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:

Interview with Felipe Croce from Tim Wendelboe on Vimeo.

I just visited Sitio Canaa to see how Joao Hamilton is doing. He just finished his harvest and had done a lot of experiments that we tasted later in the afternoon. My good friend Felipe Croce is translating.

Felipe is now managing the quality control and experiments at Fazenda Ambiental Fortaleza that is also partners with Joao Hamilton among others.

In my opinion these guys are producing the very best coffees coming out of Brazil at the moment. I will for sure write a little bit more about that later, but for now you can enjoy the interview I did with Joao Hamilton on his farm.

Interview with Joao Hamilton at Sitio Canaa, Brazil from Tim Wendelboe on Vimeo.

A lot of people have e-mailed me asking where they could see the lecture on Nordic Coffee Culture I did during the Nordic Barista Cup.
The lecture is finally uploaded to the Nordic Barista Cup VIMEO account. I highly suggest that you check out all the lectures there as they are both inspirational and educational.

Here is the one I did:
(PS. Due to a tape change  the lecture is cut a bit short at the end.)

Nordic Barista Cup Talks – Tim Wendelboe: Nordic Coffee Culture from Nordic Barista Cup on Vimeo.

We are now sold out of the first lot from Los Cipreses from the Caballero family.
The next lot is a 10 bag lot and is from one of their farms called El Puente.

It is more fruity and has a lot more concentration than the Los Cipreses. More info here.

Here is a very inspiring lecture by Pontus Dahlström done last weekend during the Nordic Barista Cup.

Pontus is one of the owners of MAAEMO in Oslo, which is a fantastic restaurant that focuses on local and seasonal food. They teamed up with us a while ago to develop their coffee service and are currently serving our Caballero coffee brewed with the traditional steeping method called kokekaffe.

A perfect example of how to lift the coffee service in a restaurant to become a great taste experience as well as a more profitable part of the dinner for MAAEMO.

NBC Talks – Pontus Dahlstrøm: The Nordic Approach from Nordic Barista Cup on Vimeo.

YOu can see all the lectures from this years NBC here.

We are so proud and very happy to have some new coffees for sale.

This time, the new crop from one of our all time favorites, Jobneel at Finca Nacimiento is finally in house and on the shelves.
We have bought 5 lots from him this year and the first release is a Bourbon picked on the 3rd of March. This coffee is so ripe and juicy that people think it is a Kenyan coffee. Loads of ripe cherry flavours. For more information on the coffee go here.

We are also thrilled to finally be able to sell some very special coffee from the Caballero family in Marcala, Honduras. They have several farms, so we decided to honor their name by calling the coffee “Caballero” as their family has been pioneering coffee in Honduras for over a century. We bought 7 different lots from the Caballeros this year, and first one for sale is the first picking from the farm Los Cipreses. For more info go here.

The third release this week is a coffee from one of the first farms we ever bought coffee from when we opened in 2007. Finca La Montañita is situated in the mountains of El Salvador. The Pacamara that we bought from Mr. Antonio René this year has a lot of crisp apple acidity and intense fruity flavors.
For more info go here.

We hope you will enjoy these coffees.

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.