I know it is a little way off but I wanted to write something about the upcoming UK Coffee Week.  You can get a good idea of who is behind it, what the goals are, and what the first project is from the website.

I am involved as a trustee of the Allegra Foundation, and the roastery will be promoting it.  I should add that I’m a big fan of the way that the Foundation is currently funded – administrative costs come from seed funds, so none of the donations raised are spent on anything other than charitable work.

It is hard not to be excited by what is possible if 5p per cup of coffee sold for a week went to charity.  I hope people see the involvement of bigger companies as a positive thing in this context, and that they don’t allow this to put them off.  I strongly encourage people to get involved as I think this has great potential to do amazing things!

About this.

I look forward to making coffee for people, haven’t done that since I used to do the occasional shift on Gwilym’s cart on a Sunday.  I will post some pics up here, or on flickr, or on the Square Mile blog (or maybe all of them) soon.

Hopefully see some of you there soon!  Happy to answer any questions in the comments!

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This evening I had a lot of fun presenting at the London Gastronomy Seminars.  The topic was flavour in wine and coffee, and I was up after Jamie Goode, which is a hard act to follow!  Our topic was “Flavour – from plant to cup”

Jamie’s presentation was full of information and topics that could have become a presentation in their own right.  Talking to him before, and thinking about what he said during, I suspect I am going to get sucked into flavour perception all over again.  Not so much the mechanics of taste reception and gustation – but more what our brains choose to do with this information.  Perception rather than detection.

I should also add that the wine Jamie used for his talk was fascinating.  The best description I could have was it was like tasting a natural process, having only drunk washed coffees.  Jamie’s rather more eloquent notes on it can be found here.

I really do enjoy giving talks and a room full of 150+ people certainly delivers a little adrenaline rush.  (I shall make no secret of the fact that I would kill to talk at TED one day, so thoroughly jealous of Intelligentsia being involved this year! If you need a barista at all…..) That said – suddenly having to brew 16+ litres of coffee with a single filter brewer was a little challenging!

I talked a bit about coffee’s journey, dividing the narrative into four stages:  creation (growing)/processing/roasting/brewing.  I then served two coffees and tried to relate the flavours in the cup back through those four stages.  The Q&A from the audience at the end was inevitably my favourite bit, the range of questions was wonderful.  Unfortunately they were unable to film tonight’s event, and I don’t think putting the slides up would be very interesting.

I think the London Gastronomy Seminars are going to continue to grow and grow – there already seems to be a community forming of diverse and interesting people with a shared passion.  I look forward to the next one, and hopefully I’ll see you there!