I was talking to Scott Callaghan the Australian barista champion just before he left for London for the World Barista Championship and I mentioned to him about “densation.” It’s a clumsy word but its similar to the principle that occurs with the sorting of green beans in a good dry-mill where you have a ‘densimetric’ table that is on an angle and when it vibrates the larger beans go to the top and
The Humble Flat White
I read an article today in an industry newsletter that Starbucks/Seattle’s Best Coffee is joining forces with Subway and Burger King to improve their coffee to try and compete with McDonalds and Dunkin Donuts success with espresso coffee. Espresso coffee has now contributed to an enormous profit turn-around in several of the world’s largest corporations. So we are obviously talking about very big
Coffee Tasting Sheets and the ‘Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle’
Recently I was involved in a couple of tasting programs. One was a roasters’ competition for espresso and another was research for a rural industries organization evaluating coffee cherry maturity on taste quality. In both cases it was necessary to use tasting sheets. For the cherry maturity tasting, we used the Cup of Excellence® Tasting sheets devised by George Howell. These sheets were a
Monsoon Malabar
I head off to attend a friend’s wedding in India. It happens to be at the same time as the beginning of the monsoon season so I can’t resist the temptation of organizing to visit the coffee monsoon processing town of Mangalore on the Malabar coast. It is the only place in the world where this most unique of coffees is processed: Monsoon Malabar I land at the new Bangalore airport which is now
Cuppers versus Baristas
This year’s World Barista Championship and Specialty Coffee (SCAA) conference in Atlanta America was outstanding. I have attended most SCAA conferences since New Orleans in the mid 1990’s. I have attended all WBC finals with the sole exception of Japan and the combination of the SCAA and WBC is always an invigorating alignment of the planets. I really enjoyed the new Symposium which was
