Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Panama - Hacienda La Esmeralda Coffee

This farm keeps winning accolades year in year out. They won the award for best Rainforest Certified coffee at the SCAA meeting in Minneapolis earlier this year, and have been named as the number 2 coffee of the year 2008, so I guess I had to try and get some and find out what all the fuss is about.

The first thing of interest is the varietal that they grow. At the basic level we have robusta and arabica, however when you get past this you discover a whole new list of coffee types. The most popular are Catuai and Typica, however this estate uses a varietal that goes by the intriguing name of Geisha.

What does all of this mean to the roaster and to the final taste in the cup?

Well our impression of the bean is that it is slightly softer than other typical central American coffees, so we dropped the coffee into a slightly cooler drum than normal, and then roasted the coffee as we normally do, this technique we hoped would allow the flavours to develop at a slower rate. Finally as we went past the first crack of the bean, we watched the development carefully and pulled the coffee out of the roasting drum just as the second crack started.

The result is a wonderful coffee. I had an Americano and the sweetness and flavour resulted in one of the most memorable coffee drinks I have ever had.

The judges were right this is a truly great coffee and I hope it's here to stay in Europe.

Handle with care!

Thursday, September 04, 2008

Bialetti Stove top espresso - keeping it simple

I had the pleasure of testing a Bialetti Mukka stove top machine the other day on behalf of a customer. For those of you who don't know these machines, it's Bialetti's attempt to replicate a Cappuccino coffee, and I guess if I'm cynical their attempt to add value to their basic machines.

My conclusion - don't bother. What has always been a simple machine to operate, namely water in bottom, coffee in middle, screw together, place on stove and wait for coffee to brew has now been overly complicated by this additional gizmo.

My experience with the foaming of the milk was the equivalent of a badly made cappuccino. Everything was too milky, the foam wasn't particularly great, and generally the whole coffee experience was quite forgettable.

Like so many businesses Bialetti have tried to complicate a very simple concept because someone in marketing has forgotten about what the machine is all about and instead persuaded R&D that cappuccino is the way forward - wrong.

What I think Research and Development should be thinking about is how do we stop the rapid deterioration of the metal in the event of the machine not be dried properly before being put away. Surely there's a coating out there that would eliminate this problem which doesn't in turn taint the great coffee taste.

These are great machines because they are so simple. Lets improve on the simplicity and not believe that improvement comes through complexity.