Wednesday, November 18, 2015



Some Noteworthy Coffee Tastings Across the Country (and further North) :

US

Counter Culture
Every friday 10 am
Counter Culture Coffee – Durham Training Center
4911 S Alston Ave, Durham, NC 27713

Sightglass
Every 2nd and 4th Friday 3 pm
270 Seventh Street San Francisco, CA 94103
415-861-1313

1000faces
Last friday of every month 3:30pm
585 Barber Street
Athens, GA 30601

Ruby Coffee
Saturdays 8am-12pm or by appointment
9515 Water Street
Nelsonville, WI 54458

Madcap Coffee Roasters
Fridays , 10 a.m. by appointment
98 Monroe Center NW
Grand Rapids, MI 49503


Canada

Revolver Coffee
Every Friday between 12-1PM 325 Cambie Street,
Vancouver, CN

Rocanini Roasters
Wednesday and Friday 1-2 pm
127 West Fifth Avenue, Vancouver, BC V5Y 1H9

Elysian Coffee
Every Monday at 2PM.
2301 Ontario Street, Vancouver, BC

Friday, May 22, 2015

Coffee’s Next Generation of Roasters

After the success of once-scrappy roasters, such as California’s Blue Bottle and Portland’s Stumptown, a new generation of small shops is reshaping America’s coffee obsession

Originally published WSJ Magazine
written by OLIVER STRAND May 22, 2015 10:08 a.m. ET
 photo: Allan Gastelum



 


ABOUT 15 YEARS AGO, a handful of small-time roasters set out to revolutionize their industry by approaching a cup of coffee with a chef’s reverence for ingredients and a bartender’s flair for presentation. They pioneered a direct-trade system, sourcing beans straight from farms around the world. Thanks to their efforts, America fell in love with flavorful, fragrant single-origin coffees and expertly crafted cappuccinos made with milk so creamy and sweet that sugar became unnecessary.

Those once-scrappy roasters—Blue Bottle, Counter Culture, Intelligentsia and Stumptown—have now grown from regional companies with cult followings to national players with global profiles.

In 2014, Google Ventures, Morgan Stanley and other investors raised $26 million for Blue Bottle.
When the company opened in Tokyo earlier this year, there was a three-hour, Apple Store–like wait to get in the door. Stumptown, meanwhile, is now sold at the Moda Center, home of the Portland Trail Blazers.

In Miami—a place not especially known for its coffee geekery—hipsters line up at Panther Coffee, founded in 2010 by Leticia and Joel Pollock (a Stumptown alum), for a taste of beans sourced from Finca Kilimanjaro, an experimental farm in El Salvador run by Aida Batlle, a fifth-generation farmer acclaimed for her ecologically aware practices.

Kathleen Pratt, co-founder of Tandem Coffee Roasters in Portland, Maine, started as a barista at Blue Bottle in San Francisco and eventually opened the company’s large roasting facility and coffee shop in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. In 2012, Pratt and her husband, Will (who had been a Blue Bottle roaster), decamped to Maine; they launched Tandem five months later in the former office of a scrap-metal yard. “We wanted it to feel like you’re walking into our home,” says Pratt, who learned at Blue Bottle “how important it is to create an overall experience.” In addition to beans sourced from Rutsiro, Rwanda, Nyeri, Kenya, and Caldono, Colombia, Tandem offers free tasting sessions each Friday to demystify its coffees’ flavors and scents and allow customers to watch the roasting process.

Last year, the Pratts opened a second shop in a converted mid-century gas station, adding a bakery. Now Tandem sells about 900 pounds of coffee per week. A return to intimate spaces and individualized attention is a distinguishing feature of coffee’s newest all-stars.

In Williamsburg, Dillon Edwards—formerly of Blue Bottle and Stumptown—opened Parlor Coffee in 2012 in the back of a barbershop. It was one of the tiniest coffee bars in the city at the time, just a single barista behind a Speedster espresso machine, and its quaint atmosphere stood in stark contrast to the jam-packed rush-hour scenes at the city’s Stumptown and Blue Bottle outposts.

Last year, Edwards became a fully operational roaster, and Parlor is now selling beans to larger destinations like Williamsburg’s Wythe Hotel and Greenpoint’s Propeller cafe. One factor driving the proliferation of independent cafes and roasters is that it’s never been easier to source obscure, overlooked coffees. The supply chains that established coffee importers spent years creating—and, in many cases, jealously guarding—are now accessible to small buyers with good taste. And a group of influential wholesale roasters is supplying high-end beans to neighborhood cafes (and even selling directly to customers online).

At various coffee shops in Portage County, Wisconsin, you can now find beans hailing from Gitesi—a well-respected washing station in Rwanda, where the coffee seed is removed from its skin and dried—by way of Ruby Coffee Roasters, a local outfit started by former Intelligentsia roaster Jared Linzmeier.

But the past year’s most anticipated opening was Supersonic Coffee in Berkeley, California. The first roasting company in the U.S. to buy from Nordic Approach, a renowned Norway-based importer that sources only high-quality “green” coffees, Supersonic will light-roast in the so-called Scandinavian style used by groundbreaking roasters in Northern Europe. “We wanted to look five years ahead,” says John Laird, one of Supersonic’s founders, “and do something that would feel fresh down the line.”

PANTHER COFFEE Panther has two locations in Miami: an airy shop in Wynwood (2390 NW 2nd Ave.) and one in a converted garage in Sunset Harbour (1875 Purdy Ave.), which feels more like a local bar.

PARLOR COFFEE The coffee bar in the back of Brooklyn barbershop Persons of Interest (84 Havemeyer St.) is one of the most stylish in the city; the roastery and tasting room are open to the public on Sundays. parlorcoffee.com

SUPERSONIC COFFEE Supersonic will soon open a shop adjacent to its roasting facility in Berkeley, California (2322 Fifth St.); until then, they’re serving out of a 1965 Airstream trailer in the parking lot.

TANDEM COFFEE The Portland, Maine–based company has a tiny coffee bar at its roasting facility (122 Anderson St.) and a new bakery (742 Congress St.) in a 1960s gas station in West End. tandemcoffee.com

Thursday, March 19, 2015

What Exactly Is A Coffee Bloom, Anyway? ----way to go Huntington post!

The Huffington Post | By Alison Spiegel


Posted: 03/19/2015 9:17 am EDT Updated: 03/19/2015 2:59 pm EDT

Whether you're a coffee addict or just a casual drinker, you've probably heard the term "coffee bloom" at some point. Most likely, if you were in the presence of a holier-than-thou barista or a serious coffee snob, you weren't only subjected to this jargon. You were expected to understand what it meant. For all of you bloom newbies out there who don't want to ask for an explanation, we at HuffPost Taste want to clear things up. In our latest installment of "what in the world is that food thing you've heard of a thousand times but actually know very little about," we're putting on our coffee snob hats.

A coffee bloom is the fast release of gas that occurs when hot water hits coffee grounds. It looks like this:



inneedcoffee

When coffee beans are roasted, CO2 gets trapped inside. From then on, the beans will slowly emit the gas over time -- a process known as "degassing." When ground, the beans will emit gas more quickly, and when met with hot water, all of the remaining gas will escape rapidly. This is the bloom, and the more gas that's escaping, the bigger the bloom will be.

All of this matters to you and your friendly coffee freaks for two reasons. One, "the majority of a coffee bean's flavor compounds are trapped in the CO2 gases," MentalFloss says. So, more gas = more flavor. Two, the amount of gas can indicate how fresh the beans are.

Beans that have been sitting out for a long time will have more time to release gas. (Stop laughing. It's going to be okay.) Thus older beans will produce less gas and a weaker bloom. Age isn't the only factor that determines how much gas escapes from beans. Storage is important, too. Beans kept in hotter temperatures will release gas more quickly. This is one reason to keep your beans in cool temperatures. Beans should also be kept in sealed bags with one-way valves that don't let oxygen in, but allow for CO2 to escape.

Of course, it gets more complicated than the simple equation that more gas signifies fresher beans and more flavorful coffee. The type of roast is a key factor, as well. Darker, more oily beans won't release gas as quickly. They've also endured a longer roasting process, which means they contain more CO2 in the first place. Thus, darker roasts tend to have bigger blooms than lighter ones. When comparing blooms, you need to also keep the type of roast in mind.

Finally, to confuse matters, "bloom" can also be a verb. You can create a bloom by blooming -- or adding hot water to coffee grounds. There are different techniques for different coffee-making methods. If you use a pour over, you should pour water over the grounds in a circular motion. If you use an automatic coffee machine, you should pour just enough water to wet the grounds, let them rest for a couple minutes and then use the machine as you otherwise would have.

Need a cup of coffee yet? To summarize:

More gas = more flavor and fresher coffee.
More gas = a bigger bloom.
So a bigger bloom = more flavor and fresher coffee. And now when your snobby coffee friends are fawning over a bloom, you can remind them that it's just gas.