It’s winter in Norway and therefore we have adjusted our opening hours a little bit.
From Monday 31st of October our opening hours will be the following:
Monday – Friday: 8.30 to 17.00
Saturday & Sunday: 11.00 – 17.00
A lot of people were fired up after Anders Selmer’s talk during the Nordic Barista Cup this year. The audience almost cornered Anders about how restaurants so poorly executes coffee service after dinner.
To Anders defense, he is actually taking coffee seriously in his restaurant “Fiskebaren”, and I think he defended him self well by saying that if it is so important for coffee people to get great coffee in restaurants, then why don’t we do something about it?
Later that day we witnessed a great lecture by Pontus Dahlström from restaurant Maaemo in Norway. He literally showed everyone that not all restaurants take coffee for granted. The guys at Maaemo have been working on their coffee service from their start in 2010 and to be honest they are one of our most serious customers. Not only do they cup coffees a lot, they have great knowledge about coffee production, extraction, and taste.
Early this year they approached me to see if they could improve their coffee service even more in their restaurant. Since the focus of Maaemo is Nordic food they were dreaming of serving traditional steeped coffee in their restaurant, just like they make coffee when hiking in the forest, etc, but did not know how to implement this technique in the restaurant.
After a brief meeting and some demonstration they came up with what I think is the most exciting coffee service I have experienced in a very long time. It is not very often you come across such a well thought out coffee concept and it is even more enjoyable that it is in a restaurant.
So, baristas, stop complaining. Watch and learn..
PS. I have sourced some very special organic coffee for Maaemo while in Brazil, but I will write about that in a later post.
This is a follow up to James Hoffmann’s blog post on the Naturals debate done some time ago. Although we talked about some of these issues in a later podcast, I now feel even stronger about raising my voice to make people be more open towards natural processed coffees.
A lot of you were able to taste the 2010 Natural Processed coffee from Sitio Canaa this year. We have been able to change some people’s perception ow what a clean natural can taste like. Still, there are a lot of skeptics to natural processed coffees, and with good reasons, but I think claiming that all natural processed coffees are bad is ignorant and just means you haven’t had a well processed natural yet.
I am not a fan of all natural processed coffees, mainly because most of them taste fermented (bubblegum fruit / vinegar) a taste that is dominant in the cup and taste the same regardless of the coffee’s terroir. Therefore I consider ferment (although it can be a pleasant fruitiness to it) a defect and an uninteresting coffee flavor. You get this flavor a lot especially where drying is difficult because of humid climate where you need heat from the sun to dry the coffee.
However, in a lot of areas in Brazil the climate during harvest is very dry and perfect for producing excellent naturals. The problem with in Brazil is that in most cases the naturals are not treated as specialty coffee. Most times you see a lot of green unripe cherries mixed with ripe cherries and dried cherries on the patios. This creates a unclean cup and when dried on the hot dirty patios you also get fermented flavors.
When produced in a careful way making sure all factors such as temperature during drying, even ripeness of cherries, drying on raised beds, etc, the results can be fantastic. I would claim that it actually enhances the terroir of the coffee and it is a much more sustainable way of producing coffee as there is almost no use of water in the process. Of course it is a very difficult process to handle and the process might not be the best for all farmers, but to dismiss this process claiming that it produces unclean coffees is like blaming the espresso machine for producing bad espresso.
While my visit in Brazil, I was visiting Fazenda Ambiental Fortaleza (FAF) and Sitio Canaa for the third time. While cupping the coffees from their harvest this year my very good friend, farmer at FAF, and one of the pioneers in refining the natural process these days, Felipe Croce, presented a whole lot of experiments he had done during the 2011 harvest.
I learned a lot during these days, and thought it would be nice to share this with all our blog readers. Therefore I decided to do a video interview with Felipe while hooking up with him at Coffee lab in Sao Paulo. Unfortunately the video is slightly out of focus, but the content is still of high quality. Hope you enjoy it:
I am happy to announce that the Nordic Cofee Culture blog is finally up and running.
I have been working with Wilfa for a long time now to help them improve and develop some new coffee brewers. (To be launched at this years Nordic Barista Cup)
In this process we felt there needed to be a blog to celebrate the Nordic Coffee Culture.
Wilfa has managed to get a great team of Nordic coffee personalities together, and I am very happy to be a part of that team.
The blog not only describes coffee shops around the Nordic Countries, but will also feature brewing guides and articles, etc.
Today I finished an article about Coffee and Seasonality and I know the other contributors are working on some material to be posted soon. So, make sure you follow the Nordic Coffee Culture blog from now on.
Here is a short interview I did while I was visiting my good friend Nik Orosi who runs ‘s most beautiful and best coffee shop called Elis Caffe.
Finally they have arrived.
We ordered a bunch of VST Precision Filter Baskets a while ago and they arrived this week. You can now buy them in our store or in our webshop.
We strongly recommend to use the new VST filterbaskets. Both the 18g basket and the 22g basket is great for our coffee.
The VST filters makes it a lot easier to extract the espresso properly which gives a lot more sweetness in the cup. They are also more or less identical to eachother which makes it easy to be more consistent when brewing on several groups at the same time.
Make sure they fit your machine. (Fits all La Marzocco and Synesso machines)
To download the VST brochure click here.
Go here to buy filter Baskets from our webshop. You can also buy them in our store.
Thursday the 16th of June, Tim and I will be serving our coffee in New York City.
Summer is here and therefore we have extended our opening hours to the following:
Monday to Friday: 8.30 – 18.00
Saturday and Sunday: 11.00 – 17.00
We have put our iced coffees on the menu. That means you can now have an improved version of our classic TW Freddo and the TW Cappuccino Al Freddo.
We have also developed a TW 0% Irish Coffee. It is basically a cold coffee served on ice with delicious cold milk foam on top. Tastes like an Irish coffee but there is no alcohol involved.
More drinks to be launched soon.
We will be closed from the 21st to the 24th of April due to Easter holidays.
Don’t forget to get some fresh coffee for easter..
