The line-up for the 2012 Nordic Barista Cup has been announced and our very own Tim Wendelboe will be speaking again this year – he will speak on his experiments to improve green quality at origin. The Nordic Barista Cup is one of the premier coffee events of the year and this year there are some exciting changes to the competition.

He’ll be amongst impressive company – Rene Redzepi from Noma, Oliver Strand from the New York Times & James Hoffmann from Square Mile Roasters – to name just a few.

The full line-up of speakers and their profiles are available on the NBC website : www.nordicbaristacup.com

There has been a lot of critique on the quality of Oslo’s coffee by journalists and readers of Aftenposten, and although some of the critique may be deserved, there also seems to be a lack of reference in terms of what level the quality of a random Oslo coffee shop is serving.

“So small, so focused, so much fun. The roaster is in the front, the counter is in the back and there’s a total of three chairs. (A windowsill sits another two.) The scale is the point. At this size, every cup of coffee and every bag of beans can be executed at the highest level. In fact, all the coffee is roasted by either Tim Wendelboe or his sidekick Tim Varney, and both work shifts behind the bar. It feels like a neighborhood shop, but it’s run like a Michelin-starred restaurant.”

Maybe it is time we actually embrace our coffee culture in Norway and forget about the lost romance of the Italian espresso and similar. After all it is not only my opinion that we have one of the best cultures in the world when it comes to coffee quality and brewing.

Thanks for the kind words Oliver.

This is the third of a series of videos filmed by Brendan J Doyle in Oslo with Tim Wendelboe. Follow Broken Yellow (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube) and Tim Wendelboe for future instalments.

If you don’t read Norwegian, try Google translate, but I can’t promise you it will be as good..

Of course, we disagree that our coffee is expensive. Read this previous post if you wonder why.

Go here to view it.

A Crafty Christmas from Brendan Inkognito on Vimeo.

Here is a little feature about my book “Coffee with Tim Wendelboe”  and a short interview in the New York Times.

For those of you who want to purchase the book and you are living in the USA, please go here to buy a copy.

We also sell the book in English or Norwegian in our web shop.

If you are in Norway you can see the feature here.

The brew guide and some tips about how to brew better coffee can be found here.

I used their coffee calculator and found out that if I use the Aeropress and brew 4 cups of coffee of the Hacienda La Esmeralda every day (our most expensive coffee) it will cost me NOK 12.709 per year (USD 2.045,-). That means about Kr. 34,- per day (USD 5,47). Pretty cheap for the most famous and expensive coffee in the world if you ask me.

For a more normal priced coffee the price would be:  NOK 5.409,- per year.(USD 870,-) or Kr. 14,82 per day (USD 2,39).

I am shocked how cheap it is to drink coffee compared to wine and beer. I just spent Kr. 2000,- on Wine for a dinner the other day.