The biggest drawback of espresso is that you need a big and/or heavy machine to produce it. This is for good reason, since it takes a lot of power to force heat and force the water through the grounds to pull a good shot. At least, you needed a big machine until recently. This year, mypressi introduced the TWIST, a hand-held, portable espresso maker.
The Twist uses both fresh coffee grounds and ESE pods and pulls perfect shots of espresso at the touch of a button. It looks something like a baseball at the end of an ice cream scoop handle – but more stylish – and pumps out 135PSI per shot. The first models should be out this fall sometime and should retail for about $129.
New Caledonia coffee comes from – you guessed it – New Caledonia, in Island in the South Pacific. These beans came from the Domaine de Kouandji estate. Like some other pacific island coffees, this one is fairly rare, with production of just 1000 kg per year, and it has some very unique qualities to it. The first thing you’ll notice is that the beans are very small, almost half or 1/3 of the size of your average coffee bean. Another distinctive feature (one that you might not notice) is that this coffee is very low in caffeine content, less than half of the average for other Arabica varieties at about .6%.
The coffee itself is very interesting. It has a creamy, hazelnut note to both the smell of the beans and to the body of the coffee, reminiscent of very milky chocolate or gianduja. There is also a little bit of an herbal note to its finish, and since the coffee is very smooth and light bodied, it comes close to a mellow, lingering black tea finish. It also has some sweet notes in it, like dried fruit. It’s extremely drinkable black and seems like a good choice for a breakfast coffee, where it won’t be paired with foods that may overpower it.
I would assume that a coffee party is simply a party where coffee is consumed, perhaps like any other type of party but with less alcohol. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, a coffee party is a party where every attendee is given a slice of cake and a cup of coffee. There is actually a world record for it, too. The previous record was broken this weekend to much fanfare in Cologne Germany. The koffeeklatch was held by German company Kruger Kranzchen and involved 8,162 people. The previous record had just 4,585 attendees in London in 2008.
No statistics were given on the amount of coffee or cake used. Assuming an 8-oz serving of coffee, somewhere around 510 gallons of coffee may have been served, along with the equivalnt of 511 bundt cakes’ (a bundt cake usually serves 16 people with small slices) worth of cake.
(Starbucks)RED is a whole bean coffee that Starbucks introduced to support the (PRODUCT) RED charity, a charity that partners with various retailers to raise money through the sale of special products that goes towards providing treatment for children and adults living with HIV in Africa. In the case of (Starbucks)RED, $1 per pound of this blend goes towards the charity, so you get good coffee and support a good cause all in one cup.
The coffee itself is a blend of Rwandan and Ethiopian coffees that is supposed to evoke some of the classic characteristics of African coffees. It is bold and smooth, with fairly low acidity, and notes of citrus and a sweet spiciness. The spiciness actually seemed to hint at the sweet-spicy combination of fruitcake, which is not too sweet but fairly rich tasting from all the dried fruit in it. The coffee also had a slight bitterness to it, like the pith of a citrus fruit, but it was subtle and made the coffee a little more interesting.
There are a lot of different things that you can go to school to study, from anthropology to virology, from auto mechanics to cooking. But some fields are best learned on the job – either because you need experience to achieve peak performance or because it just isn’t taught anywhere. Coffee falls into that later category, even though plenty of people specialize in it, since you can’t gain tasting experience from a textbook. Recently, however, I was invited to attend Starbucks Coffee College. The Coffee College was a day-long seminar hosted for several food writers courtesy of the specialty coffee chain.
Coffee College started with a quick trip through Starbucks history and a little tour of the store in Los Angeles that we met at. College was small, just myself and one other writer, and two members of the Coffee Experience (i.e. Education) team from Starbucks’ corporate office. Primarily, this portion of the day talked about how Starbucks started as a specialty coffee retailer, providing and creating blends of coffee beans that were representative of beans from a specific region of the world.
