approachability is what you want. To be fair, I've seen lots of shops with smallish floor-space that achieve the right mix of coziness without needing to have a bar seating/serving area.

I don't want to take espresso in a to-go cup, but neither do I want to take it back to my table and sip it slowly for a half-hour: I want to drink it in just a few minutes, chatting with the baristas or other customers. I don't want to wait very long at all for an espresso—that's why it's espresso—but a spro-customer shouldn't feel like they need to keep moving down the line and out the door, either. People who want a complicated flavored 20oz drink or coffee always seem to be in a hurry, and then they'll be sipping it for hours (that's why they want it extra hot), whereas the espresso which must be made and consumed very quickly works better in a more leisurely environment. I think that's irony.

Perception

The public perception of espresso lags behind what we know in the industry, even more so than with other brewing methods. Strong, bitter, and a tiny cup pretty much sums it up for most people and even most cafés, I would guess. The use of “espresso” or, let's say it, eXpresso as a flavor in ice cream etc. has compounded the confusion, as has the focus on caffeine content. Even more than coffee, espresso has a rep as just a caffeine delivery system.

(Side-rant: I just refuse to talk about caffeine content in espresso now. It's certainly there. Does it have more or less than a coffee? Which coffee? By volume, by cup? Are we talking a normal shot or ristretto, what dosing, what roast level? Robusta in the blend? I'm pretty sure a big chunk of the hopped-up-on-espresso effect is psychosomatic, just because it has such a stronger taste than coffee. I'm not even going to talk about it until I can get some scientific testing done on the espresso I serve, and that's not exactly top priority on my list.)

When people do have a little more nuanced conception of espresso, it's almost inevitably based on a stereotype of European-style espresso, usually meaning Italian. I have a distinct memory, from when I was a tyke, of my father explaining what espresso was: it was a tiny cup of black, magically potent coffee, bitter as death, equally well suited to greasing tractor bearings or melting through bank vaults. Wizened Italian men in immaculate suits, the way I pictured my great-grandfather Tomasso, would stir in a pound or so of sugar into these little cups while they discussed “the family”. Fruit or floral notes in the cup would probably be grounds for verbal or physical abuse. Decades later, reading about the “first wave” of Italian-immigrant-driven espresso culture in America, I would have a nice “aha” moment. (And just to bring it full circle, weirdly enough: the town where my great-grandfather settled after immigrating from Italy? Apollo, PA.)

My mother had never had a shot of espresso until I made her one at my shop a while back. She wasn't an instant convert, but her comment sticks with me: “I had no idea espresso tasted like that.” This is a double-ristretto shot, served to someone who likes flavored coffees and lattes, makes coffee at home and uses flavored creamers, goes to Starbucks—in other words, my mom is pretty close to the perfect example of the average American coffee drinker. The idea that espresso is such a complex beverage, that discussions of sweetness and creaminess, specific flavors like fruits, chocolate, and spices are common in the upper-tier coffee world—is completely off the radar of such a coffee drinker. As baristas, we need to make sure we are getting the word out about this stuff, and more importantly getting people to discover these complexities by tasting great espresso.

We need more awesome espressos

When I was first getting really obsessive about coffee, I had three espressos that were kind of game-changing for me. God-shots, if you will. Jay Caragay pulled me a shot of Hines Organic in his Towson, MD library location. This was my first exposure to a really deliciously bright spro. A super-friendly barista at the Equal Exchange café in Boston, MA made me an espresso from a blend that was heavy on some Sumatran coffee: utterly mellow, very sweet, with this heavy butter-and-caramel-popcorn taste and mouthfeel that was totally new to me. Finally, I pulled what was, for me, a god-shot of Spot's espresso, totally by accident, just a test shot after doing some maintenance on the machine down at Delaware & Chippewa.

I've had a lot of great shots—probably quite a few that were “objectively better than” the above-mentioned shots, if I could take a time-machine and check them against my current palate. But the point is, those three shots stand out in my memory, they were god-shots when I had'em. The first two showed me two very different and phenomenal directions espresso can go in, totally different than the bitter, comparatively watery shot too often taken for the (Italian?) standard. The shot I pulled at Spot gave me a totally absorbing sensory experience—I was talking/emailing about it for days, it was literally revelatory—and, having shown me what my blend is capable of, made me obsessed with recreating that shot every time.

The thing that bugs me most about the traditional Italian espresso argument is not just that I don't like that style of espresso—I don't think I've had a good Italian espresso. Buy me a ticket to Florence, I'll get a shot of not-stale Illy from a good barista, and I'll let you know. No, the thing that bugs me is the idea that there is one good espresso—one type of blend, one type of preparation. That just hamstrings an awesome medium. Imagine if someone said that wine can come from one kind of grape, it can be made with one specific process, and everything else is not wine, so you might as well just get some vodka and fruit juice, savages. The range of coffees, roasts, and blends that make for good espresso might be narrower than the range that can make a good filter-drip coffee, but it's still pretty large. Listen to the way barista competitors describe their espressos to get just a glimpse of the potential. (Sprudge has a nice list of videos from the WBC).

I understand that barista competitor who said he'd only had a few good espressos in his life. Hopefully that was a little hyperbolic on his part, but really good espresso is often hard to find. When I'm visiting some random café, I don't often get a coffee that is jaw-dropping, but it's usually at least palatable. Not so with espresso!

More so than anything else we serve, I think espresso is a beverage we coffee-people have kind of been keeping to ourselves. I don't know how many hundreds of shots I've had in my few years in the industry—you do it for a little pick-me-up, to check the quality of your product, and because you know that, running around behind the counter, there's a good chance any other drink you make for yourself will be spilled/lost/cold long before you finish it.6 At Spot Elmwood, we're periodically fans of rounds of “shift shots”, which tend to get focused on for their caffeine content—but they also ensure we're all tasting espresso pretty frequently, so even the people who aren't working the bar yet, or who don't normally go for “straight” coffee in any format, get a chance to taste superior vs. inferior espresso.

I raise my demi to an image of the future, where espresso-drinkers rival other coffee-fans in their numbers and nuanced palates, where good espresso is the norm, not the exception, and where 3 or 4 grinders per shop allow us to celebrate many different espressos. Buffalo-area roasters and baristas: we should find a location sometime and do a public espresso tasting. Bring your own blend and grinder and we'll go to town.

Oh, and here's hoping that Nietzschean binaries compel the folks at Counter Culture to craft some dark, winey Espresso Dionysus.

Battle Scars, Grinder Ideas

2010-08-12T07:00:00.000-07:00

I thought I was pretty clever, coming in to work before 5am to swap out the burrs in our main coffee grinder. One hour and a number of odd complications later, I was starting to sweat at the thought of all those coffee orders just over the horizon...fortunately, I got everything brewing in time. Our fix-everything-man came by and helped me figure out the problem: turns out I was just being too gentle in trying to loosen a bolt. Gentleness aside, I did manage to stab myself pretty good with a screwdriver:

Lesson learned.

(By the way, I am very pleased with the Salter kitchen scale I've been using to set the grind. It's only accurate down to about an eighth of an ounce, but that is reasonably okay for the volumes I'm doing. The long on-time is great, and anyways the digital is a great improvement over “Old Bouncy” the mechanical kitchen scale. I heard about it over on Barista Exchange in this thread.)

I have to say that my appreciation for the Fetco Grinder/Brewer set-up has gone up a lot lately. After monkeying around with some brewing ratios & parameters, I have our house blend at a place that I really like. It's not radically different, just a little better—I don't have a refractometer (yet), but a TDS meter, brew chart, and some math put it right where I want it. And my palate agrees! I've even got a few good comments from customers, which is nice.

However, working on the grinder today, I couldn't help but notice the way that grinders are lagging behind other coffee equipment. Any coffee geek can tell you the primary things we want out of a grinder. Extra kudos might be given for good dosing mechanisms (particularly on espresso grinders) and limiting the amount of grounds that stick somewhere other than the dosing target, but really we just want it to perform well on the basics: it should be fast, quiet, and cool, the range of particle-sizes should be fairly small for a given setting, and it should be finely adjustable (ideally stepless).

The thing is...those qualities are expected out of any decent commercial grade grinder today, whether it's for espresso, brew-to-order, auto-drips, or bulk grinding. I think that there are a few really significant improvements that could be made to all categories of coffee grinder. And the big one is, you guessed it:

1.) Grinding by mass.

That's really what we want when we're grinding: a specific weight of ground coffee, to brew with a specific amount of water. (Thank you, universe, for keeping water's mass pretty much stable to its volume as far as us baristas are concerned.) The problem is, most of us coffee-brewers are grinding by volume or time. At home—well, most people at home probably aren't even grinding, but either way they're probably just using a scoop of some kind—measuring by volume. The only automatic grinders for drip coffee that I've seen use a timer to allow beans to fall into the grinding chamber; you just have to use trial and error to get the right mass of coffee—beans vary a lot, and as the burrs age they don't grind as fast. When using an espresso grinder, one doses by eyeballing the basket (volume), except for those fancy new electronic doserless models (timed). The only time I see baristas consistently dosing and grinding by mass is in shops with brew-to-order methods—except for those Mallyke press-pot grinders (timed). The standard method seems to be just scooping some beans into a cup on an accurate scale before grinding.

So, what's wrong with these methods? Screwdriver-wound in my hand still throbbing, it's mainly those timed auto-drip grinders that are bugging me. They work pretty well—if you have someone that knows how to set them, and is using an accurate scale. If the beans don't vary for any reason—that is, if they are all of uniform size and density. If the grinder is regularly re-programmed as the burrs wear, and finally if you don't mind grinding a ton of coffee while you zero in on that perfect time.

Too many coffee shops don't have the regular equipment maintenance that they need. That's a separate and much larger problem, but it's a fact. The more coffee equipment that will make good coffee in between service visits, the better the coffee will be in the average cafe. Personal experience with our grinders suggests to me that quarterly re-calibrating is the absolute minimum, and unknown events can create a need for adjustment more often than that. I don't have the statistics, but I doubt the average American coffee-shop is getting thorough quarterly maintenance.

Beans vary. Using different blends? Using the same grinder setting for a French-Roasted Indo as you are for that lightly roasted peaberry? The mass : volume ratio for these beans is significantly different, as is bean size, and that plays out in noticeable differences in dose when using the a timed auto-grinder. So what do you do? My grinder has 2 hoppers with 3 settings each, so in theory I can work with my roaster to find a mass:volume ratio for each bean and blend he sends my way, break those into 3 (or 6) time:mass profiles, program the buttons to fit those profiles, label each bag accordingly and train my staff to grind that way, and then replicate that system at all our locations.

I am far enough down the rabbit-hole that I am giving this real serious thought, at least for 3 mass:volume categories: the thought of a 3-liter brew varying by as much as an ounce or two in the dose kinda gives me shivers. But it's not the most elegant solution.

For shops that are doing brew-to-order of whatever kind, pour-over rails, Clovers, etc., the issue isn't correct dosing—measuring onto a .01g accurate scale handles that. It's training, and time in coffee prep. Now, granted, cutting-edge shops seem to have these kinds of systems down. For a shop that is very interested in the all the benefits of brew-to-order, but is considering starting such a system from scratch (*cough*), the element of training everyone to dose correctly and the time spent on each step of brew-to-order looks a little intimidating. A programmable grinder that worked by mass would knock out a huge amount of concerns for these operations, and would probably be welcomed by the cutting-edge as well.

Espresso—well, on the one hand espresso grinders work pretty well. Eyeball-dosing or using timed doserless controls both seem to work pretty well. If you're using multiple beans for espresso, you almost certainly have a grinder for each, so that's not a problem. On the other hand, if someone did invent an espresso grinder that could quickly grind mass-accurate down to a hundredth of a gram or so, I'm sure it would not be left out in the cold.

So, let's invent this thing. I don't think it would be too crazy. Basically you just need to insert a step in between the hopper and the grinding chamber, where the coffee is measured by weight before being ground. I can think of a number of ways to do this—from a paddle-wheel or gum-ball-dispenser-type device to doll out the beans at a measured rate, or just a “stutter” of timed releases. A smart enough machine should be able to learn a mass:volume/time ratio from one partial dose, and then achieve the desired full dose with subsequent cycles. It would be very important for this machine to “finish clean”, with no grinds or whole beans left in, since you're brewing different beans and don't want to contaminate. Perhaps a “bypass shoot,” where leftover whole beans are shot out unground? As always with coffee equipment, compactness is important, a minimum of moving parts is a plus, and the ability to clean it easily and often is paramount. Bringing us to the next item on my wish list:

2.) Cleaner insides. This is a peevish comment, maybe, but I can't believe how gunked up grinders get inside. Microscopic coffee particles, in all their oily goodness, get everywhere, and congeal into this weird clay-like substance all over the place. I can't believe that they're not affecting flavor as they're knocked loose with each grind cycle. There has got to be a way to seal up the area around the burrs better, and to prevent oil/particle build-up. While we're building this dream machine, let's also put on a “purge” button, that grinds a very small amount of beans to make sure the residual grounds aren't from the previous batch.

3.) Since we're being whimsical, let's also tack on a computer brain that analyzes particle-size (maybe even surface area), probably by some kind of optical measurement, and

4.) Electronically controlled grind adjustment. Automatically adjusts for burr wear, can be programmed to provide different grind settings for different coffees.

Taken all together, this grinder will allow us to program a dose, by mass. That's the big thing. Add on 3 and 4 and we can make a one-touch button that grinds your coffee exactly how you need it, which would be ideal for medium-to-high volume shops using multiple brew-to-order methods. Sounds great, yeah?

Please steal this idea if you're capable of making it happen. I have a long history of thinking up stuff that I don't or can't actually make (laser bore-sights are common now, NASA and the Navy are using my 3-axis gyro system for steering in frictionless environments, and those nail-clippers that catch your nails are everywhere. That last one was going to be my fortune, I tell you.) All I ask is for one of these grinders in my shop, and maybe my name in the credits somewhere.

Seriously, though, I think we are creeping up on some big changes in the coffee scene. 3rd wave shops are experimenting with all kinds of brew-to-order, and that's great...but 3rd wave shops are still in a very, very small minority. What we need to see are some brew-to-order machines that work great with relatively low fuss, so that more coffee shops can get in on the action. The cutting-edge shops will always be great, but I'm also very interested in the rest of the coffee scene—the big & little chains, the independent shops that don't necessarily have the money, training, background, or clientèle to go to the extreme innovative edge—but they still have customers that could appreciate a truly great coffee were it prepared right. For that, I hate to say it, we're going to need really good brew-to-order machines, Clover or Trifecta or some future-machine glimpsed but dimly, that are more automated, requiring less complications from the perspective of the buyer. By eliminating waste and allowing a per-coffee price-point, without the big scary variables of training that manual brew-to-order methods require, these machines could bring quality single-origins to every corner, much as lattes et al. were brought to the masses by the 2nd wave (and its reciprocal relation with more consistent/more automated espresso machines).

And these future-machines will need a future-grinder.

Somebody get on that.

Update!

A thread on Home-barista occasioned a really interesting response on Barista Exchange. I'm not surprised to see other people talking about this, and between the 2 forums there a lot of smart, coffee-obsessed people thinking about the issue. I'll definitely be keeping my eye on it.

Hello! The Rules, The Goals!

2010-08-12T06:35:00.000-07:00

Buffalo Brewing is a blog about the coffee and coffee-house scene in Western New York. I'm based out of Buffalo. I want to encourage the growth of specialty coffee and good third places in my city and beyond, by encouraging education and a sense of community on both sides of the counter. I also want a place to put my thoughts/rants/opinions/questions about coffee and cafés down where they can, in theory, be publicly ridiculed.

Full disclaimer! I'm Jake Casella. From the sticks in PA, I moved to Buffalo in 2006. I work for Spot Coffee, a small chain and roaster based out of Buffalo. I've been working for Spot for 4 years, as a barista, store manager, and head of barista training/coffee quality. Given how many hours I'm at work, it's inevitable that this blog will be a little Spot-centric at times. And I'm not above making a shameless self-promotional plug once in a while.

That said, this blog should not be considered to represent the opinions etc. of Spot Coffee, inc. Just me! Nor is its purpose only to advertise for Spot, though do I hope you get a good impression of my shop. I want to promote quality, education, and community in the region as a whole, not just as connected to the cafés I work at. I think it's worthwhile for its own sake; I also think that cafés should shoot for “good” competition.

It's my theory, not backed up by peer-reviewed statistics or anything, that coffee shops and their communities are a non-zero-sum game. The more educated coffee drinkers we have, who like quality and great atmosphere, the better all quality cafés in the city will do.

More disclaimer! I don't claim to be an expert on all things coffee, though I am working on it. Don't take my word as gospel, and please jump in to comment on anything I am totally wrong about—I'll appreciate the feedback. Like Socrates, I try to maintain a good balance of being a didactic jerk and loudly professing my own ignorance.

The format! I will be putting up my own rants and thoughts about coffee as they come to me. I will also start visiting various coffee-related businesses and writing up something little about them, hopefully interviewing a barista or owner or something at each. I'd like to tie this in to a resources page and a Facebook group eventually.

The rules!
1.)Stay positive! I am never going to post a negative review, as my goal is to help a community form, and I want the attitude to be open. Constructive criticism is great, but if my first interaction with someone focuses on something I think they're doing wrong, I can't imagine they'll want to get involved. I will not be bad-mouthing chains like Starbucks, Tim Hortons, etc.--they are a part of the coffee scene here, and their impact on coffee drinkers cannot be denied. If I think there is something negative worth talking about so that, as a community, we can think about it and find some solutions, I will do so in a manner geared to be anonymous, focusing on the problem rather than the location where I noticed it.
2.)Keep it friendly! I'm not out to post your trade secrets on the internet. I want to make sure that anyone I talk to, any shop I feature, feels completely comfortable about our conversation making its way onto the web.
3.)Encourage quality! By highlighting people who are doing things right, and by linking to trends and resources, and by talking about things I love in coffee.
4.)Encourage education! Particularly for the coffee drinker who is just starting to explore this crazy world.
5.)Encourage community! On both sides of the counter. One of my favorite things is going to other cafés and talking to the baristas, seeing regulars from my own café and getting a second to talk to them, not as their barista, but as a fellow café-lover. I come from the sticks, I mean really, and since moving to the city I have completely fallen in love with good public spaces. Coffee shops are one of my favorite types of “The Third Place.” I think I have a high standard of living, not because of how much money I make, but because of the presence and quality of the neighborhood I live in. That's what I want to celebrate and promote.

In addition to posting this blog at http://buffalobrewing.blogspot.com, I'll also be posting it on Barista Exchange, where I hope I can get some feedback from the larger coffee community. That's it, wish me luck!