It's all about balance

Yesterday after a game of tennis, my fellow players as usual asked me "what coffee are we going to have today David?". On this day I selected a double shot regular (around 8 floz) cappuccino.

John, who works behind the bar at our club must feel under huge pressure to deliver something great when I appear, and I have to say he didn't disappoint. The club uses our Colombian Excelso coffee for all its coffee requirements.

The taste was great for a number of reasons. The coffee was correctly extracted, the coffee shots weren't run too long, the milk had been correctly foamed and overall there wasn't too much to drink.

During the week Ania, who makes the coffee in our shop had shown equal prowess when making a latte for me - usually this is a drink for which I don't have so much time, however as she demonstrated getting all the different elements right really is key to a great drink. On this occasion she used our Bourbon Dark coffee blend.

The problem is that on so many occasions I've had a coffee that has had all of its flavours "stretched" so much that you end up tasting every other flavour apart from the coffee.

It could be that too much water has been run through the ground coffee, which means that you get a load of extraneous flavours that were never meant to reach the cup.

The milk has been overheated, or not correctly foamed, which delivers a thin taste assuming you haven't burnt your mouth first!

Then of course there are the usual culprits; coffee incorrectly ground, water not up to termperature, pump pressure not right, machine not cleaned properly, etc. Seemingly an endless list of problem areas.

So many factors go into making a great cup of coffee all the way from origin to the cup, that it's a wonder we even bother to worry about getting it right all the time. But thankfully we do.

As has been demonstrated to me over the last two or three days, when it's got right there surely aren't very many other drinks greater in the world than a perfectly made cup of coffee.