I’ve another post coming on why I blog, but this reason deserved a post in its own right.  A few days ago Shaun dropped me an e-mail about the Vinturi.  He’d played with it a little bit and thought it was interesting, and thought it might be something that would interest me. I admit I was curious – so I grabbed one from the UK website.  (Clicking through may help explain the image above!)

As I write this I confess I know very little about the science of aerating wine – feel free to point me in any link-based directions!  I didn’t know if it was specific to wine/alcoholic beverages with very volatile fractions, or whether it would affect coffee too.  I’m rather lucky in having Anette who is very good at tasting things – so I gave her several different brews split into pairs of cups, one aerated and one not.  Each time she said one cup tasted noticeably better, and it was the aerated one. As I was the one conducting the tests I’m rather biased, so feel free to discount this – but I thought the aerated cup was sweeter and had better clarity.

One obvious explanation would be that the aeration cooled the coffee, so comparatively it was the easier cup to taste – I should probably check how much temperature is lost (though I did preheat the Vinturi before doing it).  I am sure a slightly cooler brew would have an advantage, and a noticeable one at that, over the same hotter brew of the same coffee.  Simply pouring into a cooler cup could well create an advantage.  However the use of aeration in wine – which, again, I don’t understand yet – does intrigue me.

Yesterday we dropped some espresso through it, and it was interesting.  We then brewed an americano, skimmed it (for this is what crema skimming was truly made for) and then aerated it.  It was the best american I think I’ve ever had.¹ Perhaps I simply wanted it to be.

I am well aware you could pull the “Emperors New Clothes” card on this one – but I still think it warrants a little attention.  If people can come up with some experiments that will isolate the aeration then I’d be willing to try them and perhaps open the doors at work to people who want to take part in a little experiment too.

I will keep playing with it, and report back after a bit of reading on the science (if any) behind it all…

1. But I haven’t had that many, and I never really liked them to begin with!

London Gastronomy Seminars

This month is the second in the London Gastronomy Seminars series.  The title is “From plant to cup: flavour in coffee & wine” and I am presenting along with Jamie Goode.

Those of you into wine will know Jamie from wineanorak.com and his blog is great too.  I saw Jamie present a few months ago and I learned a great deal, and hugely enjoyed his presentation.  The bar is set high for me, and I am going to work hard to make my part of the presentation as interesting and useful as I can.

If you are in London then do come down, feel free to ask me awkward and difficult questions and drink some coffee and some wine!

From plant to cup: flavour in coffee and wine
21 January 2010, 7pm
Senate House, University of London (directions are here)
(Hosted by the Centre for the Study of the Senses, Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Study)

Tickets (£10)

SCAA Symposium

I’m also very excited about being involved in the SCAA Symposium this year.  I helped out in one of the workshops last year, but due to WBC commitments couldn’t get as involved as I would have liked.  This year’s event looks amazing and I am delighted to be attending.

I am taking part in the first session alongside some big names in coffee.  I hope I can bring something of value to the discussion! The program looks amazing and I look forward to catching up with a lot of people there.

See you at one of these soon I hope!

In recent conversations someone has said to me that they love a certain coffee, but not first thing in the morning.  Maybe mid-afternoon instead.  Initially I didn’t get it.  My very narrow mind assumed that good coffee was good coffee and that the rotation of the earth in relation to the sun shouldn’t have too much impact on how that coffee, my tongue and my brain all got along.

I remember doing an espresso tasting for a wine magazine a year or two ago now.  We tasted the espressos blind – the coffees rushed quickly into our room from the roasters themselves, set up on their own machines just outside the door.  I was excited to taste coffees like this, with other professional tasters and I remember my frustration when the journalist kept asking which espresso we had tasted would go best with chocolate cake, or would be best after dinner.  “This is irrelevant!” I thought, “I want to talk about how these espressos taste!  I want to talk about which come from clean, tasty green coffees, about which have been carefully and intelligently roasted.”  Except they weren’t interested in that.

I’ve written before that sometimes independent cafes are so desperate to be nothing like the chains they despise that they occasionally miss out on some of the smarter ideas and concepts that the chains use very effectively – having spent a lot of time and money researching and developing them.  I know a lot of us in the coffee industry are acutely aware that we drink coffee with a slightly different mindset to most consumers, and that we buy coffees in a different way too.

Does it devalue a great single varietal, single estate coffee to say that is great with breakfast?  If we say that it is a great morning cup are we missing a chance to say that it is an heirloom bourbon, a honey process coffee, part of only a 10 bag lot or that it has really nice red apple and red grape flavours in it?  Which is the most important piece of information to most consumers?  How are they going to enjoy that bag of coffee?  I’ve talked before about how the size of the promise we make is linked to the speed we build up trust with the consumer, but what about when we lose control of how the coffee is brewed?

I have become aware recently that I often talk about coffees in a different way, based on my own choices.  There are some coffees that almost require a little intellectual engagement – they are challenging and interesting and worthy of discussion.  There are also coffees that I drink when I don’t want to think about it, I just want to be satisfied and have a simple delicious cup. ²  Instead of talking about morning coffees – is there any value in talking more about why a coffee might be appreciated in the morning, to emphasize the tasting/sensory part more than the ritual part?

Last of all – what is your favourite coffee to drink around lunchtime and why?

1. That still does make me angry, and a bit frustrated.  It is probably the most common misconception – that the coffee itself has something to do with the strength of the cup.
2. We’ve touched on chuggability before…

First and foremost – we don’t drink coffee like we drink wine. Broadly speaking we buy wine in two different circumstances: to enjoy ourselves and to enjoy with others. Generally we spend more, buy better, buy more interesting when we are enjoying it with others. We want to know more, want a little story, want something worth discussing. Wine’s great success was making it culturally acceptable/desirable to discuss what you drank at some length. Coffee isn’t quite there yet. We drink coffee in different circumstances – mostly it is a solitary affair, though sometimes shared but rarely the focal point the way a stellar bottle of wine can be. We experience it in different environments, with different goals and different focus on the sensory experience.

I also want to look at the route to wine’s success. In the UK certainly a higher spend may have been achieved but the real successes of the wine boom were producers like E&J Gallo. The £5 bottle of acceptable, non-descript, reliable wine. Compared to what had been easily available at that price range in the decades previous these wines were really pretty good. More than that – they made wine extremely accessible.

I recently attended a chocolate and tea pairing, at Tea Smith, with the chocolates by William Curley. There were some toe-curlingly, giggle inducingly wonderful moments and flavours. Talking to both John from Tea Smith and William it is clear that these two commodities could fall into the wine model the way that coffee could. However do push them into that model wouldn’t bring to the fore the most interesting things about them. Microlots of astounding tea don’t fit into the wine model, despite coming from one estate and being one particular type of tea and having an interesting processing method, and listening to William talk about chocolate you felt you could swap chocolate for coffee and it would work as well – from sourcing to vintage machinery!  Yet high-end chocolate has adopted a different approach when it comes to marketing and consumer understanding.

We, as an industry, have yet to find the hook that will encourage the broader public to delve deeper into coffee – to discover the captivating and broad range of sensory experiences available in what is considered a humdrum, everyday drink. It is clear, however, that we can’t settle on trying to piggyback wine because it just won’t work. We must keep looking but I have no doubt that accessibility will be the key.

UPDATE:  Steve Leighton posts on Coffee and Wine.