Your Guide for Craft Coffee
Hungarian coffee cinematographers Kavekalmar are back at it again with a new video about making espresso by hand. It’s a little less ambitious than their last video project, but the above mountain of spent espresso pucks shows just some of the sacrifices one has to make in the name of art. We’ve long been advocates of hand-grinding, but now we want snag a lever machine for the Compass lab. Watch the video below and see if you don’t as well.
Hand Crafted Espresso from Kavekalmar on Vimeo.
What happens when you plant 100 coffee cherries you picked in Costa Rica? Turns out some pretty crazy stuff. Kávékalmár, the same creative team behind these genre-defining short films, just released a project 150 days in the making.
SPROUT – BABNEVELDE from Kavekalmar on Vimeo.
Edited down from over 200,000 frames of footage, SPROUT features a time elapse of the first months of a coffee tree’s life. We watch as coffee beans eerily emerge from the soil in an almost zombie-like fashion. Then, in a surprise burst of color, the first leaves appear.
For all the seed-to-cup education that has taken place over the last decade, few coffee drinkers have any meaningful connection to the agricultural processes that produce their morning cup. SPROUT offers a rare glimpse at those first, precious steps. Hats off to Gabor Laczko and company, who continue to outdo themselves!
Whether it’s filming the inside of a coffee roaster or conducting freakish scientific experiments with a moka pot, Hungarian coffee filmographers Kávékalmár love to explore unchartered territory. Their latest and most ambitious project, Sourced, offers an in depth look at Hacienda Rio Jorco and its sister company the Rio Jorco Processing Plant.
Hacienda Rio Jorco is a coffee farm in the Tarrazú region of Costa Rica that has belonged to the Alfaro family for three generations. Today, Hacienda Rio Jorco is raising the bar for coffee quality, employee compensation, and environmental impact. Sourced follows the coffee being picked, processed, and bagged to be shipped to overseas markets. Along the way we get both an intimate look at the lives of the laborers on the farm and breathtaking ariel shots captured with a drone (which provides plenty of enjoyment for the Alfaro brothers). We’ve long enjoyed coffees from Costa Rica. Gábor Laczkó and company have us wanting to buy an airline ticket and see it for ourselves.
SOURCED from Kavekalmar on Vimeo.
If you asked us a couple months ago, we would have told you that it’s impossible to make a good cup of coffee with a moka pot. Although this stovetop espresso maker is seemingly ubiquitous across the European continent, our only experience with moka pots have been bitter, acrid, and unenjoyable. But then we stumbled upon this video from Kávékalmár on James Hoffmann’s blog. To summarize, we haven’t questioned our coffee presuppositions so much since we watched Matt Perger’s 2013 WBC routine. After watching this video we feel like we need to add a moka pot to our brew arsenal, not to mention some thermocouples!
Photo from Creative Commons.
