Nana Mouskouri Black Coffee

This is our music ... and subject. That last second smile is ...very sexy. Hm.

1 year Antwerp Barista

Dear readers, Coffee lovers, Barista's,

1 year ago is was stuck with this boring website of mine and i decided to go for a coffee blog. I barely knew what a blog or blogspot was or how to run it, but bit by bit i came into it and one year and 200+ articles later we can celibrate this first anniversary.
Not that i'm a big fan of anniversary's, but i'm very happy i made it this far.

The highlights : there are too many nice experiences i had troughout the year, but the best is the knowing Barista's from all over the world are following and appreciating the blog. My start was Antwerp and this Blog helped me reaching many more people in this city. I guess i gave basic Barista training to approximately 150 persons and advanced training to 8, all of them now fully passionate on Latte Art, Specialty Coffee etc....

What's up for next year?
Mainly Specialty Coffee.
Hopefully i can use this new Specialty Coffee website and blog to reach people in and outside Belgium and share the same coffee beans.
So often i see fantastic beans coming into the Antwerp Harbor, and so often they are just getting old and losing their taste or they're being shipping to other places in the world. My ambition is to pick out the best of them, roast them with the highest care possible and distribute them with all advise necessary.
No, i'm not going to start roasting them myself, but i see so many good roasters and roasting equipment in Belgium, that it's time to push them a bit further than their regular and often boring Java D'oré, Dessert, Mokka, Feest or other melanges. And if they dare to do singles it's not really for espresso but drip.
So, bring on the microlots and best brewing systems and let's drink more and better coffee than before. I'll try to show you all the road i'm driving on ; have a nice trip.

Godfather Illy died at 82

Jack Manning/The New York Times

Read the NY Times article here.

Fresh Caffenation Honduras on Nespresso

Just for fun i tried some fresh fine ground coffee in a Nespresso capsule. Closed this refilled capsule with strong Reynolds and checked the extraction.
This was my third and last try. The extraction is a bit 'under', but quality was not below all levels. With a bit finer ground and full blend there are possibilties...

Watch out : after these three attempts, the machine was jammed, and the owner asked me to mess around with someone else's machine the next time. I understand.

Coffee Berry Info

There are typically two seeds per coffee berry packed with the flat end facing each other, but that is not always the case. A special case which is common is called peaberry which is a single seed. But, there can be more than two in a coffee berry also.

The outer skin of the coffee berry is generally tough and can withstand handling. The inner pulp of the coffee berry is generally mushy. In a few types of coffee plants, the pulp is more valuable than the bean itself. This is because the coffee berry pulp has a high sugar content and can be fermented making a coffee liquor or a tea made from the pulp. The coffee berry parchment shell is fairly tough. This is taken off in the last coffee bean processing stage. However, the coffee silverskin is so thin and attached so well it tends to stay with the coffee bean right up to roasting. When roasted, the silverskin can, and usually does, crack off the coffee bean. The silverskin cracks off because it does not expand like the inner coffee bean does when roasted. This posses a problem in two ways. First it is a thin messy chaff which is undesirable and must be removed from the batch of roasted coffee beans for cosmetic reasons. Second, it can easily catch fire.

Burning hot coffee problems?

Coffee Mug Knows When You're Going to Burn Yourself

Our father told us that the best way to test whether a steaming cup of anything was cool enough to drink was to just drink it. It wasn't until the fifth time we were in the hospital that we discovered that the man wasn't our father. If we had these heat-sensitive On/Off mugs, which change from the Off position when cool to the On position when hot, we'd still have our original tongues. However, as Joel from BBG points out, the heat-sensitive plastic lining has a tendency to wash off—leading to a scenario where a practical joker could paint the mug black and write OFF on the side, then pour in a cup of boiling hot coffee. [Charles and Marie via Technabob via Boing Boing Gadgets]

Eva Solo

The Eva Solo brewer is one the most important products of this Danish company.

The idea is comparable with cupping and the French press.
I take coffee, a little finder grind than French press, and stir it up with water just off the boil.
Then i give it a couple minutes to do their job and then the tasting...

Comparable to the press, with the big disadvantage of getting too bitter after a while.
The jacket keeps it warm for half an hour, but the problem is that the coffee is not drinkable after ten minutes anymore, so...

Advantages : Nice design, easy and fast way of brewing, clean taste.
Disadvantages : Expensive (because of the design) - €60 for the litre can, hard to clean outside the dish washer, too bitter after ten minutes.

If you like the design, clean coffee and you don't want too much hassle ; this is Eva Solo Coffee Maker is one for you.

The Eva Solo is also a very nice tool to make iced brew. Kiril showed already on his Espresso run blog how to do so. I did the same last week and post my experiences soon.