So far, this year has proven incredibly exciting and challenging. And different. You didn't hear from me due several reasons - I like to say the most important are my current workload of two jobs plus a little freelancing plus studying and living in the new house with this incredibly big garden that needs so much attention. But that's only part of the truth.

When my workload started to rise late last year, I realized that in order to pursue my coffee related activities, I'd need way more money than I'd possibly possess before I receive my diploma and way more time than I'd possibly have spare before I receive my diploma. So I began to pull my head out of coffee-related activities, especially the ones my conscience reminded me that what I wanted was quality and education, not smiling faces and oh-ahs for a little latte-art with a rubb(er)ish coffee base. With that pull-out, the constant challenge of my own tastes diminished a little, and the perception of what I consumed slowly faded.

I stopped participating in coffee forums, stopped blogging about it, and after a very teaching experience at the last cuptasting competition in February I even stopped worrying about competitions in general (I do worry about the state of specialty coffee in germany, but that's a whole different story. The very ambitiuos and knowledgeable three guys over at Radical Coffee are trying hard to change that though and I sincerly hope they succeed with their approach and get the response that they deserve in the professional barista and coffee scene).

It took all but a single cup of brewed coffee to change that for a moment. Here I am, browsing coffee blogs again when I actually should get some work done, catching up on what I missed the past half-year or so, enjoying every single sip of that cup like I haven't done in quite some time (it's a Nicaraguan, Limoncillio from hasbean.co.uk by the way) and realize that I still have it in me. The passion is still there, and so are my plans for the future. When time and money permit, I'll be back. In the meantime, I'll be a systems administrator and programmer and student and drink the occasional exceptional cup of coffee. Perhaps I might even get to fix my espresso machine though that's unlikely for the near future.

That's all for today. And might be so for the next few months or even a year or two on this blog. But watch this space. Apologies for all that expected me at different venues the last year or just didn't hear a word from me.

This is giving me goosebumps, seriously. Sorry for being silent so long, new home, more study and less coffee are the causes - that will go on for quite a while, too. But seeing both Gwylim and Colin (also both members of TMC) in the finales in Atlanta makes me go all crazy and reenergizes the littel coffee freak in me. Congratulations!

Besides the Bonanza Coffee Heroes, Berlin now has a new coffee experience: Godshot - The Future Urban Coffee Klub. I haven't paid them a visit yet (Berlin is just too far away for me at the moment, more mentally so than physically), but judging from what I've read and seen both on their Blog and on Kaffee-Netz, they have a very ambitous project and tick all the right boxes for me:

• Good Coffee (from Walter and Langen) - check
• ambitous setup (GB/5, Hario Vacpot, naked portafilters, big grinders, beautiful location) - check
• nice service (nice bottled water for the guests) - check

The one thing that does not work for me is the logo, but I don't have to taste it so it should be ok. Hopefully I'll be visiting them both sometime this year, and I also hope they'll keep it up! It's a real relief to slowly see germany getting some high-profile coffee bars. Raise the bar for the rest of them, I'm all for it!

I love cupping coffee. I love the in-your-face tastes and aromas that this method of drinking (or analyzing) coffee gives you, the overwhelming sensations you get when slurping, and if you forget to spit, the overcaffeinated funkyness afterwards. The totally obvious difference from coffee to coffee or roast to roast, as well as the very subtle similarities. The pure pleasure every sip gives you. Yet at the same time, I have major difficulties in describing what I taste, what I smell and what I see. I find it very hard to exactly point out what is it I taste in a specific coffee, and how it develops during cooling. As a bonus, I still (after all the years) haven't really grasped what the term 'chocolate' means in a coffee. There are so many different tastes in chocolate that I find it hard to say 'this espresso was especially chocolaty'. It's more than possible that I just don't get it, but it can't be that important as my palate seems to be working well enough - in last years cuptasting I had 6 out of the 8 triples right. Not too bad considering the cup tasting competition was the only 'real' cupping I've had during that year! Let's see what this year brings for me. Especially with my shiney new totally awesome cupping spoon ...

For more information on how to cup and evaluate, read Hasbean Steve's article and/or Marc Prince's introduction to cupping. Also, Wolfredo has an excellent series of german articles about cupping, so if you speak german and interested in this they're a must read ("Cupping Grundlagen" and "Kaffee verkosten, Schritte und Termini").

The only thing that can teach me describe coffee better is, I believe (and you guessed), more cupping. So a few days before christmas, I roasted three batches of IACs Yirgacheffe with slightly different profiles to different roast degrees - just before second crack, to start of second crack and a few seconds before rolling second. It was the first time I actually made three roasts in a row with an eye on keeping them as similar as possible, to just different roast degrees. Turned out not as complicated as imagined - Using a good scale, a (hopefully quit exact) thermocouple and nearly-full gas cartidges, it worked quite well. The whole flat smelled funny for a few hours, though, as my batches are 450g and each produces a lot of smoke. A real roaster would make this so much easier (at least I hope) and reproducable ...

So, here are my totally unscientific tasting notes (I tried using the Cupping Database from greenbean, but I as of yet fail miserably in quantifying my notes so I just kept writing)! The three batches are labelled #1 (before second crack), #2 (beginning of second) and #3 (before rolling second). I had two cuppings - the first only about 5 hours after roasting, the second two days after roasting. I think I'll never cup so early after roast again, as it was really, really misleading - after the first I had #1 written of as a misroast, but it developed really well afterwards.

First Cupping:

• no1
  lightest of all, before 2nd crack. 'cheap' muted acidity - citrus like, but more like old citrus juice the 'cheapness' goes away during cooling, body is quite light, a little sweetness shining through. Unbalanced unbalanced, unsatisfying becomes more juicy when cool

• no2
  medium roast, first pops of 2nd crack. slight sweetness, nice body, quite balanced seems very round acidity becomes sweeter and livelier as it cools, fruity-sweetness but the fruit is muted, but more intense when cooling quite boring inbetween #1 and #3, but nice for itself

• no3
  darkest of all 2nd crack before rolling. less acidity, muted fruit, body more dark fruit as it cools roundish body smokey berry-like flavours, more berry as it cools

Second cupping:

• no1
  feels darker, more body, very nice acidity. livelier, deeper, darker. mouthfeel becomes lighter when cooling, the acidity is way more 'there' and less muted compared to first cupping after roast. lively, nice flowery aftertaste, acidity becomes more dominant over time, with hints of light wood sweet woody something with red berry aroma

• no2
  very similar to #1 when hot, less body, less pronounced acidity sets itself apart when cooling, little more pleaseant body, the berries begin to develop. the aftertaste is a lot more fruity less flowery, thicker mouthfeel than #1 and more body lingering around develops a thicker, sirupyer mouthfeel when cooling. very balanced, but I believe something inbetween #2 and #1, more on the #2 side, would be perfect for this bean sweet berry juice

• no3
  sirupy, dark ripe berries, heavy on the tongue sweet dark berry sirup, heavy body heavy on the tongue. hints of marmelade/jam in the aftertaste, long deep aftertaste slightly burned rubber develops, just a tiny bit. roasted wood at the same time, with dark overripe berries aroma on top, and body body body (did I mention that I love this roasted wood taste? Oh yes, there was this Yemen Mokka Matari thing last year ... ;))

• no3 filtered
  clean clean clean cup, medium body hints of ripe berry mouthfeel juicy-clear and not as wild as when cupped

And at day 10 after roast, #3 turned out to be a really tasty espresso. Very lovely, very berry, very satisying. I was quite sad after all the coffee was used up (some of it had to go as christmas presents, so I ran out quickly!).

So, that was my christmas coffee cupping, and I'll try to do more in the future. Perhaps I'll even write about them, but don't hold me responsible if I'm not! Oh and by the way: Happy new year 2009!

Edzard did it again: he organized what could be summarized as a barista jam, latte art throwdown and preparation for competition event. Together with the good people, the vegetarian food, a coffee cart outside and too much alcohol in the evening - what a nice day!

Quite a shame that I only get around writing about it half a year after the actual event took place. But better late than never, and since I get a surprising amount of friendly nags from people who actually read what I write I feel the urge to at least finish this post that sat in the pipeline for three months!

So, back to the event: The second (now hopefully annual) Hannovesche Barista Battle, taken place on August 31st at Edzards DerMuffinMann, Rehbockstr. 2 in Hannover. As I was fully aware that I'd not be as good as last year, and at the same time the others would've become better and better, I tried being smart for a change: to get on the judges panel instead of competing and making myself look like a complete idiot! Luckily, Edzard agreed, and I got to do my very first (though not 'SCAE official') judging. A very strange and good feeling: not being the one to be judged is a real relief. Takes the pressure off it. But at the same time arises responsibility: you want to be fair. To everyone. That cappu, is that 7 or 8 out of 10 points? And how to justify that decision if not by gut feeling? If the last was 7 then is this one 5 or 6? Not so easy as it turned out!

Judging also showed me that I often had a different opinion than the others, which initially confused me quite a lot. But since I could communicate my point more often than not, that confusion went away and I quickly grew more confident in my own tasting and judging. That was quite a day! Unfortunatly, I didn't take any camera with me and so far didn't catch any pics online. I'm sure the pictures captured the feeling from that day very well, and if they pop up I'll link them here. Edzard even promised some videos, let's see how that one turnes out!

Really look forward to the next episode of the Barista Battle, and I try to write about it rather sooner than about this one, but I don't make any promise here as the next year is already planned to be a dense one!

All the best, merry christmas and a happy new year to my few lovely readers!

It took me that long to write up something on that special coffee. No apologies for that, as was quite busy (and still am) at the moment, and this sat long enough in the pipeline to be ready now.

So. What a name for a coffee. But it's good to be precise on this one - it allows poeple to identify the exact batch of coffee I'm talking about. That doesn't happen too often even in the special specialty coffee world, where direct trade models are being established, importers buy based on quality and building long-term relations with the farmers, roasters roast to perfection with each bean and blend having it's own roasting profile. So this is the batch I received from Walter's Kaffeespezialität, and I finally decided to write what I think about it after a friendly nag from a friend (I wrote this quite a while ago but only now managed to find the time to overlook and publish it).

The setting of this tasting was quite a thing for me. At Squaremilecoffee, roasted by Anette Moldvaer, together with a good friend that I've made through toomuchcoffee.com, side by side with a Cup of Excellence from Costa Rica, El Portillo if I remember correctly, and an unnamed Rwandan sample if memory servers me right.

It was a blind cupping, that means Anette arranged the coffees for us, three cups of each, without us knowing what was what. But to be frank, it was outright clear from the first sip which coffee was the Esmeralda, just because it was so different from what I was used to. (Now this is the point where I stopped writing some two months ago. Great.)

I could grasp why people are paying so much money for coffee from this farm. It's different. It's one of these showcase coffees that Steve talked about in the latest common grind podcast. But it's more than that: it is actually very, very, very, very, oh yes very enjoyable. The mouthfeel was more tee-y than any coffee I'd encountered before, light on body in a good way, the smell was very peachy as was the taste. Very sweet, too. Somehow, the taste reminded me of that lovely peach iced tea I used to drink ten years ago. Thouroughly enjoyable. It's a shame that I didn't make more notes back then, but I will have the chance to cup it again, as I still have around a hundred gram left that really need to be roasted soon. I just don't know yet how, as always!

In the eternal department of new toys my newest addition: Bestest of cupping spoons ever invented (not that I'd know ...) Thank you Dr. Schwarz, it's a blessing and such a lovely tool!

FAIL.

So I had the pleasure (and a pleasure it was!) to visit Anette, Stephen and James at Squaremilecoffee two times during my stay in England. They are located a little outside of central London towards Hackney, in a small road alongside car repair shops, car painting shops and a glazier's workshop if I remember correctly. It's basically in a garage. That's what surprised me the most: they are a small small shop, having one room at the moment plus upstairs, and all their stuff packed in that tiny (or so it seems, it's packed full of coffee stuff: roasters, bags of greens, tins (with valve) of roasted, a myriad of coffee brewing devices including their Synesso) garage! I'd have taken photos, but that would have kind of ruined the atmosphere for me if you know what I mean. Most of the time I sat there staring around, being impressed and unable to speak much. I wasn't able to attend the cupping on the first day since I had to catch my coach towards Bristol, but I left them the small bag of the Esmeralda for Anette to roast so that we could cup it the week after. About being challenged in established views: James made a little french press of their Muchoki Peaberry: grind really coarse (with their Ditting grinder), poured, steep time 4 minutes, afterwards spooning away of the top 1-2cm of foam/grounds/coffee (I first thought 'wtf?!', but proof was in the cup!), press, wait, pour into cups. Contrary, what I'm used to: grind way finer, but still coarser than for filtere (with my Major), wet the grounds and stir to get them all wet, wait a few seconds, pour the rest, steep time 3 minutes, press, pour into cups. Result: a completely different flavour profile in the cup. That french press he made was about the cleanest and cup I've had from a french press, nearly no sludge, no perceived body because of the fines, very nice mouthfeel, very aromatic (well thanks to the Muchoki). The roast was quite light, but in that french press it worked damn well. While trying to replicate this profile at home, I found that my Major just isn't up to the task of grinding coarse, consistently. I can get about half as coarse as James with the Ditting (quality of grinds are so hard to compare verbally!), and with his method it leads to a very nice cup, but it's still far away from the clean, overly aromatic cup I've had at their place. One day I'll get one of those Ditting or Mahlkönig bag grinders just for my morning french press pleasure!

Okay, I somehow hesitate to write about the Esmeralda. Why? It's a really, and I mean it, special coffee for me. I fear that trying too much to describe the taste and aroma might do no good to my memories of it. I'll let a few more days pass and decide later wether I'll describe it or not. A small regret that I left the rest of the roasted Esmeralda with Anette and took the rest of the greens with me - it should've been the other way round. No chance I can roast the rest anywhere near as good as Anette did with the first half, and I suppose the greens would have been more useful for her as they're to me right now. I realized that on the plane next morning. Gah.

See you on August 31 in Hannover!