Daniel's World of Coffee

What I've Been Up To

The last time I posted in May, I was in Panama. I'm in Seattle now, and here's a quick run-down on what I've been up to in the coffee world.

1) First of all that Panama trip. As I noted before, I was acting as host for a group of Puerto Rican coffee farmers who were sent to Panama to observe specialty coffee practices in Panama. There were a dozen people in our group, and we spent our time in the western highlands of Chiriqui. I knew it was going to be fun before I left, but it really ended up exceeding my expectations. I'll post some videos and comments about this project over the next few days.

2) Speaking of Puerto Rico, I'm finishing up the analysis of the soil-data project I started way back in November. There's a huge document detailing all of our findings that I've created. I will share part of that this week, and the rest of it when it's all officially available.

3) As always, I'm teaching roasting and cupping courses in California with Boot Coffee. In May and June I was down there with Willem, Jodi, and the rest of the crew for some really great courses. I will be going down there again at the end of July for another 10 days, into August.

4) In the next 12 months I'll be teaching courses in Honduras (twice), Panama, and hopefully Colombia as well. Stay tuned here for more information. Or you can check out the Boot Coffee website.

5) After a long and arduous journey through my own preconceptions, I've become a full-on believer in Kahlua. It's just so much better than every other coffee liqueur I've tasted (and you'd be surprised how many I have tasted.... think double digits). Last September I did some work for Kahlua in Stockholm. In June, this project took me to grand old New York, where the Ost Café folks were as good as good can be to me, despite new babies and new pork sandwich stands springing up left and right. Best cafe in NYC, y'all. In the next few months I'll be doing more work for Kahlua here in the USA. I'm excited to share with you what I've been doing. I'll be sure to mention it here on the blog when it becomes appropriate. Did I mention I get free rum, coffee, and Kahlua?

6) Fresh Cup Magazine published an article I wrote in the June issue, about branching out from the old familiar origins and finding new gems (Nepalese coffee, anyone?). I'll post some snippets here, copyright permitting.

7) Theoretically I have something coming out in Parade Magazine... but I have yet to see it appear and your guess is as good as mine.

7) Somewhere along the line there I was in Houston for the SCAA conference. Somewhere along the line there, Alejandro Mendez from Viva Espresso in San Salvador won the World Barista Championship. Anyone who reads this blog is already well-informed of that stuff. But still... it did happen.

8) All work and no play makes Homer something something...

(PS I am in Seattle currently... oh wait, I already said that).

More Morsels from Scandinavia

In a previous post, I neglected to mention one of the most charming things I discovered about coffee in Sweden, the tradition of fika. Fika is an afternoon coffee break, often with sweets and baked goods. It's similar to English tea time, but does not have such a formalized background. In fact "fika" can mean a break of any kind, or even a little date. But usually the term refers to a break in the afternoon for refreshment, the chief form of which is coffee.

In fact, the word fika comes from reversing the order of the syllables in kaffi (coffee). According to wikipedia: 'The word is an example of the back slang used in the 19th century, in which syllables of a word were reversed, deriving fika from kaffi, an earlier variant of the Swedish word kaffe ("coffee"). From fika also comes the word fik (a colloquial term for "café") through a process of back-formation.'

A gentleman I met in Stockholm told me that comes from the days when coffee was still considered déclassé, a drink for the rabble. People would refer to coffee time as "fika" to avoid arousing suspicion. A simple code for a simple tradition. Now everyone in Sweden enjoys fika, and kaffi at their fika.

Thanks to my friend Suzanne, who helped remind me of this little morsel during our own Seattle-style fika yesterday afternoon.

The speeches that were given at the Nordic Barista Cup in Oslo, on the other side of the fat part of Scandinavia, are available on their website. I encourage you to listen to all three, by Stephen Vick, George Howell, and Erling Dokk Holm. Scroll down past the Harry Potter pictures to find links to the audio.

I will have something specific to say about George Howell's talk in my next post.

"Norwegian Coffee ... Bad!"

Scandinavia is the epicenter of the world quality coffee movement. Last week I was in Stockholm drinking coffee and researching my Nordic roots. At the same time, on the other side of the great peninsula, the Nordic Barista Cup was taking place in Oslo.

I've never been to the Nordic Barista Cup, but it's very high on my list of coffee to-do's. Baristas and coffee professionals from Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland get together once a year and have all kinds of coffee events and parties. Teams from each nation dress up in matching jumpsuits like Olympic athletes, and snapshots from the various parties always show beautiful people having a lovely time.

This year, barista magazine had some top-notch blog coverage.

As for me, I had a lovely time island-hopping in Stockholm. I did some interesting work for Pernod-Ricard, the spirits company. Absolut — a very Swedish vodka, of course — is one of their brands, and that's what took us to Stockholm. But I wasn't doing any work on vodka, but actually on Kahlúa.

I did some very interesting blind tasting of various coffee liqueurs. They are most decidedly not all the same. Some have some extremely disagreeable chemical-rubber tastes underneath all that sugar. I hope to be able to share the outcome of the work I did there on the blog soon; but for now I have to keep it somewhat under wraps.

For you New Yorkers out there, I thought you might get a kick out of this picture. It's a collaboration Absolut did with Spike Lee (no joke).

I uploaded some more pics on my flickr page. Not much coffee related (except the awesome french press hotel coffee I got which made my day on Thursday), but there's some pretty rainbows.

Finally, I shot this video at dinner (amazing food at this restaurant). You can't see anything cause the light is too low. But you can hear what my Swedish friend, Frida, thinks of Norwegian coffee.