Your Guide for Craft Coffee
The specialty coffee community often celebrates direct trade: when coffee roasters buy their coffee directly from farmers without utilizing a trader. In theory, the practice ensures more of the profits go to the people who grew the coffee.
But Peixoto Coffee in Chandler, Arizona takes direct trade one step further: the vertically integrated coffee roaster sources most of their coffees from their family estate in Minas Gerais, Brazil. …
Just over five years ago I learned that Turkey would be hosting a Q grading course for the first time, and that it just so happened that it was going to be the week after I already was going to be in Istanbul on a planned visit. It had long been a professional goal of mine to take the course, so I arranged to stay an extra week.
That week would prove to be one of the most challenging of my coffee career. We tasted table after table of coffee. Blind triangulations. Aroma identification. Roast ID. It was grueling and exhausting. To make matters worse, I burned my tongue on a hot dessert the night before the first day of testing, but somehow managed to pass all 20 tests and earn a Q license.
Perhaps tne of the most valuable parts of the course for me was meeting the other coffee professionals. Having not met any of them before, by the end of the week I felt as though we were old army buddies who had been in the trenches together.
One of those coffee professionals was Ulaş Tüze, the owner and head roaster of Kahverengi Roastery. With locations in Çanakkale and Bozcaada- an island in the Aegean Sea— Kahverengi was one of the few specialty coffee shops outside of a major urban center in Turkey. Although I’ve long wanted to visit Bozcaada, (which produces some of Turkey’s finest wines), I was pleasantly surprised to learn Ulaş was opening a café just a few blocks from my flat in Istanbul’s Nişantaşı neighborhood….
The Zurich University of Applied Sciences has announced a new post-graduate certificate in partnership with the Specialty Coffee Association. According to the SCA’s press release.
the CAS in Coffee Excellence is a hybrid e-learning course designed to provide coffee professionals with a multidisciplinary overview of applied sciences within the academic world of specialty coffee.
The program consists of four modules and takes a total of 12 months. The curriculum includes an overview of botany, farm management, the science of roasting, and sensory analysis. In addition to the certificate, participants will earn 12 hours in academic credit upon finishing the program. According to SCA CEO Yannis Apostolopoulos, the program is one step closer to the SCA’s long-term goal of establishing a master’s degree in coffee studies at partnering universities.
The initial year of the program will be limited to 50 students. Tuition and fees for the program total 7,400 Swiss Francs.
Roaster. Consultant. Podcaster. There’s not much Patrik Rolf hasn’t done when it comes to coffee. Originally from Sweden, Rolf made a name for himself as a coffee roaster in the Berlin coffee scene. After deciding to found his own company, Rolf moved to Copenhagen to launch April Coffee.
In 2019, Rolf won the Swedish Brewers Cup competition and went on take second place at the world championship. Although all competitors write a routine around their coffee, Rolf took it one step further and designed an entire brewing device: the April Pour-Over Brewer. We recently caught up with Rolf over email to learn what’s so special about his device.
Baristas love to complain about the shortcomings of different brewing devices, but you set out to design a better pour-over dripper. What was the inspiration?
To brew the roasted coffee from April in the best possible way. If you think about it, very few, if any, current brewing devices are created with modern (lighter) roasted coffee in mind. After a long time of improving my roasting, I felt there was a missing link and it was clear that it was my brewing that wasn’t able to keep up with my roasting….
The country of Yemen plays an indispensable part in the history of coffee. The vast majority of commercial coffee varieties first came to Yemen from Ethiopia before spreading around the world. In fact, for centuries European researchers assumed coffee was endemic to the peninsula, as indicated by the name Coffea arabica.
But Yemen is also poised to play a crucial role in coffee’s next chapter. Recently, researchers in partnership with Yemeni coffee exporters Qima Coffee made a staggering discovery: a previously unmapped gene pool of coffee varieties. Qima is marketing this new cluster of varieties as Yemenia. With climate change and leaf rust decimating coffee production around the world, the discovery of new Arabica varieties offers new genetic material to breeders, not to mention unexplored flavors for coffee lovers.
The discovery comes at a pivotal time. A long, devastating civil war has created in Yemen what many are calling a humanitarian disaster. (The BBC recently shared a harrowing account of children being targeted by sniper fire.)
A group of coffee companies, including Qima Coffee, Square Mile Coffee, and Intelligentsia, have come together to put on an event to raise funds for charities working in Yemen. Amal Yemen, which translates to “Hope for Yemen,” will take place on March 26th. According to the event website:
Amal Yemen is a spontaneous movement designed to illuminate Yemeni coffee history, culture and arts while raising funds for humanitarian relief efforts… It is an attempt to better understand the dire circumstances Yemeni people are facing due to conflict and catalyze new efforts to address them.
The event’s program includes a guided coffee tasting with Geoff Watts of Intelligentsia, a presentation from Christophe Montagnon about the Yemenia coffee variety cluster, and a Yemeni Oud performance by Ahmed Al Shaiba. Participants can purchase a coffee kit, containing eight different Yemeni coffees, each roasted by a different specialty roaster. The coffees will highlight the regional and varietal differences found throughout Yemen. Tickets for the event can be purchased on Eventbrite.
It’s safe to say that Oatly, the one-time plant-based milk darling of the specialty coffee community, has officially gone mainstream with their recent Super Bowl commercial.
The commercial features Oatly CEO Toni Petersson playing a keyboard in a field of oats. With a voice unlikely to upstage Super Bowl halftime performer The Weeknd, Petersson croons “It’s like milk made for humans.”
The Super Bowl, like most versions of popular professional sports, is not particularly popular in the barista community, but the commercial promises to introduce their product to a wider audience. Even if initial reactions have been less than positive.
All that @oatly super bowl commercial shows me is that we’re all paying WAY too much for Oat Milk.
— CABELL TICE (@Cabelltice) February 8, 2021
It’s not the first time Oatly has been in hot water with ethically-conscious consumers. Previously the company caught flack when Chinese government-owned China Resources bought a stake in the company, followed by the private equity firm Blackstone. The controversy, however, has not stopped the company from soaring to a $2 billion valuation.
Unless you were already a billionaire when 2020 began, this last year was probably a rough one for you. Nothing has magically changed now that the calendar has reset, but that doesn’t mean the symbolism of a new year can’t inspire us to claim a little more autonomy over our lives. Here are five coffee resolutions we’re making in 2021, and we hope you join us!
Learn Some Geography
Most coffee-lovers can taste the difference between a coffee from Brazil and Ethiopia, but what about Cauca and Huila? (For the record, they are two of our favorite growing regions in Colombia, each with a distinctive flavor profile.) The coffee-growing world is immense, but we want to pay closer attention to the places and people who produced our morning cup. Whether it’s a community washing station in Burundi or a family-owned estate in Huehuetenango, Guatemala, we want to learn at least one new thing about each coffee we drink this year. …
The Clever Dripper might be the most underrated coffee brewer. The device is a sort of hybrid brewer that offers elements of both immersion and gravity drip methods. It’s easy to use, and most importantly, capable of making a really great cup of coffee.
Essentially, the device is a pour-over dripper with a sealable valve at the bottom. The valve allows you to steep the coffee as long as you desire. The resulting brew is somewhere between the body of a French press and the clarity of a Hario V60.
There are several practical reasons I love the Clever dripper:
1. It doesn’t need a gooseneck kettle like pour-over drippers.
2. İt uses Melitta #4 filters, easily the most ubiquitous coffee filter in the world.
3. The BPA-free plastic dripper and accompanying lid is very temperature-stable, which makes for easier extraction.
The only drawback, in my opinion, is that the draw-down can be hard to predict. If your grinder produces a lot of fines, it could easily take 2+ minutes for your brew to finish draining. Different coffees will drain at different rates, so when you’re brewing a new coffee there’s a decent amount of guesswork.
Without further ado, here is our Clever Dripper recipe.
1. Place 24 grams of medium ground coffee in the Clever Dripper.
2. Briskly pour 400 ml of 96° C water. Try to evenly saturate all of the grounds.
3. After 1:00 minute, gently stir the slurry, making sure all coffee grounds are immersed. Then place the lid on top of the dripper.
4. At 2:00 minutes, carefully place the Clever over the carafe, initiating drawdown.
5. Aim for 4:00 total brew time, plus or minus 30 seconds. If your brew takes much longer than that consider adjusting your grind size or shortening your steep time.
If you did steps 3 and 4 properly, the coffee bed should be perfectly flat at the end of brewing with little to no coffee grounds stuck on the sides of the filter. Be careful when placing the Clever dripper over your carafe— I’ve tipped more than one brew over at this step!
Have you experimented with a Clever Dripper? Feel free to share your go-to recipe in the comments section below.
I remember realizing this spring that coffee shops I knew and loved would not survive the pandemic. It especially hit home when Quills Coffee shuttered their U of L café— a shop where I had logged thousands of hours on bar.
With cafés around the country closing their doors or switching to takeaway-only, perhaps it shouldn’t have surprised me when Fresh Cup Magazine notified me that my upcoming article about Turkish Coffee would be in their last issue. After all, who could imagine picking up a communal magazine off a random café table in the COVID-19 era?
My relationship with Fresh Cup started in 2014. I had seen the magazine …
Every day for the last six years, the majority of traffic to this humble coffee website has come from a simple Google search: “how to make cold brew with a French press.” The data reveals a simple truth: people love iced coffee. But there’s perhaps never been more confusion surrounding a beverage.
Cold brew. Cold press. Slow drip. Flash chilled. The list goes on. But what do any of these terms even mean? Lucky for you we’ve compiled a handy guide to drinking iced coffee….
