Kostverlorenvaart

Take two bananas, 250ml of milk, one tube of Sudden Coffee , a tray of ice cubes, go BRRZZZ and BAM! you get a low calorie high energy coffee boost. Sudden Coffee Smoothie Booster from Frans Goddijn on Vimeo .

By Jan van der Weel & Frans Goddijn Sudden Coffee shipment (This blog is also on http://www.byleew.nl/coffee/sudden-coffee-instant/ ) Travelling can be tough if you are used to excellent coffee. How does one prepare a decent cup on the road if there is no specialty coffee place in sight? You can load all your equipment in your trunk but this isn’t a very practical solution when you travel by airplane or when you drive out to very remote places, if you want to go backpacking or if you don’t want to have another coffee related argument with your partner. Now there might be a simple solution. A relatively new company,   Sudden Coffee , promises to offer a solution. “ Just add water & stir - it's really that simple” , they say. Sudden Coffee compared to Nescafe Sudden Coffee is crafted by Kalle Freese. He won 9th place in the 2015 World Barista Championship. The company only uses high quality single origin coffee that has been roasted by differ...

I purchased some very nice green beans from fellow roaster Arnoud at vintage-espresso-machines.nl -- I had had some succes with Sumatra Mandheling beans before so I was curious to try these. For a Mandheling, which can contain some weird and damaged beans, this batch of 15kg was quite neat. Roasted in portions of 200g in the Fracino Roastilino, roast time 9:20 up to an end temp of 216ºC (profile included below). These turned out delicious. Keeping the Rate of Rise up to the end is something to take care about and then it's all good. The taste was so good from the E8 grinder already that I decided to take the time to use the R120 on these beans. I could have ground a tiny bit finer but it was a beautiful cup anyway. COMPAK grinders, LONDINIUM espresso machine, ACAIA scales. Music in the background: Heidi Bruehl (Plantlife's Love Philosophy Mix) Extracting Mandheling from Frans Goddijn on Vimeo . YouTube version: Roast profile, logged with Artisan...

When experts tell you about water for coffee, their long presentation usually boils down to this message: "It's terribly complicated but what you should do is buy my filter system."  From what I have studied (and forgotten) so far I have remembered that one needs active carbon in the filter to get rid of any unpleasant substances like chlorine and one needs to limit the amount of minerals in the water even though some are useful because they help extract coffee or at least make you taste the coffee better.  50-60ppm (parts per million) in minerals seems very good. A good filter takes out or replaces minerals that could build up as scale inside your espresso machine. Also, a pH value that is around 7 (neutral, not acidic and not alkaline) is good to have and "pure" water, as in distilled water, sounds good but is actually the worst to have. Book cover Now there is a new book out, by Maxwell Colonna-Dashwood and Christopher H. Hendon and the title "...

This Sunday afternoon I visited Roland Buurman and Arnoud Kruiver in their vintage espresso treasury near Amstelveen . They source the beautiful old machines from Mexico, Italy and other very remote regions. In their workshop they restore and overhaul the machines, retaining some of the original patina while replacing the controls with modern versions. They also import small stocks of specialty green coffee to share with a growing network of home roasters and startup commercial micro-roasters. They roast test batches and small orders in house and larger batches on a shared machine elsewhere. Their roaster is connected to the Artisan roast logger software, so they can monitor, archive and compare all roast profiles. If you are interested in a commercial espresso machine that looks spectacular at a much lower price than most of the top brands that everyone else already flaunts anyway, go check them out. They are also working on a set of tampers which are briefly featured in the clip ...

It's BachoTeX  time again in the woods along  Bachotek lake.  With workshops on Latin calligraphy, batik, long-stitch book binding and the combination of jazz and popular songs, conversations about smart battery chargers, corruption in present day regimes and tips to wash baseball caps. And coffee, of course. Bachotek Lake Not without basic coffee tools Early morning gathering Talking it over One of the guys Calligraphy workshop By Barbara Wilin´ska Young and old working hard Rechts: Lorien Otten Discussion Harald König Intermission conversation Working outside in the sun Karel Píska Batik At Willi Egger's Long-stitch Binding workshop At Willi Egger's Long-stitch Binding workshop At Willi Egger's Long-stitch Binding workshop (Martha & Lorien Otten, and others) Willi Egger at work Taco Hoekwater Teun Otten Bonfire Bonfire Bonfire Lorien Otten ...

A remarkable quote from Talor Browne on her recent blog post : Even at the top, there is no known knowledge, only trial and error. Everyone, even Tim, is kind of bumbling along in the dark, looking for the light switch. It bothers me to see people be looked up to so much when it’s all so unknown. The things I do know are: if your raw coffee is delicious, it’s actually pretty hard to fuck it up. Thanks to Matt Perger for linking this in his Barista Hustle newsletter! Marko Luther, a friend of mine and a highly regarded and experienced roaster, writes me: "Nice quote. I couldn't express this better and share Talor's view fully. I had that impression already in 2013 when I talked to Morten and Tim in person at SCAE in Nice.  So there seems to be a clear change in taste on modification of the roasting process, but it seems impossible to grab the exact details of this influence and use these to make a tool that brings out what you are looking for in a coffee.   ...