A coffee day out in Gent-Belgium

Today i planned to meet lovely Isabel for a quick break in Flanders seconds biggest city, Gent.

Just outside Antwerp i passed by my roasting friends from AKC to pick up samples :
Ethiopia Djimmah, Brazil Cerrado Perla Estate, a Colombia Supremo, French Roast mix of Santos, Costa Rica and Java and a couple of others. Soon at the cupping table.
And a couple boxes of prime coffee beans : Old Brown Sumatra, Honduras Monte Cristo Estate, Indian Mysore A, Papua New Guinea Sigri and Puerto Rico. Soon in our grinder.

Serge, the co-owner, just came back from Brazil where he visited several farms and cupped some amazing stuff, so we’re eagerly waiting for those great Daterra and other pearls.

Gent.
Rendez vous at this small coffee house with the name Barista. They offer Viva Sara coffee on La Cimbali and Mazzer equipment. This can’t go wrong you start thinking, but the espresso missed presence and detail and was a tad too large with medium dark crema. Not bad for Belgian standards though. Peter Deprez, our representative for Tokyo can be proud of the products and knowledge he and his family delivered, but there’s room for improvement.

Then it was time to wander around the old city center. I have to admit Isabel is a top class guide. We quickly passed by this must see Wallpaper store Priem to pick up another roll of vintage vinyl paper for her daughter's bedroom.
To celebrate this we moved on to Mokabon. This very old fashioned, dark and noisy place is the best known and most visited coffee house in town. The atmosphere is very unique, but don’t expect any top quality coffee. A bit comparable to Antwerps’ Cuperus, very old fashioned with still dozens of people a day who come over for a half pounder of fresh desert coffee beans.

Better coffee beans at Simon Levelt. This well known Dutch Tea and Coffee supplier, active since 1817, opened up this very nice coffee store with a very wide choice of non electronic brewers, espresso machines, tea’s and coffee beans.
7 different single origins on the shelf. Although i wasn’t sure of the freshness and a roast on the light side i couldn’t resist to buy me three bags :
Guatemala Alta Verapaz, known for it’s vulcano underground.
Nicaragua Finca El Limoncillo, shadow grown.
Brazil Fazenda Lambari, organic bean from the Novo Mundo Estate.

I told this fine young lady behind the counter (sorry i don’t have her name) about my ongoing search for fine coffee and wrote her down this url. She was very enthusiastic and as a true magician she conjured up this white bag of coffee as a present. Fortune Coffee, the secret of China.
I while ago i met a guy who couldn’t stop talking about this wonderful golden triangle area in the West of China, where they harvest fantastic coffee, and his brother was managing some farms. Since then i was in a search for a sample of China coffee and so today i found this very rare bean. Exciting and thank you very much.

We still had two more hours to relax, enjoy the sun, eat and start dreaming about all the cupping and brewing that’s awaiting me the following days.
To be continued .....

Sammy Piccolo National Post Diary

Sammy Piccolo is without any doubt one of the most famous Barista's in the world.
Managing with his brothers the Artigiano Coffee Company from Vancouver Canada he is a real coffee connoisseur and entertained the World Barista Championships for many years. He finished 2nd, 3rd and 2nd at the last three WBC finals! Maybe he's a bit comparable with snooker player Jimmy White, without any doubt the most popular billiard player never becoming world champion.
Last week we had the opportunity to follow his professional life in a week diary he wrote for the Canadian National Post.

Here his contribution from last Thursday, when he talks about the upcoming Championships in Tokyo :

Sammy Piccolo, National Post

Published: Thursday, June 21, 2007

This week's diarist is Canadian champion barista Sammy Piccolo, the only person in history to place in the top three for three consecutive years at the world championships. He kept his diary last week.

Today, I headed to 49th Parallel Coffee Roasters, where the Canadian National Barista Champion is training for the (World Barista Championships). Colter Jones is one of the managers at Caffe Artigiano, and the only barista other than me to represent Canada. It's time to pass the torch. I'm very excited for him. This competition is the biggest and most prestigious recognition in the specialty coffee industry. There will be baristas from over 40 countries competing in Tokyo this year. And it's only weeks away!

I watched Colter perform the presentation he will give to the judges. He will be evaluated for 15 minutes as he prepares four cappuccino, four espresso and four coffee drinks. He prepared his cappuccino first. Creating latte art on these cappuccinos isn't as easy as it looks. If you've ever been to a cafe that pours latte art, you'll notice that with a wiggle of their wrist, a barista can create an intricate pattern with the milk and crema of the espresso. But Colter has more to think about than just the design at the top of the cup. The six judges will be scrutinizing everything from the foam on his cappuccino, to what colour the crema is in the espresso. They also evaluate overall barista skills and even how clean your grinder is.

The last drinks he made were his signature drinks. I promised him that I'd keep these details secret. The signature drink is a barista's true expression of his or her personality. These drinks often take many months to develop and perfect. The drink requires a strong espresso taste and is judged on creativity, craftsmanship and visual presentation. The world will be watching to see how well Canada does this year. Canada is undefeated by an American competitor. Go, Colter, go! No pressure, but beating the U.S. is always great, even if just for the bragging rights! -Tomorrow, cupping Kenyan.

(picture is typically Sammy and taken by Coffee Geek)

Interested in the Vancouver coffee scène? Don't forget to check this interesting Jimseven article about his visit this month.

El Salvador Picacho SHG on Chemex

The Chemex is such an easygoing coffee maker and the El Salvador Picacho SHG (Strictly High Grown) such an easygoing coffee. This marriage is perfect!

After cupping the SG, SHG and premium Picacho i have to admit that the higher level is more detailed and fruity, but i need this SHG in my blend for it's mouthfeel, pleasant aftertaste and brother for the Yirgacheffe.

I think the Chemex filter does well for most of coffee's. It filters out the bitterness and brings a lot of harmony. It's comparable to the in Belgium very popular Melitta filter, but more tasteful and more beautiful.

El Salvador Picacho yes. No 'Los Planes' or 'Santa Ana', but a collection of the southern region. Following the words of Luiz Rodriguez, Head of Economics Department of the 'Café de El Salvador', - we met at the SCAE Coffee Fiesta in Antwerp in May - it is a prime selection and definitely one of El Salvador's best buys in a country that's in their golden age of coffee growing.

Price? Reasonable. Not the cheapest, but at €4,00 a 250 grams, on a full city roast to bring out the best of its espresso potential, it's worth a try.

4 months of Antwerp Barista

Dear friends,

As you all know, coffee, and espresso in particular, is my passion and this Antwerp Barista blog my window on the world and vice versa.

After 4 months of blogging, i’m making a first evaluation.

It has only been 4 months, but it feels like an era.

73 posts. Plus minus half of them are written by myself, the other half by someone else or it’s just a photo.

In the beginning i wanted to make people from Antwerp and Belgium aware of how the life of a professional Barista looks like, but more and more i’m drifting away from being a Barista myself. I think i see myself as a professional coffee enthousiast interested in all aspects of the 3^rd wave coffee community (Jason Haeger’s article here), going from harvesting over blending or charity to Barista Championships.

I noticed my growing enthousiasm for cupping and my decreasing interest in technical stuff.

I’m aware of my increased interest in the fast growing and powerful speciality coffee industrie in the States and more and more it inspires me to keep on looking forward and sharing all my wonderings and interests with you, readers of my blog.

Of course i’m also dreaming of letting you all know more about the National Barista scene, but unfortunately it’s almost non-existing.

We have our Championships, something i recommend every Barista to participate in, and we have some first class importers/traders, roasters and coffee lovers in general, but that’s not enough! So let me be bold for a moment and ask all Belgian coffee aficionados to spread the word and let all people in our country know that it can be just a small step to drink better coffee and enjoy these moments at its fullest.

In Belgium the 3^rd wave has taken it’s first step on the ladder, let’s all together take on the next step and go up step by step by ...

I want to finish by thanking everyone who helped or inspired me during this period

I’m happy with all the great people, national and international, i encountered on this trip. It’s also thanks to you my ambition is still burning to keep on blogging and tasting and cupping and brewing and grinding and tamping and blogging and ...

Greeting you with the words of Dave Stephens

HAPPINESS IS A WARM PUCK

Ciao,

Rob

Coffee Kids, Grounds for hope

There is an old story of a poor woman brought before a judge and charged with stealing a loaf of bread to feed her family. The woman did not contest the charge. The judge pondered the situation briefly, found her guilty, and fined her €10.

Immediately thereafter, the judge fined everyone in the courtroom, including himself, 50 cents. He then paid the woman's fine and gave her what remained from the collection. In the ruling, the judge explained that the homeless woman was guilty of stealing. But the people in the courtroom were guilty of living in a community where people were reduced to stealing to feed their families.

In spite of many social and environmental program in the specialty coffee industry, the majority of coffee-farming families in the world still live in deep poverty.

No matter what any of us has done on behalf of struggling coffee-farming families, it is simply not enough and it won't be enough until the very lucrative coffee trade is no longer associated with poverty for the 25 million families farming coffee. All of us in the coffee community are responsible for allowing millions of others to suffer. We are responsible because it is our community. We are responsible because if are not, who is?

There will be no fine to set things right. We must be our own judge and jury, and we must hold ourselves accountable to do the right thing. And if it doesn't hurt a little, it probably isn't enough.

Please support as many cases as you can and please give generously to Coffee Kids.

Bill Fishbein, Founder.

Solar Roast

Cool photo's from a new thing called Solar Roast. I'm not a roaster myself and know little about it, but this article on springwise.com is worth reading.
What's this?

Cup of Excellence : Guatemala Auction

It's auction season and interesting to see how the Cup of Excellence is progressing.
Mostly an American thing, we found at the Guatemala auction some buyers this year from Iceland, Japan, Finland, New Zealand and Norway. Where's Great Britain's proud Hasbean would you ask? They couldn't find the right bean for the price offering and didn't buy this year. For those amateurs in Belgium who are interested ; don't worry, they still offer other great Guatemala.

No doubt this year top farm was the El Socorro from Palencia.

The farm has an efficient ecological wet mill. It depulps coffee cherries in dry, it transports the coffee and its pulp mechanically and it reuses water in the process. Then, the water is treated with clean production techniques, before throwing it away. Since 2005, we have been working on tests to uniform the fermentation process and we have obtained satisfactory results. Drying of coffee is done in patios. The farm is certified by Rainforest Alliance and Coffee Practices.

Their pacamara bean scored an amazing 93.60!!!
The taste was mostly described as mature, elegant with jasmine and lots and lots of fruit.
Aren't we all getting thirsty right now?

The 15 bags were all bought by Solberg & Hansen AS for € 19.50 a pound.

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