Barista jam NP 2 - report

Last sunday another jam for coffee lovers, non professionals.
It's great to see them dripping in one by one. A bit nervous, curious about the event, craving for a good cup of black liquid gold.
Present : Rick, Ben I and II, Björn, Julie, Hannah, Noömi (a new professional Caffènation Barista in the making), Staf, Jeanine, Bart, Geert, Ellen, Johan, Wouter and Marcel.

It was almost the same two hour routine, but this time in good health, thank God.
I spoke in our first report about the first half of our jam, this time i'll go a bit deeper into general brew techniques and milk texturing, with cherry on the cake ; latte art.

To show people how a good shot looks and tastes like we briefly talk about our three most important elements in extraction control ; weight, grind and pressure. This i always need to repeat more than 5 times throughout the class. Most people still think it's the machine that controls the flow. Of course partly it is, depending on the bar pressure and type of machine, but our most important tool is our grinder and then our hands.
I showed them how we train ourselves with a naked filter, to pack the coffee this way we control the flow of the (lazy) water.
Then we show underextracted and overextracted espresso. This is sometimes a bit difficult. It is easy to give the coffee a faster or slower run, but with our clean machine, fresh coffee and grinding, the crema still looks almost ok. To top things of we pull a state-of-the-art-espresso of the blend of which they just cupped the four components. Only a look at our first photo (taken by Ellen) gives you an idea of how enchanted they were with the result. Me too. Bird as well.

Milk texturing. First we show them a classic wrong foaming technique, where we stretch up the milk from 4 till like 80 degrees. All bubbles, too hot and a very light foam.
Then a correct one. Half a pitcher of cold milk, 3.2 fat %, stretching till 45 °, binding till 65-70° max and, don't forget!, tapping the can, give it some resting time to make the milk a bit fuller and rolling (is this the correct English word?) the foam to keep it all together.

To finish of some latte art, etching, question and do-it-yourself. Fun.

Again a perfect sunday morning start. Great people, sunny weather and good coffee, say no more.