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Random Picture Friday #25: Who?

Don’t forget!  Manual Brewing Workshop at Brown Coffee Co. in San Antonio is Tomorrow!

Have  a great weekend!

(POSITION FILLED)Looking for a hard working, quality driven barista in Austin, TX

POSITION FILLED

Taken straight from BaristaExchange…

I need to hire a full time barista in Austin, Tx.

We’re an independently owned shop with a focus on quality coffee as well as relationships with our customers.  This barista must have a strong work ethic, the ability to work well solo and as part of a team, and a strong desire learn about coffee, equipment, etc…

Interested baristas should forward their resume via email to ____@______________.

Thanks everyone!

(via)

Flipnotics.com

Reminder – Manual Brewing Workshop in 4 days!

Brown is hosting a workshop focusing on manual brewing by the cup, which continues to find an ever-wider audience. This is a free and open workshop for serious home consumers as well as coffee professionals.

The goals for this gathering are simple:

-To continue growing the coffee community in Texas

-To provide some outlines of popular manual brewing devices

-To help level-set baristas with best practices around manual brewing

-To introduce a game-changing device for the industry that’s soon to be on the market: the Luminaire Bravo-1

Hope you can make it out for a fun evening with great coffee, great coffee people and some of the latest and greatest coffee equipment around.

REMEMBER?

More Starbucks News – Beer & Wine

(From USA Today) – Here we go again.

Starbucks remakes its future with an eye on beer and wine

By Bruce Horovitz, USA TODAY

…A very different kind of Starbucks is on tap. It will serve regional wine and beer. It offers an expansive plate of locally made cheeses — served on china. The barista bar is rebuilt to seat customers up close to the coffee.

Most conspicuously, the place looks less like a Starbucks and more like a cafe that’s been part of the neighborhood for years — yet that’s “green” in design and decor. This is the calling card of independent java joints that have been eating and sipping away at Starbucks’ evening business for decades. U.S. Starbucks stores get 70% of business before 2 p.m…. more…

More signs of an identity crisis, or a case of “If you can’t beat ‘em, Join ‘em?”  I just can’t help but think that Starbucks is clamoring for more attention.  Is this more of the same, or will this turn into a new format?  Remember Starbucks independent knock-off cafes?  Like 15th Avenue Coffee & Tea?  Will it last?  Will it fizzle?  Will this be a one-or-tw0-location-spinnoff in an effort to gain organic media attention in place of shameless advertising?

Only time will tell.  Is it a good idea?  I personally think that it depends on the neighborhood.  You don’t want people getting drunk in your neighborhood “upscale” coffee house… do you?  (perhaps a topic for a future post)

Are you are tired of Starbucks news as we are?

Starbucks Baristas Told to Slow Down – WSJ

Starbucks Corp. is telling its harried baristas to slow down—which may result in longer lines.

Amid customer complaints that the Seattle-based coffee chain has reduced the fine art of coffee making to a mechanized process with all the romance of an assembly line, Starbucks baristas are being told to stop making multiple drinks at the same time and focus instead on no more than two drinks at a time—starting a second one while finishing the first, according to company documents reviewed recently by The Wall Street Journal.

Baristas are also supposed to steam milk for each drink rather than steaming an entire pitcher to be used for several beverages. Other instructions include rinsing pitchers after each use; staying at the espresso bar instead of moving around; and using only one espresso machine instead of two, according to the documents. (lots)more…

Is Starbucks trying to prove that it has a soul?  Is it trying to convey the notion that they actually care about the quality of their drinks?  Yes.. but that isn’t the question at the heart of the matter.  The real question isn’t whether or not a notion is being conveyed.  The real question is whether or not the notion being conveyed is true.

Just for kicks, I googled (is it a real word yet?) “Wall Street Journal Starbucks” and this was the result.

The top link is the current news.  The second link is a direct non-news link to the story.  The third link is a direct non-news link to WSJ’s coverage of Starbucks’ “Plunge Into Instant Coffee”.  Now, maybe it’s just me, but isn’t there something wrong with this picture?  The fact that Starbucks has been in a bit of an identity crisis lately is no real surprise.  A company cannot be all things to all people, and yet that is exactly what Starbucks appears to be attempting to do.

Let’s be clear.  I do not hate Starbucks.  A lot of great coffee professionals got their start at the Siren.  They have taken the idea of coffee as a non-commodity affordable luxury to places where it might not have been successfully introduced otherwise.  Their ubiquitous presence has caused a mass education of the masses, a readily available phony status symbol, an addiction to the combination of sugar, fat, and coffee to the point of a country getting mad at the seller of said products instead of taking responsibility for their own actions, and an enormous population of people who have come to believe that there is such a thing as an industry standard (a part of which is such a thing as the dreaded “Caramel Macchiato”).

It would be fantastic if the coffee giant were to suddenly focus on quality in a tangible sense.  I see this as more of a publicity stunt.  An attempt to make the public see them as something they maybe once were, but certainly are not now.

Frankly, I don’t give a rip if my double short wet cappuccino (leave a good inch of room, please) takes five seconds or fifteen minutes: as long as it is properly made.

Random Picture Friday #24: Tea Sub

(via)

It seems that getting some leaves wet for awhile would be a pretty boring task.  For some reason, I never seem to run out of toys to discover to help keep it amusing.  Introducing, the Tea Sub.  The geek in me doubts that the leaves have enough room to expand for proper extraction.

Tea Sub

Designed by Ototo

The TeaSub submerges tea leaves to the bottom of your cup, creating the perfect infusion of your favorite brew. H12 x W4 x D7cm Made of silicone. Dishwasher safe. from: Monkey Business

Crema – A perk, or a necessary evil?

Crema has often been believed to be a sign of a properly pulled espresso.  More recently, crema became loved as a sign of freshness of the coffee.  More recently still, a famous blogger declared that crema is rubbish.  Let’s move on to the lesser appreciated, but more commonly “understood” expression of coffee oils and gas often referred to as “creme”, but that I refer to as “bloom”.

French press fans have long been fans of what is often improperly called “crema” or “creme”.  It is referred to as “bloom” before poured into the cup, and it doesn’t change states between brewing and pouring, so I have opted to refer to it as bloom.  Nevertheless, it has then moved on to be an indication of how fresh a coffee is.  If it is “too fresh”, there will be unmanageable amounts of gas being released upon hot water contact, and the bloom risks overflowing its vessel.  More recently, an earlier World Barista Champion introduced the “cupping method” of French press brewing.

The question then being, “Does it make a difference?”  I have done a LOT of experimenting with French press brewing.  It’s the way that coffee is most often brewed in the mornings in my household.  It is full submersion brewing (read: even extraction) that you could teach a monkey to do.  There were talks of using a high dose and short brew time with a french press when the Clover was taken off of the independent market.  It can be used for cold brew coffee.  You can brew at double strength quite easily for Japanese method iced coffee, or to tide you over until you can afford that espresso machine that you so wisely passed up in order to blow all of your money on the best grinder you could get your hands on.

The French press definitely has it merits.  I would argue, however, that the single greatest contribution for the quality of home coffee brewing is the introduction of getting rid of that gorgeous foam before pressing the plunger down on your French press.  It makes that big of a difference.  Back to espresso.

Espresso, as we all know by now, is comprised of three parts: crema, body, and heart.  By definition, espresso is not espresso without crema.. but that would lead to a philosophical debate about ontology and semantics (so let’s just leave that bit out).  The heart is the concentrated solution of dissolved and undissolved solids in the bottom of your demitasse.  It is the reason for espresso’s being.  (I have found myself wiping clinging remainder of an espresso from the inside of my demitasse with my finger to get every last bit of flavor from one of the best shots I have ever tasted)  The body is the bulk of the liquid part of the espresso, which contains water, dissolved solids, and not a whole lot else.  The crema, they say, is a colloid of coffee oils and carbon dioxide gas.  The carbon dioxide is a known binder of aromatics.. which is something that most aficionados recognize as vitally important to a good cup of coffee.

It seems, however, that there is something else hiding in the crema, as well as in the bloom.  People have often talked about fine particles in the cup, but rarely do they blame the crema or bloom for that bitter tinge, when they are often the bulk of the cause.

Bloom lends texture to your French press coffee, and it is visually pleasing to behold.  Crema can tell you a lot about the espresso that was just served to you before you even taste it.  It also lends a texture, and a lasting persistence of flavor and aromatics long after the espresso is consumed.

The definitive question, however, is:  Is it worth it?

Leave your comments below.

Manual Brewing Workshop: Brown Coffee Co, San Antonio

It seems as though this is the season for events in the coffee community.  This time, Brown Coffee Company is hosting a Manual Brew Methods workshop in San Antonio.  Manual brew methods gained steam when Starbucks bought the Coffee Equipment Company(inventors and sellers of the Clover brewer that made waves.. for awhile), and baristas were suddenly in search of a replacement for the cup-at-a-time marketing tool known as the Clover 1S.

Brewing is not the same as brewing well.  Manual brew methods require skill, attention, and concentration.  Most coffee establishments lack these basic requirements, but there are a few institutions who have, or who plan to implement a cup-at-a-time brew method to their list of options for their ever-discerning patrons to choose from.

Here is the scoop:

Brown is hosting a workshop focusing on manual brewing by the cup, which continues to find an ever-wider audience. This is a free and open workshop for serious home consumers as well as coffee professionals.

The goals for this gathering are simple:

-To continue growing the coffee community in Texas

-To provide some outlines of popular manual brewing devices

-To help level-set baristas with best practices around manual brewing

-To introduce a game-changing device for the industry that’s soon to be on the market: the Luminaire Bravo-1

Hope you can make it out for a fun evening with great coffee, great coffee people and some of the latest and greatest coffee equipment around.

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