High Hopes for Apple Mac Coffee

*Courtesy BBC

"When next waking bleary-eyed and the only thing to kick-start your day is a caffeine hit made within minutes of boiling the kettle - imagine taking six months to brew your morning cuppa.

This is how long it took for 30-year-old Alex Sargeant, a self-taught barista from Norwich who did not even like coffee until recently, to develop his "signature macchiato" - the 'Apple Mac'.

An espresso-based drink created with a serving of molecular gastronomy from the Institute of Food Research, he hopes it will secure him a place in the UK Barista Championships final on Sunday.

"What excites me about a good espresso coffee is complexity - I want a coffee I find challenging, that has a whole host of flavours fighting for dominance on the palate," Mr Sargeant said.

Alex Sargeant's competition performance will be broadcast around the world online

A co-owner of Strangers Coffee House in the city's Pottergate, he has made it to the London finals weekend for the second year running and is the only person to qualify from the East Anglia regional heat.

Mr Sargeant is a former mortgage broker, private investigator and policeman who swapped his beat for the bean four years ago with the opening of his own coffee house.

"I wanted to be an expert in what I was doing. I started by creating latte art as it looked awesome and customers really appreciated the 'wow factor', but then I wanted to start making better tasting coffee," he said.

Mr Sargeant now talks about his single origin Nicaraguan coffee as a sommelier would enthuse about the subtle tasting notes in fine wine.

"My espresso has that crisp acidity you get from Granny Smith apple flesh that pinches around the inside of your mouth, but it's also got a vanilla sweetness, maple tones and rich, dark chocolate flavour notes which I wanted to extenuate in my signature drink," he said.

"I knew I wanted to use apple, but not quite how. I've created the drink with jellies, syrups, caramels, pralines - all of these things you take to a point which either tastes lovely, or you discover will never work in a million years."

To compete in the championship, Mr Sargeant's signature drink must retain espresso as its dominant flavour.

During his performance held at the London Coffee Festival he will be given 15 minutes to make four espressos, four cappuccinos and four signature drinks.

The drinks are judged for their technical accuracy and "sensory values". The overall winner goes on to represent the UK at the World Barista Championships in Australia.

"It's everyone preference as coffee is such a personal thing - but when I present my drinks to customers it's about presenting beautiful drinks, the same way as a chef would present beautiful food.

"My customers are also now are far more interested in where the coffee is coming from, how is it roasted, by who and when.

"You have so many people who are really interested and passionate about why the coffee is important, you then have others who don't care - they just need the caffeine.

"The competition is a bit scary but I think it's great be able to start to put Norwich on the UK coffee map.

"There's a couple of independent shops here getting on the radar within the industry and it's great to make people aware of that."

Record-Breaking Costly Coffees

*Photo and story courtesy of TrendHunter.

"If you think you had an expensive Starbucks excursion the last time you ordered a vanilla bean latte, you can at least be grateful that your bill didn’t come to $47.30.

Well, the coffee would have cost $47.30 if prankster Beau Chevassus didn’t use his free birthday discount to get the monstrosity that he made up.  Apparently, that’s what it’ll cost you to get a 52 oz. coffee concoction that has no less than 48 shots of espresso.  The record setting expensive Starbucks visit started off as a simple mocha frappucino and quickly spirals out of control after adding the shots in addition to vanilla, two bananas, strawberries, caramel drizzle, and chocolate shavings.  I imagine that expensive Starbucks drink doesn’t taste like nearly $50 of value either.

If you want a heart-attack inducing sugar and caffeine overdose, you only need to ask the Starbucks barista for a Quadriginoctuple Frap, and make sure to get all 48 shots in there."

Wow!  ...and I thought a regular cup of coffee there was expensive.  What's the most expensive coffee you've every ordered?

Learning the Arcane Arts of the Barista

*Photo and story courtesy of The Spec

Want to know what it takes to become a barista?  Read journalist Jeff Mahoney's adventure into learning the art of being a barista:

"In case you haven’t noticed, Hamilton is changing. It’s time to wake up, stylishly late, and smell the Americano. I did, or at least started to this past weekend, courtesy of the people at Detour Cafe.

Yes, we’ve always had a coffee “thing” here. After all, Hamilton is home to Store No. 1.

But no longer can we think of ourselves as a city that judges its joe by how warm it keeps your hands in an arena. Low-grade stuff with no subtlety, brewed from beans that might’ve been roasted in the blast furnaces you see from the Skyway, just won’t cut it anymore.

These days is about the “good stuff.” Coffee is now an objet de marquee. A headline act, menu topper. Boutique-y, “artisanal,” complex, maybe even a little fetishistic. It has its own nomenclature.

Just look at the stores that have emerged in recent years. Homegrown Hamilton, which roasts its own; My Dog Joe; The Cannon (Ottawa and Cannon); Baltimore House; The Mulberry Street Coffee House on James North, Johnny’s on Locke Street. Many others.

Fifty shades of café.

The Detour Café on King Street, Dundas, exemplifies the conceptual evolution of coffee in this city.

They invited me this past Sunday evening, along with four other “coffee curious” media types, for a barista barnstorming, bud-popping, nose-rainbow showcase slash how-to. Believe me, this was better than the Oscars.

First, Detour owner Kaelin McCowan and Crystal Archer and baristas Geoff Woodley, Will Thorburn and Momiji Kishi line up seven kinds of coffee, including two Detour blends.

This is what is called the “cupping.” First, you bring your nose up very close to the contents of each cup and try to capture the aroma and identify accents.

“You can tell baristas,” jokes Geoff. “We have burns on the tips of our noses.”

Kaelin, who is, like, a coffee bodhisattva, breaks it down. “You try to aspirate the scents for the big overarching themes, then identify flavour profiles. Try to pick out the sugars — is the sweetness like caramel? There might be floral notes or the coffee might remind you of colas, olives or chocolate. When you have them side by side, it’s easier to tell differences.”

At Geoff’s prompting, I take a spoon and push back the “crust” (the flecking on the surface of the coffee) and dip into the liquid, from the edge of the cup. This is called “the break.” You hold the full spoon over a paper cup, then aggressively slurp it into your mouth and try to swish it around to further develop the tastes.

There are coffees here from Brazil, Kenya, Bolivia, to name a few sources. Kaelin travels to farms in places like Central America, scouting out coffees.

Kaelin, a Toronto transplant, and Crystal Archer, originally from New Zealand, started Detour as a coffee-roasting operation in Dundas about five years ago. Two years ago, they moved the roasting to Burlington and opened up the café/restaurant.

The barista workshop is something Detour is doing more of as patrons and even passersby inquire after the mysterious subtleties of the coffee arts (did you know that coffee “beans” are the pit of a purplish fruit sometimes called the coffee cherry?).

Detour’s baristas are highly qualified to open the code for us. Geoff is the reigning Central Canadian barista champion — there are competitions culminating in the nationals. Momiji held the title a few years before him. And Will is an accomplished latte artist, as well as barista and roaster.

There’s an encyclopedic breadth to their and Kaelin’s knowledge of coffee and its precise demands. Chemistry, acidity, the taxonomy of drinks (flatwhite, latte, etc.). Even the choice of cups is important.

After the cupping and some “pulling shots,” Kaelin and Crystal sit us down to a magnificent meal from Detour’s ever-evolving menu (kudos to chef Chris Beltrano).

Then it’s on to espresso (130 pounds of pressure per square inch) and some hands-on latte art. Will describes how the milk must be rolled over the steam injection in just such a measure to create the right consistency of micro-foam. He does a “free pour” onto the coffee and a beautiful rosette appears on the surface. He also does a tulip and a heart.

Then it’s our turn. I come up with something shapeless and bleary. I think of a Carly Simon lyric, “clouds in my coffee.”

The evening, one of sensual delights (the coffee’s amazing), goes longer than scheduled but seems to fly by. I leave the café, it’s dark out and suddenly the city seems different, younger somehow. You’re not at the drive-thru anymore, Dorothy.
It’s a brave, new barista world."

Seattle Barista Fired Over Snarky Blog

Courtesy El Paso Times:

A Seattle barista says it was all satire, but his anonymous blog that made snarky comments about his boss and the customers he didn't like got him fired.

Matt Watson was exposed as the author of the blog "Bitter Barista" this week by another coffee site called Sprudge.com, which led his boss at All City Coffee in Seattle's Georgetown neighborhood to fire him, The Seattle Times reported Tuesday.

In the blog, the 30-year-old wrote that his vocabulary is too complex for his boss to understand. He also wrote about not serving customers what they ordered.  For example:

•  "If you remind me four times that you've ordered decaf, guess what you won't be getting ... "

• "I would remember your usual drink if you were a more memorable person."

• "I like to use a lot of big words when I tweet, that way if my boss ever finds my twitter account, he won't understand any of it."

Watson said his blog was satire and that he was just accentuating the "5 percent who I guess make our job more difficult and don't treat us as human beings."

"I had a good personal relationship with 95 percent of customers," he said. Watson added he thought very highly of his boss, Seth Levy.

Watson said baristas are "probably an artist, overqualified, people with pretty much college education across the board."

The New Jersey native has a bachelor's degree in philosophy and moved to Seattle "following a girl."

He worked at All City Coffee to make ends meet while pursuing a career as a hip hop artist under the moniker "Spekulation." On his site, Watson has released several songs in which he raps.

Watson started his Bitter Barista blog about two weeks ago, but it was getting a couple of thousand hits a day.  He made no mention of All City Coffee or his real name on the site.  But the operators of Sprudge.com put it together after Watson said what he was doing in his Spekulation tweets, The Seattle Times reported.

Sprudge.com ousted Watson on Thursday:  "There's a lot of anger in this blog, and while we love the well-worn barista cliché, it should be the stuff of mild parody, not an all-out assault on whomever walks through the door of your cafe."

According to the Times, Watson emailed Levy saying:  "This isn't bad press, it's actually really good press ... especially given your customer base and the type of neighborhood that Georgetown has become ... I'm just saying ... it could turn out to be a fun something that gives the place a little spike in publicity."

Levy didn't quite see it that way.

"He was writing about his boss during business hours," Levy told the newspaper.  "I represent the business, the customers, and the staff.  I can't endorse what he was saying, whether humorous or not. It puts me in a difficult position, where if I don't respond that means I endorse what he's saying."

Watson hopes to put together a Bitter Barista coffee-table book.