The Coffee Compass

Your Guide for Craft Coffee

Kahverengi Roastery Opens Istanbul Café

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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….

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The Zurich University of Applied Sciences Announces New Post-Graduate Certificate in Coffee Excellence

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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.

Designing the April Pour-Over Brewer: An Interview with Patrik Rolf

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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….

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Amal Yemen Raises Awareness, Funds for Yemen

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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.

Coffee Community Buzzing About Oatly’s Super Bowl Ad

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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.

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.

Five Coffee Resolutions for 2021

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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. …

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Behind the Scenes with Chris Deferio of Keys to the Shop

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I first met Chris Deferio in Madison Square Park at the original Shake Shack kiosk. I had just arrived in New York with my friend Kenny Smith to compete in the World Latte Art Open Championship at CoffeeFest. It was a cold and rainy March evening, but we thought a cheeseburger would help calm our nerves before the competition. As we huddled under an awning we looked over and noticed one other person crazy enough to brave the icy rain for a Shack burger. “I think that’s Chris Deferio,” said Kenny.

Since that chance meeting, Chris has become a friend and even a sort of mentor in the coffee industry for me. For younger baristas who don’t know their OGs, I like to mention that Chris had a Latte Art instructional DVD out before I even drank coffee. Chris is now a full-time podcaster and consultant, sharing his rich coffee and managerial experience on Keys to the Shop.  I recently caught up with Chris over Zoom to learn more about his production process, and what it’s like to have more than 400 episodes out. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity.) 

I’m curious, what was the first coffee shop you had keys to? 

I guess it was my first coffee job — the one I got fired from. It was a location of a company called Arsaga’s in Fayetteville, Arkansas. It’s not an Arsaga’s anymore. That particular location has since switched hands. It was bittersweet. I deserved to be fired, I’m not going to deny it. I learned a lot from that though, and obviously, kept going in coffee. I believe that was 1999.

I’m amazed by your creative output. How many episodes are you releasing these days? 

The average is nine episodes a month. Tuesdays, which are full-length, Shift Break on Thursdays, and Founder Friday, which is the last Friday of the month.

The show kind of grew a life of its own. When I started I just wanted to do a show a week. I wanted the show to be a resource that was focused on supplying tools and great, actionable take-aways. …

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How to Make Coffee with A Clever Dripper

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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.

Double Dutch: an interview with World Aeropress Champion Wendelien van Bunnik

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Just over a year ago I traveled to Den Haag to take a course to become an authorized SCA trainer. Sitting across from me in the class was the reigning Dutch barista champion, Wendelien van Bunnik. Wendelien directs the education program at Single Estate Coffee, a coffee roaster in Maasdijk with a café in Den Haag. I recently caught up with Wendelien over email to hear about what it was like to win the World Aeropress Championship and why there’s more to the Dutch coffee scene than just Amsterdam.   

Before becoming a coffee educator you were an English teacher. Does that traditional educational background influence the way you approach coffee training?

I think so yes! There’s a big difference between having a certain skill yourself, and being able to transfer this skill to others. During my (short) time as an English teacher, I learned that you must never forget how long it takes to learn a new skill. Once you’ve mastered a skill, it’s very tempting to forget the work you put in to learn it. So when I was in front of a class as an English teacher, I already learned that it’s not about the teacher, but about the learner’s process. The difference in speed and way people learn in general is so different for everyone. It’s up to me as a trainer to figure out how people learn the best, and to remain patient and focused on their individual process. Especially in my early days, I stepped into the pitfall of thinking training was about me as a trainer, having to demonstrate my skill (and impress every one of course). Although obviously, you need to be able to demonstrate skill, it’s 100% not about the trainer, but about the learner and the goal they want to achieve….

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What Determines the Color of Brewed Coffee?

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One of the most driven coffee professionals I’ve had the honor of meeting is Reza Kosar. In addition to being the first Iranian to become a licensed Q Grader, Reza is a talented coffee roaster with an insatiable curiosity in coffee science. He recently posed an interesting question on his Instagram account: what determines the color of brewed coffee? Which raises a second question, what effect does color have on flavor? We chimed in with what we thought was the right answer, but it turns out Reza had taken a deep dive into the subject and has graciously offered to share his research with us. 

Roast

The roasting process leads to the formation of the characteristic coffee aroma and dark-colored
compounds. …

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