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…

Post pages are, I hope, simple and readable. Comments (which are a massive part of why I write this thing) are also a little more readable and clear. Any bugs then let me know (unless you are on IE 6 ¹, in which case I am sorry, terribly sorry).

Looking forward to the Christmas break, as I have a tonne of draft stuff I need to post. In the meantime – why not cast your vote in the Absurd Latte Art Contest II.

UPDATE: For clarity – I did not do the design work here. I was merely a tyrannical and irritating client.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Full credit to Lawrence Brown for the design work.

1. I know some people are stuck with this browser at work, but I probably shouldn’t condone reading my ramblings during working hours….

The first full talk of the day, after the opening address, was Dr Vince Petiard. He is Executive Vice-President of Business Development for Natural Source Genetics and former Director of Plant Science and Technology Centrer for Nestle, L’Oreal and the Syntheloabo. I’m not sure exactly what that all means but in his talk he explained that he worked on raw material research for various companies as they were acquired by various larger companies.

His talk was both fascinating and slightly horrifying. A lot of people consider Nestle the enemy (in coffee) but when you look at what they’ve done (in terms of research) and what they know then I am very glad I got some insight into their process.

There is really too much to cover, and I am going to struggle to condense things down enough. I’m just going to post one interesting part of his talk (the bit mostly about coffee). Nestle took around a hundred varieties, propagated them, stored samples in liquid nitrogen, and then grew them. Across 3-5 crops they were able to assemble a database of varieties with masses of data about them (from how they roast and extract- for instant of course – through to yield and trunk size of the trees).

At the end of this they had three catagories:

1 – Varieties that taste good pretty much anywhere they grow. Essentiallly the quality was linked to the variety itself.
2 – Varieties that pretty bad no matter where you grow them.
3 – Varieties that can taste good in certain areas/under certain conditions.

Of category one there were five main varieties in there. Interestingly 3 of those 5 varieties where from what he called the Ethiopian Accession. I think this means that these are essentially heirloom Ethiopian varieties. He didn’t say what any of them where, but he said that one of 2 that were the result of cultivation and selection came from someone he knew. He asked that person how they’d cultivated the variety and he explained that the two stages where first to select for disease resistance and sufficient yield, and then of those children (of the first generation) he then sub-selected based on cup quality. This continued through several generations.

Really there was too much to cover here. I am sure we’ll talk about the GCQRI budget in subsequent sessions – but to give some perspective. Nestle purchases about 2.5% of the coffee crop. Their total R&D budget is 120 million swiss francs, of which 2.5 million swiss francs ($2.53m) is spent on coffee. Per year.

The main subject of the talk is about how plant science can help the Speciality coffee industry. Mechanisms to learn and implement new technologies, but also to raise concerns about genetic diversity and even agro-terrorism. I particularly enjoyed hearing about how the correlate cup quality to raw coffee. One method they’ve been working on is skipping correlating cup quality to specific biochemicals, instead cupping to correlate to genetic markers. This appears to have been more successful – though I really understand nothing about how you break down coffee’s DNA to be able to find specific, interesting lines of DNA code.

As a final note – he reminded us that finding markers that correlate to quality, does not mean that marker is causing quality. Anyway – back to the next session!

(Apologies for any mistakes I make!)

Despite the backlog of other posts I can never find the time to visit, I suspect blogging for the next week will probably be devoted to the WBC.

Having said that I don’t know that I will have time to create the kind of coverage you will see on the unofficial WBC blog over here, which is already chock full o’content.

People are arriving into town, as I type this team Japan are at the roastery plying us with delicious things.  Other barista champions are visiting or arriving later today and I hope people get a chance to enjoy both London’s coffee scene – as well as the city itself.

Having done these before I’m coming to terms with the frustrating idea that I just won’t have time to properly chat to everyone I want, that there will be a lot of half finished conversations but I am excited to see lots of people again who I haven’t seen for a while.

I’ll try and update flickr, twitter and here too!

UPDATE:  Another WBC Blog.

Just a very quick post to let you know that if you are coming to London for the WBC and want suggestions of somewhere to go then I’d recommend checking out the WBC/Coffee Kids London Coffee Map.

Not only will you get delicious coffee, but the participating shops are also raising money for Coffee Kids, which is two good things for the price of one!

London Coffee Map

I plan to talk a little bit more in future about some of the ideas behind The Penny University, but for now I will say that we are about to close out the applications for the two jobs we have open there.  We hadn’t really posted the advert in a lot of places, and while we’ve had some great responses, I just wanted to make sure it was spread as far as could be.

You can read a little more about the project in the job descriptions.  I should also add that we’d be very uncomfortable asking anyone to relocate for a job, especially with work visas being so difficult right now.

If you have any questions do let me know, though we’re not releasing a lot more detail about the shop for a few more days.

Barista

Store Assistant

Scottie’s trip is all about learning – talking to as many different people as possible, tasting as much as possible – and it seems like a pretty good idea to me.  It is easy to slip into habits where working hard every day at what you do, and maybe reading up on stuff online feels like enough.  You can’t replace the experience of learning through doing, but what I like about learning through discussion and tasting is that you often are taken down avenues and get ideas you hadn’t expected.

I haven’t travelled very much since the company started roasting, so I am really looking forward the upcoming SCAA show.  The show is all about people for me, but I am pretty excited about the SCAA Symposium on the days beforehand.  (It probably won’t surprise you to find out that Scottie is going to this as well!) Yes, I should be clear and state them I am involved in one of the sessions on the first day (about which I am actually a little nervous) but I am looking forward to the rest of the program too.  (If you are curious you can see the program here)  The idea of being in big room full of people who know more than I do about every single aspect of the coffee industry is immensely enticing!  I’ll try to blog as much as possible from the event, but if you are going I look forward to having a chat over some coffee!

Hopefully when I get back I can get stuck into (and reveal) another couple of big projects that I think will be amazing – and are the reason all has been so quiet on here of late.

Thanks to all who responded!

There are a load of posts I keep meaning to publish, but they are all so horribly written that I haven’t!  (The post about who is to blame was so badly written that, while the responses were really interesting, I didn’t manage to communicate what I wanted to – which was embarrassing!)

Before I type cheese too many times I want to let people know that the next London Gastronomy Seminar is coming up and I am really quite excited about it.  There are more details here.

On a side note – Neal’s Yard Dairy are a company that I have a huge amount of respect for, not just because of the quality of their product but because they do such a great job of communicating it in their shop, and ultimately they are incredibly good at selling it.

There is lots to be learned here.  I hope to see you there!

The new Uber arrived today and I am very excited.  This probably could have been a post for the Square Mile Blog, but there are many more exciting/important things to post on there!

What’s different about this Uber?  The capacity is bigger.  We sometimes used the old one for cupping, but it had more of a cafe use/quick recovery capacity so couldn’t do many bowls.  This one has a 6 litre boiler – very exciting!  This one has a flow control dial, instead of an button control.  It also has some beta software for us to test out.

I missed the Uber when it was gone.  My brewed coffee consumption dropped (a bad thing).   My experimentation also dropped off a little (also a bad thing).  I hope to get that going again.  I also grew irrationally annoyed with kettles (a weird thing?).

Before anyone accuses me of spam (perhaps fairly) I should make clear that we don’t make any money from the sale of Uber boilers, though yes – they are now available for sale.  It is just a project that we’re really excited about and it has been, and will be, a great tool for exploring coffee.  We’re extremely grateful to Marco – they are splendid!