Five cafes. 11 shots. One chemex. Three friends (and me). One morning. Crazy times.
Here’s a slideshow.
I’ll be reviewing the tour and a couple of the cafes individually over at thebeanstalker.com tomorrow. In the meantime – you should order some beans off me.
Here’s a photo my friend, coffee companion, and photographer extraordinaire Steven Tran took of me at Veneziano Caffe in West End.
Hey. Guess what. I sell roasted coffee. No doubt some of you know that. What you don’t know is two things.
I now have a snappy looking rubber stamp so my coffee bags are branded.
And also, you can now pay for the coffee as you order via Paypal. You don’t even have to have a Paypal account. Just a Credit Card. You can order from this page here. And I’m thinking I might even put the form in the sidebar on the front page.
Cool hey. I suggest you order away. You won’t regret it. Millions of people have already enjoyed coffee from St. Eutychus Coffee. And that’s the only exaggerated sentence in this post.
Serious Eats is your favourite food blog. You just may not know it yet. They conducted a blind taste test (with the help of my food hero J. Kenji Lopez-Alt.
The table was littered with tiny paper cups numbered one through eight, each representing a different method for storing coffee beans:
- 1. Whole beans stored at room temperature in a Ziploc bag (Ziploc bags are not hermetically sealed—air can still escape and enter the bag)
- 2. Whole beans stored at room temperature in a one-way valve bag (from which CO2 can escape but stale-making air can’t get in)
- 3 and 4. The same beans stored in the freezer
- 4, 5, 6, and 7. Ground coffee stored in the same 4 manners
The grinds and whole beans all came from the same batch. The coffee was stored for two weeks before we cracked it out, to get the full effect.
The taste test followed an earlier, less scientific, test, which came up with the following conclusion (which I agree entirely with)…
“Looking at the results with an open and caffeinated mind, my recommendation is to treat fresh-roasted coffee just as you would fresh-baked bread: Better to buy a little bit, use it up while it’s fresh, and buy more when needed. And, just as with fresh-baked bread, the second-best—though by a mile—option is to prepare it into individual servings and store them air-tight in the freezer (in the case of bread, that means slices; for coffee, that means premeasured doses you’d use to make a certain size batch of joe at a time), using only what you need at any time and never letting them thaw and refreeze.”
When beans thaw they sweat and their chemical make-up changes. It’s bad. Mmmkay.
Looking for the best coffee in Brisbane? Look no further than Cup, in Russell Street West End. It’s a grungy little warehouse/garage in a side street in West End. A hipster’s paradise (and there were plenty of them around). And the coffee is amazing. So good.
They boast an incredible machine. A Slayer. Which I’ve been excited about in the past (more than once). The Slayer was the first machine to allow changing of pressure during the pouring of a shot.
I discovered Cup a couple of months ago. And was suitably impressed. And Robyn and I checked it out yesterday after I dropped my machine in for a service (which means I’ll be checking out cafes for the next few days).
Cup’s house blend is a rich, sweet and earthy delight. It is so thick and goopy. Viciously viscous. As an espresso it goes straight to the back of your mouth and then explodes. It really is that good.
In milk it’s equally sensational. I had a flat white, Robyn a piccolo latte.
This is their current blend. Featuring a couple of beans I regularly roast and sell.
40% BRAZIL Daterra.
Nice balanced sweetness and body. This is the yellow bourbon varietal from a solid reliable farm.40% GUATEMALA El Injerto.
This is a mixed Cattura and Bourbon coffee from the award winning El Injerto farm. It is very clean and sweet with a nice lime acidity. Always cups up great.20% ETHIOPIA Yirgacheffe.
A new Yirgacheffe thats just arrived adds just a little acid to tie the others together.
Here are our coffees. iPhone style.
It’s more than possible that I have posted this exact infographic previously. But I like it. It’s about coffee. And it is interesting.
From Mint.com.
I don’t like decaf (but I will roast some for you if you ask nicely – in fact, it’s the only coffee I currently have because Australia Post is tres slow at the moment. I like putting French words into sentences when they are completely unnecessary…
From Fake Science, via Gary.
I likes this shirt. I likes it a lot. Two of my favourite things. Coffee. And Venn Diagrams. Combined.
On Threadless.
Did I mention that I just got back from two and a half weeks in Greece and Turkey on an, ahem, study tour. I learned two things. Driving in convoys (difficult, but essential) is better with walkie talkies, and the coffee is terrible.
So I give you the perfect solution. CoffeeTalkies. A real product1, brought to you by the Onion.
1 The box is real. The product is not.
I had a bit of a crash course in making Greek coffee yesterday. We had an incredible lunch, hosted by a Greek family, Mima took me through the steps. I photographed them for your benefit. Basically you are trying to make coffee that is almost toffee.
You start by measuring the amount of water you want for your cup.
Then you add two and a half teaspoons of sugar to your heating water.
And two and a half teaspoons of very finely ground coffee.
Then you stir. And stir. And stir. Forty times clockwise, then forty times anti-clockwise.
You wait for the coffee to visibly thicken – like the first sign that sugar is caramelising.
Then you serve it immediately.
We all know that some foods were made to go together. Perhaps the most appropriate way to recognise this is in ampersand form. Like these:
There are more here from designer Dan Beckemeyer. Via The Jailbreak.
Once you’ve got your supply of fresh beans and your grind sorted it’s time to make your coffee – the next step where coffee often fails is in the “dose” – in espresso preparation this is the amount of coffee ground and tamped into your portafiller basket. The portafiller is the fancy name for “the handle that goes into the machine.”
The amount of coffee used per cup is also important in all other methods of coffee preparation, but it is one of the most controllable variables in your coffee preparation routine. Some baristas seeking to control every variable to the nearest micro detail will even weigh the ground coffee before making their drinks. Others will develop a consistent routine to ensure they get the same result every time.
When it comes to espresso getting the dose wrong can have profound impacts on your extraction, too much and the coffee will stall or pour too slowly. The ideal for espresso is for about 30mL in 25-30 seconds, a shot that takes longer, called a ristretto, is thicker, oilier, and becoming increasingly popular in specialty cafes. Ristrettos can be achieved by increasing your dose.
The basic routine for espresso dosing is to grind your coffee into the portafiller basket until it is heaped over the top. A good tip at this point is to use the double shot basket even when you’re only going to use a single shot. It tastes better.
Bang it against a flat surface a few times (aim for the same number every time) to settle the coffee – you don’t want big gaps or different densities in the puck your coffee will form in the basket – having uniform density means the water has to travel through the coffee evenly.
Next, level off the coffee with a flat surface (use the same thing each time – most baristas use their fingers, but you can use the back of a bread knife or buy expensive dosing tools). Volume is more important than weight – different beans have different densities and it’s important to have the same volume of coffee in the basket each time rather than the same weight, but a ball park is 14gm for a double shot.
Then tamp (push down on) the coffee firmly – some people suggest tamping with 15kg of force (you can practice on bathroom scales, practice pushing down on them with your tamper/flat round surface until it reads 15kg or thereabouts). When the coffee is tamped properly you should be able to flip the portafiller upside down without getting coffee all over your bench, once you’ve got the coffee in the basket it’s time to extract your shot.
When it comes to dosing for your plunger coffee or filtered/percolated coffee there are ideal ratios of coffee to water – that are also best calculated using volume. For a plunger, also called a “French Press” or a presspot, the ratio is one heaped tablespoon per cup of coffee. Brewed coffee (percolaters, drip filters, etc) needs about two tablespoons for one and a half cups.
This Saturday night our church is hosting a coffee night with myself and former Di Bella Coffee Roaster Daniel Russell. Here’s the flier. You’re more than welcome to come along – RSVP in the comments.
I’m about to post five posts in a series “five steps to better coffee” which will become the booklet we give out on the night (hopefully). I’ll also do a bit of a dummies guide to home roasting.
If your church (in Brisbane) would like to run a similar night – let me know. I’m sure Dan and I can be talked into helping out…
I thought I might try a new little segment here (depending on future latte art results)… Can you spot a resemblance to a relatively famous painting in this cup of coffee? It’s a bit like reading the tea leaves.
Too many people think making coffee is easy (for a significant proportion of that group it simply involves hot water and a teaspoon of coffee flavoured dirt).
Illy is an Italian coffee powerhouse. Giorgi Millio used to work with them. Now he’s a coffee writer. Here’s his description of Illy’s approach to coffee.
“Certainly my views on coffee have been influenced by the company’s scientific environment, created by three generations of chemists; a research and development unit covering agronomy, botany, physics, chemistry, biology, statistics, and computer science; and laboratories dedicated to dedicated to the study of coffee, in areas like sensory perception (not just taste, but aroma as well).”
He’s a coffeesnob. Here’s an interesting fact:
Coffee is intricate and requires education and passion to get right–plus a lot of practice. Espresso is the most complex coffee preparation, containing around 1,500 chemical substances, of which 800 are volatile. There are also more than 100 chemical/physical variables that affect the final preparation—like water composition, the size and distribution of the ground coffee particles, filter dimensions and hole diameter, dynamic water flow temperature and pressure, shape and temperature of the cup, roasting degree, and many, many more …