The winner of the 2008 Colombia Cup of Excellence is Mr. Eduardo Valencia, Finca Villa Loyola in Narino.

This was by far my favourite coffee during the competition and I scored it twice at 97 points out of 100.

A spectacular coffee that is remniscent of red wine. The intensity of the flavours and acidity is amazing. My notes for this coffee were as follows:
Aromas: Vanilla, Floral, Fruity and buttery.
Acidity: Intense, crisp and red wine like (Burgundy). Very mature and lively.
Mouthfeel: Sweet, velvety and refreshing. Very transparent and clean. Spicy finish.
Flavour: Red currants, rose hips, black currants (when cool) Coffee blossom, hibiscus and grape juice. Some lingering cinnamon and sweet fruit in the finish.

A very well balanced and intense coffee. Just the way I like it!

I have to say that meeting the farmers and talking to them has by far been the most greatful moments of this trip. It is very moving to see how much this means to them and a great experience that every person involved in coffee should be able to experience.
I was lucky to get a picture with the person representing the winning farmer right after the award ceremony. He was of course very happy and busy talking with the Colombian press.

Now we will celebrate with a dinner with the farmers.

The first round of tasting is over in Colombia, and after 44 coffees spread over 6 cupping sessions for 2 days I am relieved that we have found some great coffees on the table.

My personal favourite coffee was on the last table today and I really think that this coffee will win the 2008 Colombia Cup of Excellence if it is as good tomorrow.

Tomorrow (Thursday) we will taste all the coffees we have given 84 points or more again and all the coffees that still gets 84 points and more after tomorrows round will be auctioned out on the internet in just a few weeks. On Friday we will cup taste the ranking 10 best coffees and rank them in order.

It is very comforting to know that the coffees are being tested so many times as we have allready seen quite a few coffees that have had defects in the first round.

Tonight I will get statistics on how I have been scoring the coffees compared to the other jurors. I am really looking forward to see how that turns out. I have felt much more comfortable cupping this time and feel I have focused more than I ever have on a cupping like this. The cupping sessions have been extremely well organized which has given the jurors the perfect conditions to consentrate when scoring the coffees. Not to mention the beautiful cupping facilities.

Yesterday we all went to a farm in Caldas after the cuppings.
The farm was very beautiful and located on a steep hill with a beautiful view over the valleys in Caldas. The farmer showed us both his roasting facilities(he was roasting his own coffee to sell to the locals.) and his wet mill and of course his plantation.

I even got to pick my first coffee ever. Although this is not harvest season, the farmer showed us a couple of trees that had some ripe cherries on them.
Picking coffee really opened my mind and reminded me once again of how much work is behind each cup of coffee. I picked for about 10 minutes and probably got enough cherries to make 2 espressos. In adittion, the hills where the trees were planted were so steep I had to hold on to the tree in order not to fall down the hill. I can’t even imagine how tough this job must be during the main harvest.
And some people still think coffee is expensive! Those people should be forced to work on a coffee plantation for a day or two…

Right now I am resting after all the cupping and waiting to go to another farm.
I will write more from Colombia during the week and for those of you who miss our La Lomita coffee, I am proud to announce that I will be visiting the Lomita farm on Sunday…

Here are some more pictures from Colombia:
Shade Grown coffee. The trees have been cut down to improve yield.

Sun drying coffee. Look at the steep hills in the background.

Discussing the coffees and checking score statistics after a cupping round is a good learning experience and quite fun too.

There are more pictures in our new flickr account

Only hours after our Nordic Roaster victory, I had to get on a plane leaving for Colombia. My quest is to be a jury member of the 2008 Colombia Cup of Excellence.

After 24 hours of travelling I arrived Manizales, where the cup tasting will take place.

Today, Monday he 15th, the jury of about 30 professional cup tasters from around the world cupped 3 rounds of 8 samples with 4 cups in each sample.
In the first 2 rounds we cupped the same 8 samples in the same order. It might seem a bit silly, but it took some time to get used to the slightly darker roast profile than I am used to as well as water and air at 2200 meters above sea level. The water boils at about 93 degrees celsius which means the coffee cools a lot faster than at sea level. It was also a very good excersize to cup the same coffees in 3 rounds, where the order was the same in the 2 first rounds and in the 3rd round the coffees had been switched around randomly in order to challenge the judges to find the coffee’s number from the 2 previous rounds. This was a good way to check how consistent we are judging.
I was happy to see that I scored very consistently, except for one coffee where I came over some defects in one of the rounds.

I have to say that the coffees we cupped today was not fantastic, but fortunately they did not get high enough scores to reach the Cup of Excellence competition. ( A coffee needs more than 84 points out of 100, consistently through the 5 screenings that the Clomombian jury has gone through before the international jury gets to taste the coffees.) This means that we will probably taste much better coffees from tomorrow and on, when the real competition-cupping starts.

I can’t wait to start the tasting tomorrow and it will also be fun to see if I am as consistent in my scoring as I was today throughout the next 4 days, because at most we will cup and score some coffess blindly 3 times, and we get all the statistics by the end of the competition.

The beautiful cupping surroundings in Manizales.

We are very proud to announce that we actually won the Nordic Roaser 2008 competition.

This year the competition was only for filter coffees. 10 roasteries from the Nordic Countries participated in the Competition, and were asked to roast their best coffee or coffee blend to be brewed on a Bunn filter brewer. We could only choose the coffee, the roast profile (we roasted it in our own roasteries) and the amount of coffee to water ratio.

All the attendees at the Nordic Roaster Event that took place on the 12th and 13th of September got to taste the different coffees blindly and they all got one vote each to vote on their favourite coffee.

We competed with a micro lot coffee from Yirgacheffe, Ethiopia called Aricha #7.
This coffee was roasted very lightly (Colorette 115) to preserve the coffees natural aroma and not to get any roasty notes in the cup. We truly believe that our coffees should reflect the terroir and its origin and therefore we roast our coffees very lightly in order not to get any roast flavours or diturbing aromas that was not in the green coffee naturally. The coffee was roasted on the 4th of September and was brewed and tasted on the 13th. That means 9 days of degassing in a sealed and nitrogen flushed bag. I have to say that it tasted beautiful today and this is actually one of my all time favourite coffees. Today it was really intense in flavour and it had a very clean and distinct aroma of strawberries, peach, jasmine and forest berries. Since this is a naturally processed coffee, the sweetness is also very mature and the mouthfeel is very creamy.
We recommended the Coffee to water ratio to be 70 grams per liter of water.

The Aricha #7 is of course for sale in our store for a whopping kr. 165,- per 250 grams.
This is a very small lot of coffee, so I think we will actually run out of ths coffee within 1 – 2 months, as it is allready one of our best sellers. But rumours has it that we are expecting a new lot called Aricha #32 pretty soon, as well as some other goodies from Ethiopia…

A big hand to Ola Brattås, our roast master, who roasted the coffee and also to all the staff at TW and our customers that challenges us every day so that we always strive to become better.

We are very happy to announce that from Friday the 12th of September our first ever self bought Cup of Excellence coffee will be for sale.

Cielito Lindo, the 4th place winner from this years Honduras Cup of Excellence went for a whopping 14 US$ per pound. In adittion we have vacuum packed the coffee, so sales price is NOK 700,- per kilo, but we think it is worth it.

We also make it on our Clover for 45 kr. a cup.

We have roasted this coffee very lightly to bring out its delicate fruity flavours and a juicy mouthfeel.

We really hope you like it.

We had some visitors from the Norwegian Slow food organisation.
Here is what they wrote about us. (In Norwegian)

On Monday the 1st of September I celebrated 10 years in the coffee industry.

I remember I applied for a job at Stockfleth’s Lille Grensen in late August 1998 and that I had a job interview with Mr. Arvid Skovli 2 days before the 1st of september that same month. Arvid told me that they needed people immediately since they had nobody working full time in the small coffee shop. Since we were only 2 people applying for 2 vacant jobs, we both got the job.

I actually did not drink coffee at that time (I had tried it, but did not like the coffee from the supermarket very much) and I had never heard about coffee shops either. However, I have to say that the coffee I drank at that job interview (a cup of Monsooned Malabar) really tasted delicious compared to what I had tasted before.

I got the job, and after a 3 hour espresso class with Mr. Willy Hansen on september 1st, at Solberg & Hansen, I started working in the coffee shop in Lille Grensen.

One thing lead to another and I soon started managing that store. After a couple of years, I met with Alexander Jensen who started working at Kaffefuglen in Oslo. He learnt some tricks from me and after a year or two, we opened more Stockfleth’s branches together. Managing a lot of stores was not my right element, so I decided in 2005 to quit Stockfleth’s in order to follow my own dream…

In the meantime I had already competed in some barista competitions with quite good results. And I have to say that these competitions have been some of the biggest influences in what I have learnt and how I approach coffee today.

Looking back, there are several things that have changed. Here are 4 of the most amusing:
1. I don’t drink double mocha with hazelnut syrup anymore.
2. The espresso I serve is not 60 ml anymore, but less than 30ml. (maybe it will be
0ml in 10 years??) But it still costs 20 kr.
3. We don’t sell coffee called Colombia anymore, but coffees from specific farms from Colombia.
4. I don’t work for a boss anymore!

There are also a couple of things that never change:
1. Coffee is more fragile than ever, and the shelf life for roasted and green coffee is not very long.
2. Most people still need to buy a grinder.
3. Running a coffee shop is still hard work and features endless days and long hours behind the bar and computer.
4. Taste is what matters!

While sitting and eating a delicious cake (shaped like a coffee bean) that my wonderful girlfriend sent me, I can’t help to think that everything I have accomplished is because I have had a great team of people around me during the last 10 years. (Including when I was freelance for 2 years)

There are numerous people that I would like to thank and that have influenced me in positive ways during the past 10 years in the coffee industry. I am not going to list them all here, because I think they probably know who I am talking about.

Last but not least, I would like to thank the TW crew: Ola, Tim V, Ingrid, Hanne and Chris. Thank you for being so patient and making TW into a wonderful playground for coffee.

I really hope to have fun in the coffee business for at least another 10 years.

Tim W