On thursday september 10th we will arrange cup tastings throughout the day.

Most of our 2009 /2010 coffees have arrived and therefore we wish to invite everyone to participate to taste these coffees originating from Honduras, Panama, Costa Rica, India, Kenya and Colombia.

We do have  3 tasting sessions that are still available. Maximum amount of spaces per group is 6 persons.

The available times are:

• 14:00 (Fully booked)
• 16:00 (Fully booked)
• 18:00 (1 open spot)

All tastings will take approximately 1 hour. To sign up please leave a comment in the comment field.

First come firs serve.

We had a very successful first cupping session this past Friday, a great mix of coffee beginners and baristas from Oslo were there to taste, before anyone else, the new Colombian coffee, which is now on sale in the store and the soon to be released Cielito Lindo from Honduras, which was cupping beautifully.

The tastings will cover all the Tim Wendelboe single origin coffees, and perhaps a reference cup of supermarket quality coffee to demonstrate the contrasts in coffee quality.

There is a limit of 6 places per session, and the times and dates will change each week.

The second session will be held this Friday 4th of September at 2pm, and there are now no more places remaining.

Please let us know if you would like to join, by leaving your name in the comments section or contacting us via email or phone.

Thursday the 19th of March we hosted a taste evening focusing on Kenyan coffees. Tim had a presentation of Kenya as a producing country and shared his thoughts and experiences from his recent trip to Kenya.
9 coffees were tasted, 8 Kenyans and a new Australian coffee that tasted fantastic. (More info on this coffee next week) The 8 Kenyan coffees were samples and we will buy the best lots based on this tasting and 5 rounds of previous tastings.

Kenya has had a fantastic year in terms of producing excellent coffees. Therefore the price for the coffees is slightly higher than previous years. We are looking forward to getting the new lots probably in June. Until then we are glad to announce some great new coffees to be launched within next week.

Below are some pictures from the taste evening. See more pictures from Kenya on our Flickr stream.

A week has passed and finally I have time to write on the blog again after some wild time on the countryside in Kenya.

It has been a fantastic week where I have cup tasted about 200 to 300 different coffees, if not more. Some terrible, but many of the coffees I have tasted have been fantastic.
I have been traveling with Thompson Owens (picture) from Sweet Marias and Peter Dupont (second picture) from The Coffee Collective during most of the week. We have had many great discussions and talks which have been very educational and inspiring for me.

I promised you a report, so here it is:

Monday was spent at Dormans head office tasting countless cups of various coffees with various qualities. I did not really find anything spectacular, as the samples were all control samples of the coffees that were going to be auctioned on the Tuesday at the Nairobi Coffee Exchange. The coffees on the table were selected because Dormans was unsure of its quality after cupping the lots the previous week.
Either way, the cupping session was really good in order to calibrate my palate for the next days of cupping.

In the afternoon we visited Coffee Management Services (CMS) in Ruiru. We met with Mr. Kamau. CMS is a company educating their clients in good agricultural practices. Their clients are mainly smallholder farmers which are members of Cooperatives. CMS also work as a marketing agent for the coops, which means looking for potential buyers for the farmer’s coffee.

I am not going to explain in detail all that CMS does in this post, but basically CMS will help us to set up a direct trade model with a coop in Kenya and provide us with the documents and transparency so that we are sure that the farmers are getting payed their money. This is especially important as we try to buy the highest quality coffees for a premium price.

We heard about some cases in Kenya where farmers have not got their money yet after the 2007/2008 sales. I can’t even express how disrespectful and harmful that is to the farmers and the coffee trade!

CMS however guarantees the money will go to the coop within 14 days after the sale has taken place, and after talking with a lot of coops and farmers, they often get payed before the standard 14 days.

In the afternoon we went to the New Gatukuyu Coop Society where we had a very nice meeting with the chairman of the coop and his fellow farmers. Meeting farmers eye to eye is very rewarding and we had some great conversations with them about how to improve the quality of the lives of the farmers as well as the quality of the coffee they produce.

Tuesday featured some more cupping at Dormans and also a visit to their factory where we could see how they will coloursort, handsort and vacuum pack our coffees, once we have bought them.

In the afternoon we visited the Gikanda Farmers Coop. Society and the Ndaroini and Gichathaini factories (wet mills) where they have processed some of the best Kenyan coffees this year. Their coffee always stood out on the different cupping tables during the week. Although all the good coffee has already been processed, we managed to get a glimpse of some sorting and weighing of Mbuni coffee (picture below), which is terrible tasting natural processed coffee made out of the leftovers from the harvest.

On Wednesday we visited the huge Central Kenya Coffee Mill in Nyeri where the parchment is removed from the beans, beans are graded, sorted, and cleaned from any foreign matter before they are packed in burlap for storing before the weekly auction in Nairobi or packed in containers for shipping. We also cupped a lot of great coffees from Kiawamururu, Gichathaini, Ndaroini, Kangocho, etc. In the afternoon we visited Kiawamururu which was a great factory. No wonder they produce great coffees!

At the end of the day we had a meeting with the Karagoto coop society, where they have produced the best Kenyan coffee I tasted on this trip. The coffee is produced at the Tegu factory / wet mill which is part of this society, and I will for sure blog more about this coffee on a later stage as I have already bought 19 bags of it.

Thursday and Friday were spent cupping all the best coffees we had found on the trip and a visit to the Kiariaini factory, which was a bit dissapointing compared to all the great factories we had already been to. Therefore it was good to get back to Nairobi for some serious sun bathing by the pool.

Next stop for me is Ethiopia for a week of sightseing of probably the greatest coffee producing country in the world..

See the slideshow below for more pictures from Kenya.

On Thursday we hosted a cupping of Central & South American coffees from roasters throughout the world, as part of the Kaffefestivities. A huge thank you to the people who made the effort to send their coffees to us.

Norwegian Coffee Folk

We received over 30 coffees from all over the place, and on Wednesday night the staff at TW’s picked out the best 10 - at least one coffee from each of the roasters would be showcased. The top 10 coffees were, in no particular order -

Finca Vista Hermosa, Guatemala - Coffee Collective, Denmark

Cielito Lindo, Honduras CoE - Tim Wendelboe, Norway

Finca La Lomita, Colombia - Tim Wendelboe, Norway

Gonzalo Rojas, Panama - David Haugaard, Sweden

Los Lejones, Panama - Supreme Roastworks, Norway

La Aurora, Colombia - Supreme Roastworks, Norway

Finca Kilimanjaro, El Salvador - Solberg & Hansen, Norway

Cruz Del Sur, Peru - Intelligentsia, US

Las Mingas, Narino Lot 45, Colombia - Kaffa, Norway

Hacienda Esmerelda Geisha, Panama - Kaffa, Norway

The selection was Scandinavian heavy, this is all thanks to the hopeless Terminal 5 at Heathrow, who left my luggage containing coffees from Melbourne.

Razzamatazzmus getting stuck in

Both the Kaffa coffees stood out, especially the delightful Esmerelda. It was interesting to note the varied roasting techniques from country to country and even between the Norwegian roasters. There was a fantastic atmosphere with around 20 guests - some roasters, some baristas, some customers, all keen to share opinions and thoughts on each of the coffees presented.

We will be sure to host another cupping of this type again in the future, hopefully with a broader spectrum of roasters. Perhaps a trip across the Atlantic to an African country…

Aftermath

Kaffefest is coming up. Kaffefest is a long weekend of coffee related seminars, cuppings and the finals of the Norwegian Barista Championships. As part of the festivities we are hosting a cupping of Central and South American coffees (except Brasil) from different roasteries from around the globe. The theme is very broad, we know, but it will be a good chance for enthusiasts to sample some of the styles of roasting and what coffees people are buying and are excited about.  The format is quite casual in order to create a comfortable environment where everyone is welcome to discuss the coffees.

The tasting takes place at our store in Grünersgate 1 on Thursday the 19th of February at 18.00h.

We have 2 open spots for our blog readers, so if you are interested in attending the taste evening, then leave a comment on this post. The 2 first to comment will get their ticket to the taste evening.

Friday we hosted an Ethiopia coffee tasting together with Supreme Roastworks and Solberg & Hansen.

The shop was packed with invited guests that eagerly tasted every single drop of coffee in the cups.

10 different Ethiopian coffees were tasted and I think the coffees from Ninety plus coffee were the ones that stood out.

The 3 roasteries involved had also roasted the same lot of coffee, which was a Shakiso natural processed coffee from a development project near the city of Shakiso in Ethiopia. This was very interesting as the 3 different roasteries had very different styles of roasting and the coffees vere quite different in taste although the green coffee was the same. The one roasted by Solberg & Hansen was 2 days fresher than the other coffees, but showed great intensity but lacked a bit of acidity and clarity. The one roasted at our roastery was more light, clean and elegant but lacked a bit of the sweetness that Supreme Roastworks brought out. There were a lot of different opinions of which coffee was the best among the 20 people that tasted the coffees. And that really shows that when it comes to great coffee we can never agree of what is a perfect cup of coffee, because there are so many opinions and styles to consider.

Here are some pictures from the event:
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