Daniel's World of Coffee

Sleep and Coffee

I haven't posted this week because I have been very busy getting ready for the SCAA show in Minneapolis. For those of you who might be there this weekend, shoot me an email, or stop by the El Salavador booth or the Ethiopia booth, as I will be holding cuppings at the former and hanging around promoting the auction at the other. I'm sure I will also spend some quality time hanging out around the United States Barista Championship.

Everyone's been talking about how Kyle Glanville from Intelligentsia LA is more or less unstoppable this year. I believe it. I don't want to jinx him, obviously. This is the man who taught me how to pull my first proper shot of espresso, so he has that going against him. But other than that, he's a master crafstman. I say, look out, USBC.

Competition should be awesome again this year.

I will post about SCAA while I am there. And when I get back, there are events at Café Grumpy and at BODUM USA (scroll down for that one). Oh, and a note on the Bodum/Edible Manhattan event: I just went by Bodum's new Chelsea headquarters today. Positively gorgeous. Beautiful, spacious interior design in a huge industrial loft space on the far west side of Chelsea. The gigantic north windows overlook a train yard far below, so there are no other buildings blocking the view and you can see miles uptown and along the Hudson. This is going to be a spectacular place to cup some coffee.

But now I am way behind on sleep and I haven't packed yet. Looks like I might be sleepy on the plane tomorrow. But for that particular malaise, I see the New York Times has discovered my favorite travel-lag cute: coffee before sleep.

In fact, experts said, for most trips it might be best to make the most of the alertness you can muster when you need it. That comes down to “naps and caffeine,” Dr. Rosekind said. Studies of pilots showed that a 26-minute nap in flight — while a co-pilot took the controls, of course — increased performance by 34 percent and overall alertness by 54 percent.

Using simple caffeine to raise alertness in conjunction with naps during a trip is a winning strategy, Dr. Rosekind said. Caffeine takes 15 to 30 minutes to work, and an effective nap should be less than 45 minutes, to avoid going into the kind of deep sleep that leaves people groggy. So drinking a cup of coffee just before a nap, he said, can ensure that you will awaken with a little extra zip. The caffeine and nap working together “can actually show a performance boost greater than either one alone,” he said. “It’s not rocket science.”

... from an article that's actually about the anti-lag properties of Viagra. Hmm.

Special Event in New York: May 8th

Tri-state area coffee people are invited to an event at the new BODUM USA headquarters in Manhattan, Thursday, May 8, at 6 pm.

We'll be cupping and pressing some of the top coffees from this years Ethiopia Limited auction. For those of you who wanted to attend the April 10th event but couldn't make it, here's your chance. And for anyone who's going to Minnesota for SCAA, this should leave you enough time to get home, get some sleep, and get back out there and cup with some fellow New Yorkers!

The coffees are outstanding; you have my guarantee on that. Also, this is a chance to rub elbows with some international coffee judges, including Andrew Barnett of Ecco Caffé and Daniel Mulu, one of Africa's most famous cuppers.

The event is courtesy of yours truly and ...

BODUM USA

Edible Manhattan and....

Boot Coffee

A special invitation to roasters and green buyers. Space is extremely limited, so please write to me if you want to come... I expect that we will unfortunately have to turn some people away. RSVP here. Hope to see you there!

How Much Coffee Schnapps Do YOU Have?

Last Friday, Anne and Neil organized a New York Coffee Society cupping at the beautiful El Beit in Williamsburg. It was a lot of fun. Anne does a great job with these! We had a couple of Moka Javas, one from Barrington and one from Gimme!, plus a beauty Kenya peaberry from Kownta Kultchah. It was my first time to El Beit, despite the fact that I have many friends there, like Danger Dan Griffin.

My camera's broke, so thanks Anne Nylander for letting me steal your photo without asking permission.

Afterward we went to Spuyten Duyvil for all kinds of strange beers from Belgium and beyond. (And some crazy meat, and the mostest bitterest chocolate ever). Duane Sorenson was there. I guess I was the last person to hear that he's moved to New York City. Look out, NY. Here comes Stumptown to take over your entire operation.

Also Bob Peyton, who works for Stumptown in Portland now.

But the best part of the night was that Matija brought me a freaking bottle of freaking coffee schnapps from freaking Croatia!!!

Article in barista magazine

Check out my new article on the coffee scene in Harlem in the "Field Reports" section of the new issue of barista. The article begins on page 31. Click here to read it.

An excerpt:

Still, for a city of this size, where the disdainful restaurant review pan was elevated to an art form and where the local papers run wine columns the way most towns discuss high school football, there has been a remarkable lack of sophistication when it comes to coffee. The corner bodegas feature commodity grade robusta, and in many neighborhoods the big chains still pass for “gourmet.” But things are changing. Events like the one at Society — and others we have hosted around the city over the last couple of years — have proven that there is no lack of interest in great coffee.

What made the night at Society feel special, aside from the amazingly warm atmosphere (and the waffles), was that it was taking place right there in Harlem, on Frederick Douglass Boulevard where Richard Wright and Malcom X used to roam.

Read on [go to page 31]...

Make Good Coffee, or No Sex For You!

Amazing, awesome ad. H/t: Boing Boing

I like the whole pitting of wifey against the "girls at the office." Imagine if those girls at the office were making individual vac-pot cups of 2-days-out-of-the-roaster Esmeralda. Rrrrroawr!

Article at Divine Caroline

I have been in Boston since Sunday; just about to head back to New York. My sister just got engaged to a Brazilian man, and yes, I admit, I'm already calculating how to organize a family-visiting, origin trip to Minas Gervais Gerais (Although Ricky "Minas" Gervais would be cool, too). Love you, Jane-o!

While I travel back to New York this afternoon, you should read my new article at Divine Caroline: The Magenta Orgasm.

These Are the Real Heroes

Half the coffee muckety-mucks of New York City are in Ithaca this weekend for the Northeast Regional Barista Competition. I went to Gimme! on Mott St last night to visit with baristas who have real dedication to their craft. No time for fancy competitions for the working barista. This is James Hoffman #1 (not to be confused with #2, scroll down to the third picture).

Kudos, James. America salutes you.

Ethiopia Cupping Report

Yesterday's cupping at the Cupping Room Tasting Room (maybe they should change the name...) was a blast. We had a great cross-section of people there, including green buyers from coffee roasting companies and importers, cafe owners, baristas, and discerning coffee drinking customers from all over New York City. Matija, a barista from Croatia, came with his girlfriend, Mare. Hannah Wallace came, from the New York Times. And so did photographer Chester Higgins. Chester has done photography in Ethiopia, and he brought prints of a beautiful photo of his of the famous rock-hewn church at Lalibela, which he graciously handed out to our participants.

Also, a little Ethiopian saxaphone music to set the mood. (Off the topic of coffee... the music in Ethiopia was something I was not prepared for. It's almost impossible to describe for me. Here's one of the prettiest songs I have ever heard. Breaks my heart, the title alone...Mulatu Astatqe's "Baby, My Unforgettable Remembrance")

The coffee was outstanding, as expected. Everything was good, of course. But what really stood out for me yesterday was, among the washed coffees, the coffee from Lensemo Lamisso from Aleta Wondo, and among the natural coffees, the Idido from S. A. Bagersh.

I'm getting more and more excited about this auction. I've been excited about these coffees since I tasted them in Addis Ababa, but the auction itself is getting closer and closer... all the work will have been worth it if people bid on these coffees. If you are in any way connected with the coffee industry, make sure you spread the word about this event. (Info here.) If you don't actually work in coffee, but only drink it, ask your favorite roaster or coffee shop if they plan to participate. The coffee is so outstanding, and the proceeds go directly to the farmers, helping them build a better life and further ensuring more quality coffee down the line.

I want to thank everyone who came. I also want to thank Cory Magamoll for helping everything to go so smoothly. Thanks Cory. Birr!! Also, as always, the fantastic folks at the Tasting Room. They get no money or anything for doing these events. They're just dedicated to really wonderful-tasting things. Awesome.

Roast-a-Rama

Ah, look at all that green gold. I've been roasting ALL DAY today. And by roasting, I mean taking green coffee beans and applying heat so as to cause a Maillard reaction, darkening the beans and making them fit for beverage preparation. Got it? Anything anyone else tells you is a filthy, filthy lie.

This is coffee from Ethiopia, over a dozen samples of winners from the Ethiopia Limited auction that I have been going on and on about. We're cupping them tomorrow at the Tasting Room. It's been fun roasting these coffees, but they are such delicate babies, and the quanitities are so small, and the samples so rare, that I am almost afraid to breathe on them wrong. When we cupped these for competition in Addis Ababa, the woman who ran the sample roaster at the Ethiopian Coffee Exporters Association was ready to kill me because I kept making her re-roast samples that were even a tiny bit off-spec (that, and I kept changing the codes we were using so that by the end every single coffee had about 4 different identifying codes that all had to be cross-referenced to figure out which was which, and only I had the sheet).

I've got a couple more hours to go here and then I am done. I'll post about the cupping results tomorrow. I am very interested to see how people's impressions of these compare to what the judges thought. Wish me luck staying sane.

Haitian Vert (et Maron)

This is some dirty green. My friend Rachel — a filmmaker and lover of coffee I have known since the Victrola days when she used to come in and study while I worked — brought this back from her last trip to Haiti. Rachel's documentary on the U.N. intervention in Cité Soleil, a slum Port-au-Prince, is in the post-production phase. Insane woman that she is, one gigantic project not being enough, she's been toying with the idea of a big coffee project, too.

I can't say exactly the form this project is taking, since we don't really know yet ourselves. But at the very least, we'd be following the coffee all the way from the trees to the cup, enlisting some help from a third party for importing and roasting in between. But before we can even get started on all that... we had to see what we had on our hands.

Rachel brought me this completely unsorted, natural-process coffee when we met for lunch last week. Needless to say, it needed a little cleaning up. I like sorting coffee... so this was the fun part. You can see here what I took out with just one cursory run-through of a 300 gram sample.

I saw a lot of "full blacks" in this sample, which worried me. Usually a defect of this kind will ruin an entire cup. If I was seeing them in abundance, there was a chance this coffee might never be clean enough to be nice. There was some severe insect damage here and there, but overall not that much considering this sample had never once been sorted. Rachel asked her friends in Haiti to get her some coffee... they went to a warehouse where dry cherries were being stored, the hulled them on the spot with a mortar and pestle and sifted out what you see here. That's it.

So after a bit of labor, I was left with this...

Keep in mind this is natural coffee. The goal isn't 100% uniformity in color. Those orangey looking beans are just beans with the silverskin still on, turned red from being dried next to the fruit. The important thing is I threw out all the leftover hulls and full blacks and full sours and the like.

Still, I wasn't sure how this would taste. I roasted up two samples, one to a "cupping roast" and the other to about a Full City Plus. I took it over to Rachel's place off Central Park West and we had a little cupping session (after she showed me the first ten minutes of her film, which she said was full of flaws but it looked great to me... guess I'll stick to evaluating coffee). To make things even harder on this coffee, I brought the only other fresh-roasted natural-process coffee I had around, which just happened to be the SMS Korate Sidamo which just won first place over all in the Ethiopia Limited competition and which I scored a 94 in Addis.

So how did it do? I won't lie and say it performed better than the Korate. But it was surprisingly good. Good overall sweetness. No problems with fermentation or vegetal tastes or phenol. It was a touch woody, but only a touch. And there were nice chocolate and fruit aromatics. It's good coffee! It's clearly mostly ripe cherries, properly dried. This was a huge relief. It's one thing to take on a huge, complicated multi-year project. It's another thing to do it when you are starting at scratch with no quality.

Incidentally, I noticed from a little poking around that the main response to the drive for quality in Haiti has been to introduce wet processing mills in a country where 90% of the coffee is sundried natural. There is a definite equation out there that says: sundried = inferior. I saw this in Ethiopia too. Another thing that I have seen is that with proper care, sundried = dynamite. The washing-station projects are awesome. My friends and benefactors at USAID did an amazing thing with the creation and marketing of "Haitian Bleu"... check out some great reports here and here. But all I am saying is that this is clearly not the only way to go. Haiti has a unique tradition. It needs improving, but no sense in throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Who knows what will come of the project? Rachel needs to finish her film first. In the meantime, we've got six more pounds of green if anyone else wants to try this.