Accurately communicating grind size remains near impossible.  We can say coarse, very coarse or fine or whatever, but it is still a pretty bad communicator when you are stood in front of a grinder that you don’t know.

If people are up for it then I’d like to try an experiment.  Pick a method that you know well.  Record how you are currently setting your grinder for your desired grind size.  Each time you brew it, keep everything the same (brew temp, water volume and steep time if applicable) but go a touch finer.  Keep going until you hit the wall of bitterness.  You’ll know it when you taste it, when the cup falls to pieces in a bitter finish.  Come back a touch coarser, and try a side by side brew of this grind Vs your original grind.  Which is better? Why?

I hope a few people will try this – it would be really interesting.  I am interested because if someone asked me the ideal grind size for the aeropress, for example, then I’d say to keep the steep time the same and bring the grind as fine as you can before it starts tasting noticeably bitter.

(I am quite prepared for you to all come back and tell me I am an idiot)

My predicitons were:

1. Coffee Packaging takes a step forward

Nothing here to report.  I don’t know if anyone has done anything interesting in 2009 with roasted coffee packaging but I certainly haven’t seen it, and I don’t think it has had an impact.  A poor prediction.

2. Improved Green Coffee Packaging

This is a tricky one.  I am sure that this year people have received record quantities of vac-packed, or grainpro packed coffee.  I know that a substantial amount of coffee that we’ve bought this year has come this way.  I also know that it leaves me conflicted over the amount of waste this packaging generates.  An OK, passable, but not great effort at prediction.

3.  Someone invents a grinder worth getting excited about.

Nope. Nothing here.  I know why, from an R&D cost Vs sales perspective, this hasn’t happened.  For some reason I guess I thought it just would.  A complete failure of a prediction.

4.  Decent Coffee Press in the UK.

I am going to claim this one.  You could argue that the quality of writing hasn’t been where it could be but I think this year we’ve seen unprecedented levels of coverage for speciality coffee – mostly in response to Gwilym’s win – but also covering the blossoming of London’s coffee culture.  I hope it continues.  A pretty successful prediction.

5.  Producing countries in the WBC Top 6.

Another utterly failed prediction.  Raul was just outside the top 6, and I think there was some surprise at who made the top 6 and who didn’t.  Nonetheless I can’t even vaguely claim this one as successful.

So…  Barely 1.5 out of 5 I reckon.  Not good work.  I shall have to try harder for my prediction for 2010, or just give up entirely!  I hope next time I don’t confuse speculation and prediction with wishful thinking!

The one interesting thing, in terms of me trying to salvage my credibility, are the two main predictions that I got wrong in 2008 – the rise of pressure profiling and increase in green coffee pricing – have somewhat come true in 2009.

There can be no argument on the pressure profiling front.  From the Slayer to Strada, but also to Cimbali’s rather impressive pressure profiling machine – the technology is now here and seems to have perhaps captured the interest of manufacturers more than baristas but I think it will continue to be incorporated into new machines.

As for green coffee – it may not yet have reached the peak of March 3rd but after a steep drop it is definitely back on the rise:

(couresy of Wolfram Alpha – the rather splendid search engine for this sort of thing.)

I’ll post my predictions for 2010 around New Year.

So – Gwilym’s performance:  I am sure pretty much everyone has worked out that we didn’t go to this competition with the main goal of winning. The idea this year was the same as the idea last year, and the year before that: give an interesting performance that one could are proud of.

I am also sure that by now people are doing what they always do with WBC videos. Watching, seeing the mistakes and asking how come they won despite these errors. This is the wrong way round. Every performance has its mistakes, and they are easy to find if you go looking for them. People seem to wilfully miss what made them stand out. Gwilym’s performance was exceptionally risky, assuming there was the potential to lose something important. To me it was entertaining, thought provoking and fun. Liz Clayton, as always, writes wonderfully here.

Gwilym Davies, United Kingdom – 2009 WBC Finals from nick cho on Vimeo.

With all of the last three winning performances available online I hope people will watch them and look for what connects them. The last three years have produced three very different champions, but I think there are strong commonalities in the performances. ¹  I’d be interested to hear people’s thoughts.

Watching a friend compete terrifies me. I’d rather be on stage performing. Sadly this meant that I couldn’t even watch through gaps in my fingers, and had to run away and hide on the SCAA show floor while he performed. I am such a wuss. It isn’t that I don’t have any faith, it is just that I can no longer take the rollercoaster of emotions. There should be a support group for coaches/support teams during the performances.

One final note on the performance – whenever I watched it in rehearsals I was always really excited to see what the judges would pick. The combinations were always interesting and potentially tasty. I think if we had had more time we could also have worked it up to being maybe 6 different choices per judge, which would have been crazy but awesome. I was weirdly disappointed in the choices of the judges, though I don’t really know why. Maybe I was hoping they’d pick something we hadn’t done in practice. ²

Gwilym will be a great champion. He’s been an ambassador of coffee for a long time – he’s been out there converting people, making them excited about great coffee, giving lots of people that ‘a-ha!’ moment for years now. His interest in others is genuine, he’s knowledgeable and very approachable, no ego (yet – it happens to us all) and a healthy interest in twill woven materials.³

Check the reflection

The rest of the competition was great.  Not just the performances, but the people. It is great how quickly and easily conversation and friendship comes when you only see someone once a year to geek out about coffee and get angry about nerdy things.

My journey home was a bit of a mixed bag. I had to leave Sunday night, and they took so long to get to the announcements that I had to flee and got the results in the cab via twitter and a bajillion text messeages. I tried to change my flight and was told it would be a mere $1,800. I stuck with my flight. Which was three hours delayed. So I missed my connection and got stuck in Chicago, and told the next flight would be in 21 hours. Time to kill.

After a boring stay in a weird hotel, charging my phone off the usb port in the business suite because BA had lost my luggage, I headed into town. First stop was the place I’d heard so many shoutouts to – Intelli’s Broadway shop where Mike Phillips works. It was great – being an anonymous customer, ordering some coffee and sitting in the nerdiest spot and just watching. After about 15 minutes I called Mike. I felt terrible because I’d just woken him up by the sound of things. We chatted for a bit and he very (very) kindly agreed to meet me at the Intelli Roastworks around lunchtime. I have to say that the coffee I had there was the Anjilanaka from a Clover, and it was the first Clover brewed coffee I’d really enjoyed in a long time.

It was great to see Intelli’s roastworks, to catch up with Matt Riddle, but mostly it was great to just sit down and chat with Mike. His perfomances were great, he’s an utterly charming and likeable fellow and I could have talked shop with him for hours on end. I’m grateful to him and Matt for their hospitality during my stay. I really hope to see Mike compete again. I can’t thank him enough for taking the time to drag himself out of bed on a day that can’t have been much fun, to come to work and deal with a nerdy, demanding guest. Thank you.

Now some important stuff – some thank yous. First of all a massive thank you to Shawn from Public Market Coffee in Minneapolis for loaning us his Anfim for the competition. We can’t thank you enough, it made a world of difference to have a grinder we knew well, and a massive thank you to Keith for lugging it with him on the plane. There will be many things heading your way in the mail soon.

Thanks also to the lovely guys at Slayer for loaning us a grinder too, to allow Gwilym to serve two very delicious coffees to his judges. Sorry I didn’t really get a chance to get onto the show floor to have a play!

Thanks to everyone who came by the roastery and mock judged, offered their ideas and criticisims and their constructive feedback – both for the UK and for the WBC. It was incredibly useful and giving up your time and your ideas for free was incredibly generous.

Thanks to Chris and M’lissa Owens for buddying, helping and being (as always) utterly amazing, dependably awesome and working way harder than we had any right to ask of them.

Thanks to Octane peoples for setting the bar ridiculously high for hospitality and splendidness during a WBC.

Thanks to everyone who helped. It is and was appreciated, and I will stop listing names now for fear of trying to be exhaustive but missing someone out.

I know I’ve missed loads out but if I don’t post something now then I never will!

1. That isn’t a smug allusion to Anette’s skills at sourcing and roasting coffee – more about the performances themselves – though it would be remiss of me not to point out that she totally rocks!
2. I know that sounds foolish, but the constant novelty of the drink really appealled to me!
3. However I suspect his patience with the questions about living on a boat may start to wear thin.  I am sure if people kept asking me if I really lived in a flat then I’d go postal pretty quickly….

Just for fun I am going to make another 5 predictions and we’ll wait and see how they turn out!

1).    Coffee packaging takes a big step forward

Think for a moment about how many kilos of espresso are brewed every day.  Think about how many bags are thrown away each day.  Good packaging is a necessity for quality, but it isn’t recyclable and that is becoming more and more of an issue.  The reusable, valved buckets we’ve been using at Square Mile have been great, and I am glad the bulk of our production goes out in them, but we still have to bag a good deal up.  Hopefully this year we’ll see someone clever devil make a breakthrough and move coffee packaging at least a little closer to closed loop recycling.

2).    Improved green coffee packaging

Vacuum packaging has started to take hold in coffee, but I don’t yet believe it is the pinnacle of coffee packaging.  I think jute has to go, for speciality coffee anyway, and I am head over heals in love with the smell of greens when you open a vac packed bag up (I might love it more than the smell of roasted coffee!).  However I have a few reservations about the long term storage of green coffee in vacuum packaging and I think slowly but surely we are gathering more and more information about how it affects the greens and we can continue to improve the materials and the process.

3).    Someone invents a grinder worth getting excited about

It probably won’t be a major grinder manufacturer.  In fact it definitely won’t be.  However I think there are people out there tinkering and experimenting and I think this year someone will present an idea that will slowly invade espresso grinder production and improve it immeasurably.

4).    Decent coffee press in the UK

It has been interesting to read the increasing number of good articles on coffee appearing in the NYT and the WSJ.  Most of these articles were indeed about coffee in New York but the scope has slowly widened and I hope the trend continues not only in the US, but spreads to the UK.  London’s burgeoning coffee scene is worth writing about!  Just getting the media to take coffee a little seriously would be a massive leap forward.

5).    Producing countries in the WBC Top 6.

An oddly specific prediction but I think this year there will be at least one barista from a producing country really pushing for the top spot.  I think the limitations of choice and greens variety that many feel were on national champions have gone.  Every producing country competing has great coffee growing there and I think judges are more open to that than ever.  I think the shift away from tech and onto sensory open up the field further still.  As for which countries – I am not that brave!

UPDATE: I suppose I ought to clarify this a little more (thanks Jay) – I think at least two of the top 6 will be from producing countries and I think one will be in the top 3.  I did know that various producing countries have been in the finals before (Silvia from Brazil was in the finals with me in Tokyo – so I ought to remember!)

What do people think?  Does anyone have their own predictions that they would care to share?  Post them in the comments or in your own blog and post a link here!

Despite this, and contrary to what we had planned to do, there has been no official tasting during this WBC evaluation of equipment and personally I think this is a great thing. We had some plans, but very quickly we realised that it would simply be pretty much impossible to run a test that really did justice to the capabilities of the machinery here and to perform evaluations that would withstand both our own, and other people’s, criticism.

Instead we pushed our usability testing a little further and developed the protocols used. If I can get a copy of the sheets we used I will post them. The machine evaluation tests covered things like buttons, ergonomics, the live feedback (gauges, displays etc) machines gave and other stuff (like how easy it is to clean or service a machine). Three groups worked for a set period of time on machines, pulling shot after shot, and then rotating. It has completely changed the way I think about using a machine, and clarified a lot of my thinking on what I want from an espresso machine. Manufacturers were allowed to set up machines as they wished (in terms of preinfusion and pump pressure – more on the latter if I can post about it). We drank a lot of our shots but it wasn’t to rank them – more to see how the machines would respond to us changing the brew recipe or trying to manipulate the machines as we might in competition (flushing routines etc).

Grinders were evaluated in a similar way. Again – we had six grinders to test: A Rossi doserless, a Mahlkoenig K30 and K30 twin, a Compak K10 WBC and the new Compak Doserless “Fresh” and the Nueva Simonelli Mythos.

For grinders with timers the consistency of dose delivery was evaluated, the level of particle aggregate (more on this in the future I hope), how it held a grind and the ergonomics and intuitiveness (is that a word?) of adjustments and controls.

I think the manufacturers are happy and they were around the machines at all times while we worked them, and were helpful in answering any questions. I think, or certainly hope, they are happy with the testing and they will certainly get a lot of feedback from this. If they run with it I am very excited to see what will happen next.

Any testing is obviously open to complaints or the highlighting of problems but everyone involved has worked very hard and I think we are all proud of the testing. The next round in 3 years will really set a standard as we learned a lot about testing machines in the last 5 days.

Don’t expect results any time soon – I don’t know when manufacturers will find out their full results but I do know the winner of the bidding will not be announced til after Copenhagen, which I think is correct.

I will edit my photos on the flight home so I will post when the set is up on flickr in the next few days.

Again I am happy to answer any questions, or to try and clarify how we did things but I am not really comfortable giving my opinion about any of the machines at this stage – certainly until I’ve spoken personally with the manufacturers about the notes on my forms.

I must confess to being a slightly difficult customer and asking for the polished metal finish, with the blue body.  Perhaps I just like shiny things – I think it looks great.  At some point I shall have to spend a while trialling it against the Compak.  Perhaps when I get the GS3 (it is London now, so that should be pretty soon).  This model is stepped and I am wondering if it is possible to retrofit the stepless grind adjustment.  We shall see….

A big thank you to Mahlkoenig for their generosity and support!

Just starting to clean up a Mahlkoenig VTA 6 grinder, that some of you may know by its “R2D2″ nickname that was a chance bargain. Something of an oddity – it is single phase and still has its sticker in German (which is coming off) as well as an odd plate that restricts the grind to certain settings (that isn’t going to last long either!).

Burrs are massive – 120mm, and it grinds coffee incredibly fast -2.5kg a minute on the coarsest setting. Even at a Turkish grind it chewed through 250g of coffee in about 20 seconds. Scary. Puts my current kitchen grinder, which is no slouch – a Bunn G3A – to shame.

I’d really like to give it a new coat of paint, but first and foremost just want to give it a damn good clean!