Daniel's World of Coffee

I Should Have Been a Funk Singer (Coffee of the Week)

Here's part two of my visit to the CEL. And yes, I sing on this video, inspired by coffee. If you can't understand my hyper-excited babbling at the end, I'm saying, "Thanks Intelligentsia... Thanks Geoff Watts... Thanks Kenyan Coffee Producers!"

This is my coffee of the week, incidentally. Hands down.

Part one of my visit to the CEL here.

If you don't know what the heck I was singing about during the making of the Chemex, Stephen Morrissey's cool Chemex video here.

Not the same Gichathaini Kenya, but another fresh Kenya from Intelligentsia here.

Scott Rao's book here.

Don't forget to drink lots of coffee before you go out tonight, and Happy New Year everybody!

Event(s) Report: Coffee Fest Madness

I work in coffee and I was born and raised in Seattle, WA, and yet it's been four years (!) since I participated in Coffee Fest Seattle. Well, this last weekend I got my fill of Coffee Fest-ivities at the Convention Center downtown, as well as at various spots around town. This is really more than one event...

One. The Actual Show. Lots of great coffee and interesting products on the show floor again this year. There was an understandable skewing toward Northwest companies, like Caffé Vita, Synesso, and the honorary Northwesterners, La Marzocco USA.

The best cup of brewed coffee I had all weekend (though not the Coffee of the Week... I'll get to that in another post), came from the Hario booth, where I got a perfect pour-over cup of Intelligentsia's fresh crop Kenya. Thanks to Bronwen for taking me by the hand and guiding me to the Hario booth when I was jonesing on Friday morning. (Hario also wins best business cards for their flaming hot pink numbers).

The funnest little activity at the show was the Aroma Challenge where you had to take a quiz on matching Le Nez du Café vials of essential aromas to a list of aromas. Very tough! I got 10 out of 16, though as soon as I turned in my sheet I realized I had misidentified the most obvious one (potato!) and should have got 11 right. Anyway, it was a fun challenge.

2. The Northwest Regional Barista Competition. I didn't actually see even 2 minutes of this thing, though I hear it was fantastic as always. Northwest barista legend Billy Wilson took the gold. You can read about it on coffeed.

3. Party Madness. Lots of fun at the party at Visions Espresso on Friday night, where baristas played with their array of different espresso machines while the wine and cheese flowed. Coffee people are the most fun people there are to have parties with, I've decided. They get really wired on coffee, then they start drinking. Sarah Allen also led an expeditionary party up the hill from downtown to Linda's, which is actually my old stomping grounds (those many years ago), where we took over an entire banquette outside and drank Tecate and argued about coffee.

On Saturday night it was thee Latte Art competition between Seattle and LA hosted by Victrola. Even more people at this one. Got to see lots of great friends. The LA folks took the competition pretty handily, to Seattle's undying shame. But a good time was had by all. Victrola really has the perfect location and space for parties of this kind (fire marshall regulations aside... it got a little too full at one point).

4. Cupping at Coffee Enhancement Lounge. Sunday it was back down to Visions for a wonderful, peaceful, clean cupping of those pacamara coffees I have been talking about lately. It was the perfect way to wrap up the weekend. The CEL has great natural lighting... the sun was shining in through the skylight. Sarah put on Elvis Presley, and we cupped 14 beautiful coffees in peace and calm.

I really hope to do more stuff at CEL soon. It's such a great location and the folks at Visions are the greatest.

....

At some point this weekend, I did have the Coffee of the Week. But this post is getting too long, and I have a coffee shop review I want to get to, too. So I'll post that a little later. The hint is the picture at the top of this page, if you know that man.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/latteart/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

Roasting Kenya

As I type this I am roasting up a batch of Kenyan coffee for home use. I just got done drinking, over the last few days, a batch of coffee from Los Naranjos en El Salvador, the farm of my friends, the Flores family. Four days straight of that same coffee (I don't think I had a single shop espresso or other coffee this week... amazing!), makes me crave something very, very different. So I dug through my bins of coffee and found a half a pound of coffee that Willem Boot let me have last time I was in California. It's a free-trade fair-trade certified coffee, a "double A" (for what it's worth), and the designation is Gichathainike. I drank this before, in Seattle and California, and it's classic Kenya: bold, super bright, and snappy.

The problem with roasting this kind of coffee on my little Gene Cafe, however, is it really calls for high initial heat. This coffee, like most top-grade Kenyas, is grown at super high elevation. High elevation, even at the equator, leads to exceptionally cold nights, and the cold nights lead to denser, more compact beans. This is part of what gives Ethiopian and Kenyan coffees their distinct acidity... they are some of the highest-grown coffees in the world. Combine super-high altitude with the sheer screen-size bigness of these AA beans, and that's a lot of cell structure in one bean.

You kind of have to hit beans like this with a baseball bat of heat right off the bat. Just blow torch them. In a conventional drum roaster, the idea would be to increase your drop temperature 25 or 50 degrees, making sure you are at 100% airflow right off the bat to avoid scorching. You still want a nice slow roast development time leading into and after first crack. But you want to roast with high initial heat so you can get to that first crack sometime before the cows come home. But in a little electro-gizm like the Gene Café, you have to take the "drum" away from the heat source, open it up, and pour in the beans carefully. During this time the temperature is rapidly dropping.

So I just did my best on this Kenya (I pulled them and set them beneath the cooling fan about a paragraph ago)... crank the heat as high as possible, dump the beans in fast, and whisper coaxing words to them as they roast.

I just popped one in my mouth... I can taste that crisp acidity. I think this will be a good one. But I will have to wait until morning to find out.

I've noticed through the years that Kenyan coffees tend to include an abnormally high number of "shell" beans, even in premium and specialty grade coffees that are otherwise free of defects. This is a minor defect and totally forgiveable; but still I wonder why this is. I can't believe I've never asked around for an answer on why this is! I'm curious if there's something about the varietals there or (less likely?) the processing, that creates this. The simplest explanation I can come up with is that sorters there do not consider this a defect and so they simply leave in the "shell" beans they see. With luck I will be in Kenya in November and hopefully I can find out first-hand, but if anyone reading this knows the reason for this... please share! (shell bean image from coffeeterms.com)