A little bit of fun.  All you have to do is identify what this graph is charting out.  The x and y scales are linear.  It has something to do with coffee.  The first person to identify it will get a bag of tasty, tasty coffee sent to them from me.  Terms and conditions apply¹

Also – please leave a comment to guess so other people can see. Submissions won’t be accepted via twitter etc.

UPDATE:

Clearly I’ve made this too tough.  Here is the same graph with a little more information on the axes:

1. Well – no one at Square Mile Coffee can enter nor frankly needs to – the prize wouldn’t be very interesting, nor can Ben Kaminsky. [↩]

An interesting post over at Josh Brain’s blog, titled “Further Reading“, asking about non-coffee books that people would find interesting, useful and relevant to what we do.

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 [↩]

Back in September of last year I was thinking a bit about the words we use when we describe coffee.  Out of interest I went to a few US roaster’s websites and copied all their coffee descriptions into a text document and ran it through wordle.

I then went to Starbucks website and did the same thing with all their descriptions.  The results are interesting, I think and you can click to enbiggen:

Speciality:

Starbucks:

Now don’t take these too seriously – this is hardly the most incisive bit of research.  I’d like to ask if the same thing stands out to you as it does to me – but then I have to ruin the question by giving my own answer.

Speciality  ((how uncomfortable I am with this term)) likes to use nouns.  Solid, statement-of-fact nouns:  This coffee tastes like blackberry.

Starbucks surprised me, not only by their consistent use of acidity which confuses me on a couple of different accounts, because they don’t use as many nouns.  Lots more descriptive words, more adjectives and adverbs.  Are they harder to argue or disagree with?  Perhaps a more accessible way to describe coffee to their customers?

Is there something in the way they do this we can learn from.  I’m not suggesting we spruce up our descriptions with meaningless words, and I will admit that I am uncomfortable with labels when flavour descriptors start verbing, but would describing those factual flavour nouns in our labels a little more be beneficial?

There have been two great posts from Coffee and Conservation recently, detailing Julie Craves’ year of consumption.

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 

Whoever is doing the PR work for the position of production roaster deserves a bonus. I can’t think of another position that is as widely coveted within our industry. Roasting seems so creative, so romantic, so artful. We talk about hand roasting, or small batch roasting, or emphasise the craft of it all the time. Roasting is often seen as the pinnacle of the coffee industry, or certainly up there with being a buyer.

Personally I would think an accurate description of coffee roasting would be food manufacture.

Whether you see the roasting process as being transformational and an act of creation, or you see it a necessary step that shouldn’t hinder the transparency of the raw materials qualities – what makes a great production roaster is the ability to pay attention to detail, to be focused, and to do exactly the same thing time after time after time. A great roaster should be working to replicate a desired roast curve, and only deviate once feedback from the cupping table prompts a change. Consistency, not creativity, is at the root of the job description. Yes, there is cupping – lots of it. This is also a time when people basically look for flaws in what you’ve done (as well as commend great roasts). Roasting is hard on the ego if you’ve got a great group of cuppers giving you feedback.  Roasting the same coffees over and over doesn’t offer some immediate insight into coffee generally.  You still need to taste many different coffees, cup a lot and brew a lot.

I’ve roasted enough to know that I am not a great roaster. I certainly wouldn’t hire me to roast coffee for a living.¹ I don’t have the attention span, the strength of mind. I have lots of stupid ideas for experiments, and in production you can’t whimsically mess around with a roast and then pass along experiments, that may well be awful, without warning to and consent from the customer first.  Don’t get me wrong – I’m extremely interested in roasting, I want to understand the process, I want to better connect a roast curve to a cupping bowl.  I’ve spent a lot of time reading about the chemistry, and I enjoy discussions with other roasters very much.  This isn’t enough to make me good at it for a living.

This isn’t me saying I don’t believe in experimentation – but this should have its own budget and time set aside, and shouldn’t be incorporated into production schedules.

Thankfully I work with people who are great at production roasting, and I hope they enjoy what they do.  (They also have the patience to put up with my sideline dabbling/ temper my attempts at backseat roasting!)  If you know what you are in for then I think roasting can be extremely satisfying.  The best thing is that you make things: At the end of the day there are shelves full of bags and boxes of stuff that you helped make – the creation of a physical product is so wonderfully pleasing and no empty inbox or spreadsheet can compare with that satisfaction.

I think we need to be more honest at what roles entail, and what they’re like to work. It doesn’t work for employer or employee to find out after 3 months that a role doesn’t work. Time, effort, training, money are expended and it is back to square one for everyone. When the right person finds the right role then you have lasting job satisfaction, and the company and the individual flourish.

I should probably add that production roaster can mean many things – with different levels of responsibility and opportunity to provide input into how the coffee is to be roasted.

If you want to be a roaster – then maybe see if you can just hang out with a roaster who is hiring for a couple of days. Do what they do. Get some genuine insight into that process. This is also one of the reasons I think a lot of people transition to roasting from another role in the same company – chances are they have a pretty good idea of exactly what is involved.

Also – learn to like lifting heavy things…

If anyone reading this happens to be a production roaster – I’d love to hear your thoughts?

1. You may ask – if I have nothing to do with production – exactly what is it that I do at work all day…. [↩]

Most things in coffee get a little easier the more you do them. Dosing consistently, understanding grind adjustment, understanding the taste of an espresso extraction, tamping simply and properly, the list goes on…

One thing that doesn’t get much easier is dealing with the build up of unpleasant flavours in an espresso machine. There are no shortcuts, you just have to deal with it regularly and to be honest it annoys me a lot. That taste is so obvious, so distracting, so unpleasant, that it ruins a lot of otherwise well made espresso for me.

I was thinking about the build up of dirt inside the group head caused by the release of pressure after you stop a shot. To better explain we have the following photo:

Photo courtesy of Dan Kehn of Home Barista

In a La Marzocco like this the route the water takes is a little confusing. It goes out of the far side of the neck of the group, through a flowmeter, back underneath the group head to a valve. When this valve is closed no water can leave the boiler, and when it opens water is pushed through and heads back inside the group head into that little tube you can see and towards the group head, until it drops down into the screw and showerscreen and over the coffee. ¹ Other machines have a similar tube, of varying lengths, that run between the valve and dispersion mechanism above the coffee. (Not all LM’s have this long of a pathway outside the group – machines that don’t have flow meters and more modern models have eliminated this pretty much.)

Dirt builds up here because that last tube is a two way street. At the end of the shot the pressure shoots back up the tube until it gets to the stop valve. This prevents anything from getting back into your boiler, and this valve is a three way valve allow this pressure to exit through a drain tube, usually ending up in the drainbox under the drip tray – though some deposit straight into the drip tray in the E61 style.

The only machines that don’t have this problem are lever machines. Lever machines only release the pressure when the spring has finished expanding. This is why you can’t interrupt a lever machine shot without making a mess. (I believe the technical term is ‘portafilter sneeze’)

This tube is very hot. Any liquid in this tube will likely evaporate and leave behind whatever it had dissolved. At the end of the shot this can mean dissolved coffee gets dragged into this tube where it will quickly deposit and start to taste unpleasant. Some of that unpleasantness will be picked up when you next pull a shot and fresh water is heading down the tube towards coffee. The same unpleasantness builds up pretty quickly underneath the basket of a portafilter, and we know from sticking our noses in there how bad that would taste. ²

I was wondering if getting into the habit of flushing immediately after pulling a shot would dramatically reduce the build up of dirt in that particular area. As a flush builds up no pressure it would mean that water would only travel one way out of the group, and hopefully drag with it any coffee before it had the chance to dry out and deposit.

Some people would argue that you should leave the puck in for temperature stability. Even the WBC references this idea by no longer looking inside the portafilters at start up as you can leave pucks in as you wish. I don’t think temperature stability is a concern, but I do think dirt is. I’d rather lose a little temp at the start of the shot than have to deal with the residue of a puck sat in a machine for 10 minutes. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen any proof that having a puck in promotes thermal stability, and if it is out there then a link in the comments would be great!

Also – would using a rampdown in pump pressure tofinish the shot have a similar effect, as there would be little to no pressure to release back into the group?

1. If none of this makes any sense then leave a comment and I will try and find a better way to explain. [↩]
2. This build up is why I would use Cafiza on a domestic espresso machine every day, even if I had just pulled one shot. [↩]

This is the fifth year of these predictions posts, and considering each post contains five predictions there is a pleasing quality to this being the last one of these. Feels appropriate…

Looking back over previous years it seems that the predictions have generally fallen into certain categories:

The WBC Prediction:

Alejandro’s win in Bogota felt like the culmination of a certain approach to a competition performance, combined with great execution. There’d be increasing focus on better connecting the producer and the barista and I think Alejandro took that as far as it can go. Alejandro wasn’t the only one taking this route – Pete Licata’s routine was also a great expression of that idea. That means that this year there will need to be a new angle, a new focus. I think the field of competitors will struggle with this – though I think there is a great opportunity for someone to do well by having a very clear vision and idea. (I hope I get to commentate again, as I really enjoyed that in Bogota.)

The C-Market Prediction:

A lot of the factors that caused the wild fluctuations in price seem to have moved away from the coffee market, but a lot of the base causes for the rise are still there. I predict a slow and steady creep up in price over the next 12 months.

The Brewed Coffee Prediction:

Like it or not, I think we’re going to see an increase in the quality of coffee coming out of batch brewers. This doesn’t imply an upcoming innovation in the technology, more a shift in the places using them. They make really nice coffee when used well, and this year I think it is very important that we focus on just getting coffee right regularly rather than trying to blow people’s minds with clever by the cup techniques.

The UK Coffee Market Prediction:

London has seem some explosive growth in the last few years, but this hasn’t spread at the same rate outside of the capital. London businesses have enjoyed some protection from the UK’s economy because London is pretty much a separate economy unto itself. The recession certainly hit, and many feel like there must surely be an end to the storm. I don’t think that end will be in sight in the next year, I think 2012 is going to be extremely tough in London for coffee retail. I hope I am wrong on this one.

The Equipment Prediction:

Always a tough one. I think we’ll see some technical innovation in espresso and coffee brewing from outside of established manufacturers. We’re not yet at a point where we’ll see the reinvention of the espresso machine (which I do think will happen in the next 3 years), but we’ll definitely see some great ideas coming from unusual places. Whether these ideas end up being industrialised or licensed to the larger manufacturers – I don’t know.

If anyone fancies throwing a prediction out there then do please write a blog post and stick a link in the comments, and do feel free to argue with me and tell me I am an idiot in the comments too!

These posts seem to roll around awfully quickly. I suppose I enjoy them because they are a chronicle of what I was thinking about a year ago. Here’s the 2011 predictions post.

OK – time to see how I did:

1 – Scales in Drip Trays

We saw La Marzocco show a Strada with these in at SCAA and at HOST. Aside from that they haven’t really spread much further (yet – I hope!). Not really sure this is a failure of a prediction, nor a success.

2 – C-market will peak, but won’t drop back too far

I think we have seen a peak (for now), and looking at the graph of the last 2 years I’d say that my (fairly safe) prediction was accurate.

3 – The WBC Prediction

I’ll need to break this one down:

This is going to be hard to quantify, but I think holding the WBC in a producing country will have a rejuvenating effect for those involved in the competition. I think it will be a great event and I hope people take full advantage of it being in a coffee producing country.

I think this was pretty accurate.

Also I think the Scandinavians will be back in contention again.

Unfortunately this was not. I’m still going to try and claim the point!

4 – A focus on service

This was certainly on my mind a lot this year, and I very much enjoyed the opportunity to talk on the subject at SCAA’s Symposium and at the splendid Tamper Tantrum Live event. I’m not really sure if there was an uptick on the focus on service in the rest of the industry though. I’ll leave this one to you….

5 – More Brewed Coffee in the UK

I can’t work out if it is a good tactic to keep predicting things that are really difficult to quantify. This would fall into that category. We’re certainly roasting more coffee to be drunk as brewed coffee rather than espresso, I see more places including it in their offering and I see a small increase in interest in doing batch brewed coffee really well. I think it has definitely grown more than slowed down. You may disagree.

So. I guess I am claiming 3 or 4 out of 5 correct. Please disagree angrily with me in the comments. I will try and post up a new set of predictions in the next few days.