This is required viewing:

The dress aside, I think he makes a good point.

Thoughts?

Anyway – there are now two new talks out so I thought I’d post them together.

Cosimo Libardo

Take your time with this one. Go full screen, so you can see the data. It is some interesting research that will reward careful viewing.

Paul Stack

I liked Paul’s presentation a lot, despite (or perhaps because) of his misbehaving powerpoint. Well worth a watch too!

Watch and enjoy! Once again – was so proud to be a part of this awesome event that is only going to get better in the future!

Initially there wasn’t going to be a UK Brewers Cup.  With the World Brewers Cup being relatively new, countries had the option to nominate someone to compete, and the SCAE UK asked me.  I’ll be completely honest – I did want to compete in the Worlds because I really like this competition.  However, it seemed a little unfair and I thought that it would be a fun competition to put on.  I made a deal that I would go and represent if I failed to organise the UK competition myself.  Because I had wanted to compete I planned to enter into the competition – competitions have always proven to be great learning experiences and I thought this one would be especially fun.

With WBC and all that goes into it, this was perhaps a foolish proposition but I was lucky enough to be able to drag Andrew Tolley from Taylor Street Baristas and Gwilym Davies into the mix to help organise.  As this was outside of the remit of the SCAE we also had to find funding and sponsorship and I have to say thank you to Paul and all at Marco for water boilers, Ed and Steve at Mahlkoenig UK for grinders, Paul at Coffee Hit for prizes and Peter from James Gourmet for roasting the round 1 coffee.

I was delighted with the response – we filled all 20 places very quickly (more seemed a little ambitious as we planned to hold both round 1 and round 2 on the same day, at Prufrock Cafe on a Saturday.)  There was a great cross section of shops and roasters in the running, and we just needed a few judges.

Those judges ended up giving a heroic effort.  They’d judge around 25 cups of coffee over a 9 hour period.  I was impressed.  Thank you to Grant Rattray from Cup of Excellence, Lynsey from United Coffee and Joanna Lawson from Twin Trading.  (Unlike the other two, Grant isn’t a Q-Grader, but he has some substantial cupping credentials….)

The day was fun – a lot more people showed up to hang out, drink coffee and support than we hoped.  The vibe in the place was lovely, and great coffee felt oddly accessible compared to so many other coffee competitions.

I made a little video – I tried to capture everyone during the day but in between organising, competing and just running around like an idiot I maybe didn’t do the best job.  It should show everyone and the brew method they used.  We’ll try and get some recipes up on the tumblr soon.  I am annoyed I didn’t get good footage of Andrew running things, doing the scoring, organising judges and competitors and generally being awesome – thank you again for your help! He should have been in the video, so my apologies there.

So, I ended up winning.  I have to say that I would have felt awkward enough about this, even without the mixture of cheers and groans that met the announcement.  Nonetheless I am very pleased this event happened – I hope all competitors had fun.  I shall do my best in Maastricht later in the month.

A big thank you to Jess for roasting some delicious coffee, it shouldn’t have tasted that good the day after roasting!  For those who want the details I brewed a Kangunu AA lot, from Nyeri, at a ratio of 60g/l.  The method was basically a filtered french press.  (I like simple brewing).  4 minute steep time.

People’s thoughts and feedback on the topic are very welcome – what is also exciting is how many more great talks there are to come from the day!

1. And yes – I have a Sprudge t-shirt!

The idea is that with more events there will be a library of interesting TED style talks on all things coffee.

Steve has started to release the talks in the order of the day, and kicking off the event was Colin Harmon whose talk I would consider absolutely essential for anyone thinking about opening a shop. (It was a very hard act to follow – Colin is a great speaker).

I’ll be reposting all the talks on here as they are released because I think they are all worth watching!

You can also download an iphone app which is a great way to subscribe to the talks as they’re released in the future.

First up a fun video from the Norwegian crew who came to visit London and did the whole Disloyalty Card in a day.  Epic, heroic quantities of caffeine consumed!  Quite how they managed to cup with us halfway through the day remains a mystery.  I’m almost jealous of their coffee constitutions:

Next up are a couple of videos (the first two of a trilogy) focusing on brewing in Intelligentsia’s Venice store.  The desaturation of everything but the coffee ought to be really cheesey, but I think it works really well.  It also makes me want a massive 5 cup syphon!

At the London Gastronomy Seminars I was given a Mypressi Twist to play with by the UK distributor.  I had been toying with buying one having seen the hype online, so this was a rather pleasant surprise.

I didn’t really get a chance to play with it til yesterday afternoon.  I’ve played with it some more today and this is just a quick summary of my thoughts and what I think is particularly interesting about it.

First off – it makes pretty good espresso.  I know I am hardly the first person to make this observation, but I think everyone who tries it is pleasantly surprised.  I think with a few adjustments to technique then you can get something better than any espresso machine in its price bracket, or up to two or three times its price.  If you like milk drinks though – then this may not appeal to you.

I pulled a couple of shots yesterday, and for shot number three my curiousity kicked in.  What I think is most exciting about this is its potential for experimenting with extraction.  We can only really (safely) use water in an espresso machine.  My first thought was to reach for some whisky.  I probably should have heated it up first, as it was not delicious cold – though the shot did still look pretty good.  I then attempted a little macchiato using milk to brew the coffee.¹.  In hindsight I should probably have used skimmed milk, as the full fat seemed to clog the extraction and the result was (simply put) not good.  But there was potential!

This makes me quite excited about its possible use in barista competitions.  In the past it has been completely illegal to put anything other than coffee in the portafilter (for good reason!) but this would let you infuse anything you like.  You’ll still need to pull and use 4 shots from the competition espresso machine but the applications within signature drinks are almost endless.

You could brew espresso starting with brewed coffee.  You could use espresso and push it through something else to extract flavour into it.  In fact, I am going to pause writing this post and check how many shots you can get in the water section of the twist…..

*time passes*

OK – so 4 shots of espresso fit pretty nicely into the top chamber.  And the espresso seems to pull in a fairly normal (if slightly slow way).  This is a double espresso, brewed using 4 espressos:

The taste?  Not so great, not as bad as I was expecting, but not so great.  The texture was unbelievable.  The point is that this is exciting!  I should add that points for creativity in competitions don’t come from using clever things, or having a wild idea – they come from using clever things, or wild ideas to create something tasty.  There are no points for novelty.

The more I think about it, the more possibilities there seem – non-coffee applications too.  Cocktail people would surely have a million more ideas than me.  I still wonder though – what about pushing vodka through a basket of lemon and lime zest?  What if you use CO2 instead of N20? What if? What if? What if?

I’ve gotten off topic! Back to using it to brew coffee:

I have what not many other people have – a 53mm Scace, back from my days at La Spaziale.  The Mypressi uses a 53mm basket.  It didn’t take a giant leap of thought to dig out my device and start testing the brew temperature.  I’d seen quite a lot of speculation online about it, and I can only post my limited experiments and findings.  Here is a short video:

Preheating the water chamber is incredibly important.  You could tell this was later on in my experiments from the starting temp of the scace probe, which may have influenced readings somewhat.  Without preheating the temp was hovering around 80C.  I am sure I could have heated the top chamber more and squeezed into the 90s.  Nonetheless I think it is a pretty respectable brew temperature.  I’d love to hear how people are getting max temp out of theirs.

I was also a little surprised that the dose and grind I had set on my Synesso seemed to work well.  Out of curiousity I pulled a double on each simultaneously – same dose, same grind setting, same brew time.  Here is the video, data on the shots afterwards:

Synesso shot:  18.5g coffee, 33.4g brew liquid.  Extraction percentage 18.6%

Mypressi shot: 18.5g coffee, 42g brew liquid.  Extraction percentage 18.9%

This is a single experiment, so it would be foolish to take too much from it.  One could speculate that with the temperature issues the Mypressi will struggle to extract coffee as quickly as a hotter profile on a machine.  The fact that it took almost 25% more liquid to get the extraction percentage to match (in the same time frame – with very different pressure profiles I might wager, sadly I only have a 53mm Scace 1.0 – not 2.0) would suggest that if you like shorter shots you may be better off dropping your dose and going finer, and if you want a heavier dose you may need to push a little more water through.

So far I’ve only spent a couple of days with it – but overall I’m quite impressed and looking forward to playing with it some more.  I’ll take more more readings with the ExtractMojo, see if the above experiment was repeatable.  Would love to hear people’s thoughts, suggestions and ideas!

1. Tim Styles should trademark the term MilkPressi Twist

The footage was shot inbetween me making coffee and trying to run things so isn’t very cohesive.  I thought I’d add a noisy, messy soundtrack and just leave it quite silly.  Thanks again to all who get involved!

UBF 6 – Let’s take it outside Santa from James Hoffmann.

1.  My initial offset opinion could be wrong, by about 0.5C closer to display. This doesn’t affect findings on stability or repeatability – it is just numbers.

2.  I will brew coffee in the next video.

3.  The video isn’t 13:20 long, it is about 7 minutes.  No idea why vimeo thinks differently!

Videocast #5 – Introduction to the Uber Boiler from James Hoffmann on Vimeo.

Marco have built us a prototype of a great water boiler. This is a quick intro into what it can do, and why they built it for us.

For more info go to http://www.marco.ie/uberproject