Over Christmas it occurred to me that there is a lack of exchange regarding what baristi, roasters, chefs, home brewers etc are reading outside of the coffee world.  Besides the likes of the Rao books, the Illy book,  the offer by Tim Wendelboe and  the evergreen Schomer didactic, there is a wider field of reference we can call upon and share the fruits of our labour.

I want to highlight this blog because I’d love to see more people answer the question he poses:

The idea I have here is for everyone to cite two books which they feel is applicable, relevant and supplementary to the coffee world, which may not be limited to the primary coffee sources outlined above.

I’ll be picking up the two books he recommends (though probably waiting for the paperback edition of the first, or the kindle edition should publishers ever work out their nonsense over pricing….).

If you’ve got something to contribute then head on over to his blog and leave a comment.

Bean Here, Bean There: Further Reading ¹

1. The blog as a whole is definitely worth a read/RSS subscription too

I buy a lot of really high-quality coffee. The average price per pound (not including shipping) this year was $22. The big outlier was a half-pound of Finca La Valentina Geisha from PT’s Coffee, which retailed at the equivalent of almost $120/lb. Including that coffee, I indulged in 23 bags of coffee that retailed for over $20/lb. If I take out the five most expensive bags of coffee (over $30/lb) my cost per cup declines to $0.83, or $0.75 without shipping. Most average coffee consumers will be able to bring even this price down substantially without compromising sustainability, or taste.

Great coffee is incredibly cheap.  We’ve been saying this for a long time, but it is nice to have it written aloud by someone buying a lot of coffee as a retail consumer.

Most interesting to me was seeing the increase in per cup cost since 2008.  A mixture of increasing retail prices, perhaps coupled with an increasing preference for certain coffees:

The high elevations of my favorite coffees also stood out to me. The average elevation of these coffee was over 1600 meters! Higher elevation slows bean development, resulting in a denser bean and typically more well-developed flavors. Alas, we may be seeing more coffee grown at these high elevations in the decades to come. This doesn’t mean there will be a proliferation of coffees with characteristics like that of high-grown coffees today. Climate change will mean the temperatures required by fine arabica coffee will move upslope, but of course conditions at 1600 meters may soon be the same as 1200-1400 meters today.

Both posts are an interesting and enjoyable read, and it made me want to do more to track my own consumption in these terms:

My Year in Beans: 2011

Favourite Coffees of 2011 

All that said, I’ve had a creeping feeling of unease recently. I feel like my relationship with the internet has soured, and I’ve ended up a lazy consumer of “content”. The internet has become infectious, and rewarding in the wrong sort of way. I can spend a couple of hours browsing around twitter, blogs, aggregators etc and enjoy it but doesn’t really accomplish very much. I can’t help but feel a bit like a rat in a cage that has learned to push a button for a treat and that’s all I do. I want to achieve a great deal more than I feel I am, and my dissatisfaction means a need for action.

So, I am going to try to take some time out from the online world. I wan’t to focus on creating things, achieving more and focusing a little more on the analogue world. I have a growing list of projects and I look forward to dedicating more time to them – many of which are coffee related, and the results of which will likely appear here in the future.

What does that mean for this blog? More and more recently I’ve felt like I have just been recycling other people’s content and ideas on here (and quoting Oscar Wilde does not make you a wit). I want to have something of interest to share and to say. So it means that there won’t be any posts on here for a few months. Nor will I be using facebook, G+ or twitter for a while. For people stumbling onto this blog then I’d recommend checking out the recently updated articles page that has some of the more interesting posts from the past.

See you all online again in a little while…

The Other Black Stuff – At odds with unevenness

We should (as suggested on twitter) try to convince David to join the coffee world, because if someone outside of coffee can teach us this much and share this much then think what would be possible if this were his day job!

I get fairly numerous emails from a variety companies asking me to post about their products.  I generally ignore these emails.  More recently some have come with financial incentives – and last week I too received an email from a viral marketing company asking me to post a series of three videos from Douwe Egberts in return for money.  At the time I didn’t know how much but it turns out it is £50.

£50 – not a huge amount of money.  Easy cash or the destruction of any credibility?  Could you get away with it with full disclosure? Blogs cost money to run if you are hosting your own, the temptation is of course there.  It seems that invite went out to food bloggers too – interesting to see how many (or how few!) have disclosed that they are getting paid.

I hope I have been sufficiently clear in the past with disclosure with things I have not paid for – the ExtractMojo for example, though a freebie doesn’t guarantee a good review either.   If I have time I am happy to review things, but if someone asks I would rather give an honest opinion because the short term gain is easily outweighed by the long term relationship with a community.

The food blogging community is ahead of the coffee one (it is bigger, has a larger audience and a wider range of focus) and it is starting to see more and more issues with conflicts of interest, and non-disclosure souring reader trust.  There was an interesting LA Times article recently on the way food manufacturers (two words that shouldn’t really be next to each other) are interacting with blogging mothers.

We’re probably a little way away from Lavazza whisking Chris Tacy off to the factory, wining and dining Tonx or David Walsh in return for some nice press (though they did send Gwilym and I this year’s calendar which was genuinely very nice of them, thank you) – but if coffee blogging survives twitter then it suddenly doesn’t seem that ludicrous.

On a side note I’m becoming increasingly annoyed by the number of Press Releases I get sent for US companies, with US only special offers.  In the past I’ve just tried to ignore it, but doing that is hardly going to inspire a change in their practices.  However you can’t help but wonder about the skills of a public relations company whose efforts only sour my relationship with their client.

Thoughts?

Coffee blogs have gone very quiet lately.  Hardly anyone is writing.  Some would say that blogs have had their day.  Others would say that twitter prevents something of blog-worthiness building up by dripping out people’s thoughts and ideas.

Either way it is a shame.  Perhaps some people think that there will be an improved signal to noise ratio, perhaps I am wrong to miss a lot of the posts.  I can hardly claim to be the most productive of bloggers either (despite being regularly accused of such things.)

Regardless of all the questions – huzzah for Sprudge!  I hope he keeps it going!

I know, I know – not very interesting. However it caused me to have a look at the Analytics page (is there anything Google doesn’t do brilliantly?) and see who’s visiting and why. Since the WBC the readership jumped up, and I was pleased to see we had retained quite a few of those readers – about 10,000 more visits a month in fact, pushing me up to an average of about 25,000 a month. This seems a lot, but then I don’t really know what to compare it to except what I had before.

One thing I’ve noticed is that my higher page rank in google means that when you search for roasters or products that I’ve rambled on about, my blog is often on the first or second page of results. Not sure how I feel about this, though I do notice a lot of clickthroughs from these sorts of google searches.

People have asked if I’ve considered making money from it, and I have. However I am a long way from generating enough traffic to seriously bother my bandwidth allowance (for which I pay very little) and whilst this may not be the most beautiful site it would look much worse with ugly ads running through it. Maybe when I hit 100,000! I’ve had occasional e-mails from people asking if they could pay me to promote something on here and I’ve turned them down.  What started as a place to post thoughts and progress back in 2004 seems to have become something else, and I confess that keeping it interesting does play on my mind from time to time.

To try and do just that I am hoping for a series of guest posts over the coming months, as well as some more trip reports from my future travels.

Also despite never having to compete again my brain hasn’t quite shut down on the signature drink front so I will probably continue to post various ideas and recipes in the future. There will also probably be the odd article on science-type stuff whenever I get long enough sat down with a serious book or two (I am thinking plane flights probably!) though if there are any requests I’d be interested in hearing them.

Overall I just want to say thanks for reading, and in many cases contributing. Whilst this isn’t really a community, it has been great that so many people have argued, corrected, schooled and helped me over the years. I hope you keep coming back.

Over at Barismo they have a great little section called blog notes that is essentially interesting clippings from other coffee bloggers.  Looking through the articles listed it seems that a lot has changed.  I have 150 coffee blogs in my feed reader.  Yes, this is a touch excessive and not all of them regularly provide interesting content but a surprising amount do.  It seems that more people are stepping up to experiment in a thoughtful way and to share what they find.  This seems to gently accelerate the speed we learn collectively which is the interesting part of the internets contribution to open source learning for baristas.  Ola’s experiments, Kiril coldbrews, Elliot’s thoughts on pests and Ben’s regular critique of our absurdity (immersed as he now may be in it) are all interesting and thought provoking.

I look forward to where this is going as more baristas step up to contribute, whilst hopefully keeping an open mind…

Thoughts in the comments?

Second of all – this is a big post. It looks huge but it is mostly pictures – honest!

This was my second Nordic Barista Cup and I enjoyed it a lot. I spent the first day catching up with people, which is a crucial part of the whole thing for me. I missed a few of the lectures (The Nespresso one on sustainability for example – more on their presence later) though I enjoyed listening to Roberto Bendana from Cafes de Nicaragua, who talked with Stephen Hurst.

That evening was a boat trip, champagne for all of course, and then dinner. Was nice to catch up with Anne Lunnell and to catch up with Klaus on the Coffee Collective’s progression.

After the dinner the fun began with the first and last Coffee Olympics. Hosted by Alex in absurd shorts I was granted the high honour of lighting the Olympic Flame (a candle) and things didn’t get much more sensible from there. I did enjoy the team’s coffee commercials acted out for an inebriated and amused audience, and human tic-tac-toe is as silly as it sounds.

Spent the dinner with Chris and M’lissa and it was great to see them again, having first met them last year at the NBC in Copenhagen. They were there as volunteers and I will says this now – all the volunteers were absolutely amazing. They worked incredibly hard – with barely a break and coping with never ending lists of tasks and chores. I think next year they may need a few more because these guys were doing at least two persons work each. Amongst them were a few people I knew from the interweb community but had never met like Scott and Justin, and Will from Matthew Algie was also working his arse of with them. When you see people crashed out on benches in the afternoon you know they’ve worked hard!

I hope the organisers made them feel as appreciated as they were by the attendees.

So – Day two:

The Day started with a new idea becoming tradition: Nordic Roaster

Roasters were asked to submit a filter and an espresso blend. 10 roasters submitted so each team was given four coffees to brew. For the filter coffee the roaster could choose their dose and were informed how the Bunn Brewers would be set. For the espresso again all they could input to the baristas was the dose, assuming a rough brewtime of 25 seconds to white out.

All tasting was done blind, and filter coffee was done first – 10 cups to sip. Number 6 shone at first for me, but I didn’t like how it cooled so picked number 2. As for espresso we did it in two rounds of five. I tried to take notes on the back of my card, and it was interesting to taste different styles.

It is hard to taste coffee in paper cups, but still a lot of fun. Results would be announced later that evening…

A few lectures this day I enjoyed – having the World Sommelier Champion was interesting. He talked about using descriptions to better communicate with the customer and about common language and avoiding esoteric terms. I would like to have heard more about using his skills to more effectively sell to customers, but it was good to hear him speak.

That evening was the White Party. We were sent away and the volunteers went to work on the tent. We arrived that evening and all those not dressed in white were given some nice white overalls so we all matched. When we were allowed in everything was filled with fog, strobed light and it was crazy. Eyebrows were raised over the white sous-vide food, but I had more fun throwing popcorn at Ken from BaristaMag.

Then the tempation became to much for Klaus and I and many a helium balloon was commandeered from the plastic flamingos that held them on the tables, until one flamingo had enough to take flight. It was a proud moment.

Day three started with a very brief cafe crawl with Chris and M’lissa before they had to start working. Linus from the Coffee Collective had kindly texted me a couple of places to visit (though I am not sure 4.30am is the happiest time to recieve this kind of thing – their ability to keep going late and be up early makes me feel an old man…)

The first place sounded intruiging…. Caffe Mauritz is a tiny little shop on a busy street. They have a four group Linea and a couple of Mahlkoenig R2D2s on the back bar. However it is their roasting that draws the most interest. All the coffee is roasted in an oven on a baking tray, seemingly for 12 minutes. I kid you not. The owner wasn’t there when we were in but others visited and apparently he is a great character, and likes to start the day off by having a staff meeting and telling the stories and fables.

We had an impressively generous single espresso (about 3 ounces?!) and then headed over to a little cafe, very Italian in style from start to finish for a much cheaper and much, much shorter little espresso.

The tent/event was open to the public on the final day and they could change their Kroner for Barista Dollars (B$) and spend them at the team’s cafes. This would seem, while quite late in proceedings, to explain briefly the theme for this year’s competition (though Barista Mag have been doing a much better job of all this over on their blog). It was all about The Future Coffee Shop… The finale involved the five different shops competing to make the most money. Iceland went all Clover, no espresso…. Norway bought in baristas to do guest slots…. They chose their food offering, their service style and had previously bid for the coffees they would serve having cupped them first.

I was bought in by Norway to do a half hour guest slot, sandwiched impressively by Scott Lucey and Tim Wendelboe. Norway’s espresso was very lightly roasted, and Scott piled the pressure on me by serving me as good a shot as I think was possible from that coffee 10 minutes before I was to follow him on. It was a lot of fun, and now isn’t the time to go into worrying about your shots when you can’t quite get a fix on the coffee and dealing with people’s expectations of how the shots I serve will taste.

I bought coffee drinks, bags of beans and many a tasty treat from the different teams and I think Norway even managed to sell their K30 grinder! There were cuppings, chocolate tastings, Troels roaming the floor selling his goods and Soren with an odd drawn on moustache. No one bats an eyelid. I was annoyed to miss a tasting run at the Iceland Cafe where they used different sets of grinder burrs to brew one coffee several times on the Clover – I think the results from that will pop up somewhere soon, but in synopsis: coffee specific burrs really do work best.

Next came an item in the program I was a little skeptical about. The World Record attempt with Nespresso. I am not a huge fan of Nespresso, nor their daddy company especially when it comes the world of coffee. The idea was to use 2 domestic Nespresso machines per team to make as many cappuccinos as possible in 10 minutes. Didn’t matter how they tasted, just had to look ok. My initial anger over this absurdity was calmed by idea that if Nespresso want to throw money at an event like this, then who are we to refuse it when it can improve the event for everyone. No one in the coffee community really takes it seriously, so no harm done.

The problem was that this wasn’t about the coffee community – this was a day open to the public and it seemed such an appalling shame that the public were not given the uniform message that the craft of the barista is something worthwhile and skilled, instead they also saw what we are trying to fight again – the person pushing buttons, disconnected from the coffee making passable drinks. These are some of the best baristas in Scandanavia/Europe/The World and they are forced by the machinery and coffee to produce drinks like this for the public to watch (but thankfully not taste):

If we’d done it behind closed doors it would have seemed very funny, though I guess it wouldn’t have been as good a day for Nestle. A bit of shame….

After auctioning off loads of stuff to public and eager barista souvenir hunters everyone eventually made their way over to the Gala dinner, where the annoucements would be made. There were some odd extra awards and I won Best Attendee (I owe this entirely to Mr Lucey) and Anette and David Craig (his kilt wearing may have had something to do with it!) missed out on Cutest Girl to Ave Pilt. I laughed a lot and then they got the five WBC winners up to the machine to make coffee – Me, Klaus, Troels, Tim and also Martin stepped up. It was cool to see Martin working the machine because he won long before I got into coffee and I’d never seen him churning out drinks. Again the coffee being used maybe wasn’t the perfect roast for an espresso but I think most of the crowd wanted photos of Troels, Tim and Martin (because they did most of the hard work!) than they wanted any more coffee….

The speeches were mercifully short and we were informed that the event had raised over $10,000 US towards a school charity project in Nicaragua. Then the winners were announced and I think everyone was delighted with the result. To further continue the NBC mantra of learning together, acting together, and being together the winners of the trip go to Nicaragua but also one member of each of the other teams goes along too which I think is a great idea.

I love the NBC, it makes me jealous that I can never compete in that competition because I think being on one of those teams is very special indeed and is a great experience. I hope the UK and the rest of Europe can continue to learn from their example and that team competitions continue to grow. I guess I shall soon find out as I head to Moscow in a week to compete in the UK team for the European Team Challenge.

I was delighted for Anne, Costas et al. Again – huge congratulations to Sweden.

But the night didn’t end there….. Before we managed to sneak off into the night Scott had invaded the stage and started a latte art smackdown.

About 20 baristas threw in their money (all went to the charity project – we competed for the honour/pride/hilarity). Chris, M’lissa, Scott, Justin, Lukasz and many others including myself poured under a tirade of healthy and entertaining heckling and endless camera flashes. In the end it was Scott that would make the final two and win in the head to head battle.

Right now I am really tired and probably will come back to this and tidy it up a little bit, and I suspect it is already a massive post. Thank you to everyone that organised it and thank you to the London School of Coffee who paid my ticket.

In a final smug moment I had a quick look through my case at all the coffee I picked up:

1 kg Solberg and Hansen espresso

750g Coffee Collective espresso (can’t wait to try this!!!)

5 x 250g Nicaraguan CoE and other speciality coffees

250g Finca Vista Hermosa (Coffee Collective again)

250g Guatemala CoE Winner

Add to this a little Eva Solo and a new and very sexy tamper from Lars at Xpressivo (will post pics – it really is very cool), lots more coffee t-shirts and limited edition NBC stuff and also the coffee I picked up in Canada (1kg Discovery espresso blend, 1 pound Black Cat, 1 pound Kid-O and some Yirg from the guys at Transcend) and I think I will have no trouble keeping caffeinated in the next few days (though I should probably be worrying about my vodka tolerance in the run up to Moscow!)

It has been a great couple of weeks!