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!

This is going to be a bit of a mish mash post, a composite of a few different things.  Originally I had planned to follow up the previous post on brew temperature and conduct a few experiments but the comments quickly reminded me I need to go and do some serious reading before attempting anything serious.

Instead this post is a collection of a few different thoughts rolling around like tumbleweed in my brain.

Syphons

We had a lot of international visitors today at the roastery.  Keith Loh from Singapore, Joe Hsu from Orsir in Taiwan and Paul Bassett meaning that conversation was both interesting and far ranging.  Plus I ended up drinking way too much coffee.

Joe very kindly brought me a TC-2A syphon, and we talked a little about the Syphon contest that had taken place in Japan a couple of weeks ago.  Joe had sent me the score sheets but I can’t understand them – if anyone wants to see them then I can post them on here, but google will probably deliver them quicker!

If I understood it right then in the contest steep time is set at 1 minute, and this restriction kind of inspired me to start playing with the syphon this evening.  I confess, shamefully, that my interest in it was inversely proportional to the fetishization of it online.  I never wanted to be one of those people who stopped liking a band because it got popular. How embarrassing…

Regardless – it has been good to be challenged by it again.  I still suck at it – by which I mean I still haven’t really nailed a coffee, though I feel I am getting pretty close.  I am sticking to sensible doses (60g/l) and am trying to just change one thing at a time.  There seemed to be a lot of chatter about syphons online, did anything close to conclusive surface?  Are people willing to share where they ended up?

Green Coffee Packaging

Ola wrote a fantastic post a while back, and recently it has been something I’ve thought about more and more.  Of the vac packed coffees we deal with I have two polar extremes.  One of the seasonal espresso components was packed in 20kg boxes, and plastic vacpacking.  We’ve gone through all the boxes in three months, in which time the other espresso components still in jute have not suffered.  The amount of packaging is quite upsetting, and makes me feel quite bad.

However we have a few different coffees from Aida Batlle that are too precious to trust to jute.  We may not know the full effects of alternative packing methods, but with coffees like her Grand Reserve (which we won’t launch for a few weeks more) I am glad to have them packed well against the elements.  So I remain conflicted.  I think Ola’s identification of the problem (it takes too long to move coffee) are pretty much spot on, and if we sped that up and remained seasonally focused as an industry then the packaging dilema is somewhat reduced.  That said – I’d still like to know of alternatives to jute for shipping and storage. (Shipping especially)

Teflon steam tips

Paul from CoffeeHit very kindly took a few low flow Synesso steam tips away and had them teflon coated.  I know teflon steamwands are nothing new, but this is still a fun experiment for me.  I love the low flow tips – they are great for training – but they were always annoying to clean.  I’ve only had these for a day, but so far so good.  I am going to send one back to Synesso for fun, and have a couple left.  Will see what to do with them.  I should point out that the colour choice is not the only one – it does now match my portafilters quite nicely though!

Home Brewing

I still want to do more on brewing at home.  I know I am not alone in seeing this as a really important area where the industry needs to do better when it comes to communicating and educating.  I think for the quality driven there are only benefits for getting people to drink better coffee at home – that includes cafes too.  I quite fancy putting together another videocast on coffee brewing at home.  I know I need to redo the Chemex one, and that is pretty high up the priority list, but I was curious if people had a preference.  More than that I was curious as to how most people who read this make coffee at home.  I’d be very grateful if you could vote in the poll below (you can pick three different options):

So – quite a lot there.  I know I need to catch up on replying to loads of great comments – looking forward to doing that this weekend.

Anette had an old 1000W photography lamp around – I’ve used it in the past for high speed espresso droplet shots – and I’ve noticed it gets quite hot.  My inner child suggested I should use it to make a vacpot.  So I did.

It kicked up surprisingly quickly!

There isn’t much temperature control – just on and off.  This was about amusement and not taste so I left it on.  It probably ran a little hot in the top chamber.

I usually like to hover over the vacpot – enjoying the shifting smell and getting info on the brew’s progression.  1,000W of light shining up at you makes this hard to do!

The brightness of the lamp makes the other shots look like they were taken at night, not in a bright sunny roastery.  It didn’t taste great.  At least I could open my eyes properly.

This has left me thinking about how hard it would be to construct a simple halogen heater.  Anyone tried it?  Has to be cheaper than buying one no? Advice, warnings, suggestions for future eye protection and circuit diagrams all welcome in the comments…

This morning I got up early to fly over to Dublin, to the CatEx show there.  Apart from catching up with Stephen, and lots of other lovely coffee people, and catching a little of the Irish Barista Championship, I was really there to see the guys at Marco and the new machine they had on their stand.

I am not going to be able to get very far in all this without talking about the Clover first.  The reason that the Clover got me excited initially was that it was going to be a potential way to keep promises¹ made when serving coffee.  Some people hated the amount of control it offered (deeming it soulless automation), while others got excited about dialling in coffees.  No doubt the profiling it offered really appealed to the people who bought the company.

After the Clover disappeared from the market the industry seemed to take a step back and then dig out all its old coffee brewers and start playing with them again.  More French Pressing, Vac Pots popping up everywhere, and every self respecting coffee nerd having a Chemex in cupboard.

While researching different bits and pieces for a potential cafe Anette unearthed the Quooker Tap. Nice idea, but some problems when it came to coffee!  I began to wonder if it was possible to add a mix tap to add cold water, maybe drill a little hole in the end of the spout and put a probe in and live mix a desired water temp.  Stephen, Anette and I hammered the idea out a bit more but didn’t really know what to do with it.

At the Caffe Culture show last year we got chatting to Paul Stack from Marco about how possible the idea was.  His proposal was awesome – they would take on the project and build us one.  For them it was a great research project, and they are a bunch of wonderful coffee obsessed people who immediately understood where we were coming from.

Paul came over to the roastery in August last year and we went into greater detail about what we wanted.  I demanded typically ludicrous things:  I wanted a built in scale, a live temperature display, I wanted to be able to jump between temperatures for different coffees quite quickly.

During development Paul sent across piles of data and I was extremely impressed in the consistency of water temperature delivered – a swing of around 0.2°C with their testing kit once the boiler had stabilised.

What I worked with today is still very much a prototype – it will be developed a little more before it is shipped over to us for further testing.  Hopefully a drip tray, a built in timer unit and a few other bits and pieces will be added soon.  I am not going to go into great detail about how it works operationally because it is likely that that will change to something a little more intuitive.  Before use it requires switching to ‘BOOST’ mode that cycles water right up around the font to heat and stabilise the water lines for consistent delivery.  We’re going to work on more intuitive movement between brew temperatures and I probably don’t need to explain how to use a scale.

Water delivery speed was relatively slow – good for Chemex, and not too slow to be frustrating when making a press.

Some pics (remember this is a prototype!):

Marco Boiler

Scale control and water delivery

Live brew temp

Built to fit a large Chemex underneath!

All credit to Marco for working towards a very creative, versatile boiler that would suit people who want to embrace all brewing methods yet still want control and repeatability.

Initially the plan was just to build one for us but I think the reaction it has recieved at the one tradeshow alone means that they will be looking to produce more units if the demand is there.

For those interested I’d recommend e-mailing Marco, and they will keep those interested up to date on the boiler.

Oh, and it doesn’t have a name yet – suggestions welcome!

If people have thoughts or questions then please post a comment and I will do my best to answer.

1. there is a big long post coming baout making and keeping promises with brewed coffee – soon!