London is blessed with a great coffee scene, numerous cafes, and no less than two World Barista Champions who call the city home. I’ve been slowly cataloging the cafes I visited on my trip to London, but if you’re planning your own vacation a new guide book has come out that’s worth your while.

The Independent Coffee Book – London is a beautiful little labor of love, put together by Vespertine Press, “a Brighton-based independent publisher dedicated to making practical, beautifully printed guide books that showcase the very best exponents of specialty coffee in the UK.” It’s part of what looks to be a burgeoning series; you can pick up another edition centered around the coffee in Brighton & Hove on England’s southern coast.

What I like about the London book is that it gives you a local’s introduction to each cafe, providing you with the context and history that gives each shop its character and charm. This is great when you’re just in town for a short time and really gives you a greater appreciation for what you’re experiencing. For London residents, it might also shed some new light on your favorite spot to grab a coffee, or point you towards other worthy cafes. The book is conveniently organized into regional sections that focus on the City of London, the West End, as well as North, South, and East London.

The book also has practical information that could come in handy, especially for tourists – like which shops have public restrooms, their hours, and the nearest public transit stops.

In the second half of the book, you’ll find a wealth of brief educational articles written by some of London’s specialty coffee professionals. These include: “A History of London Coffee Houses;” a map of World Wide Coffee Production; discussion on “The Ethics of Coffee Buying,” “Coffee Roasting,” “Brewing Methods,” and a handy flavor wheel.

All in all it’s a nice overview and introduction to specialty coffee and to London’s coffee culture – a great gift to travelers, Londoners with an interest in coffee or local indie businesses, and anyone else curious for a taste of London’s coffee scene.

The book is available for £10 on Vespertine’s website. Shipping in the UK £2, and most other countries is £4.

Toby’s Estate is a new cafe and roastery in Brooklyn, with Australian roots. I’ll be writing more about them later (the short review: nice coffee, great sandwiches, cool space), but for now I wanted to share that they are offering public cuppings every Wednesday. I went a few weeks ago and had a great time.

If you’ve never done a cupping, it’s basically the standardized method for evaluating a coffee. Multiple coffees are ground and brewed simply, in bowls or cups, with the floating bits skimmed off the surface. You go around the table to note the aroma, and then taste with a spoon, slurping to aerate it, and spitting to avoid fatigue that can impact your ability to taste. If you want to learn more about coffee you should hit up every free cupping you can find — it let’s you systematically compare and contrast the impact of a multitude of qualities and characteristics, including the farm, variety, processing, and roast. Doing this simultaneously with multiple coffees is always an eye-opener. If you’re lucky, you can also get in on cuppings of acids, defects, or even cuppings of different brewing water, all of which highlight how many variables affect the flavor of a coffee.

Our cupping had a few surprises, one being a distinctly aromatic coffee, with fragrant notes of brown sugar, spice, cinnamon, and herbal tea. I was really looking forward to getting to it on the tasting round, but when I did it was lacking in acidity and tasted fairly generic and roasty. It turns out it was Panama Esmeralda roasted for espresso by Coffee Collective  – the most highly lauded coffee, and one of the best roasters in the world. Coffee intended to be brewed as espresso is generally roasted a little darker, which is why the flavor didn’t come through in the cupping. The aroma makes me wish we could have tried it as espresso!

The star of the show was a Kenyan coffee that Toby’s is serving in their cafe. It smelled to me like baked raisin bread, had a red grape acidity, and I wrote “plum and citrus” on my notes for flavor. There were also some other interesting flavors on the table, like a Brazil with a strong peanut butter note.

Unless you’re a veteran coffee professional or have other tasting experience, you’ll probably come away from a cupping with a distinct sense of the limits of your vocabulary. It’s really difficult to put words to the aromas and flavors you experience in the coffee, but that’s why cuppings are so valuable! Also, if you’re at all like me, you’ll be wishing you’d had breakfast and a coffee to wake up your mind before the cupping; it requires focus and attention, and goes by quicker than you’d expect. Be advised!

If you’d like to visit one of these cuppings, space is limited so make sure you get your name on the schedule by contacting Toby’s Estate.

Several days ago a conversation broke out on Twitter between a few coffee industry heavy-weights talking about the relative impact of variety (and cultivar, both of which are often confused with the term varietal) in the taste of a particular coffee. You’ve probably seen the words (Typica, Caturra, Catuai, Bourbon, SL28, Pacamara, and so on) on coffee bags with little explanation as to their meaning or import. If you were ever curious to learn more, you should check out the blog that emerged from that Twitter conversation:

Within the coffee industry, how coffee varieties impact taste is a relatively marginalized topic; among most coffee drinkers, it’s hardly a consideration. Most identify coffee by origin – the country, or region, or farm – rather than variety.

Should we pay closer attention to varieties? What is the impact on flavor? A spirited exchange followed on Twitter, and after some discussion it was decided to move the conversation to Tumblr, where the character counts aren’t limited and where the dialogue, hopefully, will be easier to follow.

I’m glad the conversation has shifted to a space that’s easier to follow and reference in the future. If this piques your interest, head over to read more at Wet Mill. So far only Peter Giuliano of Counter Culture, and James Hoffman of Square Mile have chimed in, but if people are reading, perhaps it will spur a more interesting dialog between the many participants. You can also make use of the Tumblr “Ask me a question” feature if you have any ideas or questions of your own.

Cup of Excellence, often abbreviated COE on menus, is something more consumers should know about. The video above was produced by Toby’s Estate and it does a great job explaining the competition, interviewing both judges & farmers, and showing what it all entails.

In short, Cup of Excellence is a program active in several coffee producing nations in which a national and international panel of judges taste coffees submitted by farmers, in order to select and award the best coffees. Those coffees are then sold at auction, often fetching the farmers a far higher price as a reward for their attention to quality over quantity. If you see a Cup of Excellence winner on a menu at a cafe that has high standards and a reputable roaster, you should definitely try it – they’re often a special experience and well worth the additional price!

I’m loving this old video, shot in documentary style, looking at the wide variety of cafes that had opened up in London in the 1950s and 1960s. Part of its charm lies in its anthropological gaze, spending most of the allotted time on the unglamorous and precarious economic end of the business, while highlighting the wide range of cafe styles, strategies, and clienteles that emerged in response. In the end, if you’re paying attention, the coffee emerges as secondary to all the other features, including the physical place, low cost of access, aesthetic style, performing certain identities or lifestyles, political values, conversational space, and a business model that requires a certain type of labor and laborer, and a certain type of customer.

It’s a useful reflection that begs the question: what are we really consuming when we visit a coffee shop? Or if you’re a coffee professional, what are you really selling to your customers? What else could or should you be selling? This blog focuses primarily on highlighting quality taste and consistency above all else, as it’s perhaps the one variable in the equation that has, historically, seen the least overall improvement or innovation, aside from a few notable exceptions, only gaining mainstream momentum over the last decade or two. In these so-called third-wave, specialty coffee shops, the coffee has been elevated, even fetishized, to the point where the barista and the theatre of technical display is one of the main selling points. But the other elements are still very much part of the experience.

The similarities between these old cafes and modern cafes are numerous; the differences, though, seem fewer and less marked. Why is this the dominant way we produce and consume coffee? Perhaps this illustrates why single-cup, hand-poured brews, exotic devices, in-shop roasters, visible cupping rooms, and so on are used, beyond their functional value, as props or signs to distinguish “specialty” or “quality focused” product from the very similar looking norm. It makes me wonder how all those secondary factors could be more innovatively designed or co-opted in specialty-focused cafes?

In Asia there are some pretty adventurous models: maid cafes, book cafes, board game cafes, multi-level themed spaces with set menus and carefully casted hosts, dog and cat cafes, or one of my favorites for it’s craziness, the Dr. Fish cafe, where you can have cake and coffee while you dangle your feet in a pond and the dead skin is eaten away by dozens of little fish. Unsurprisingly these innovative spaces rarely, if ever, serve decent coffee. Some are downright terrible, exploitative, or gimmicky, and most might not suit the specialty coffee experience, but they do suggest that the elements that constitute a cafe are far from fixed.

Intelligentsia’s Venice cafe, and the table service at LAMILL Coffee in Silver Lake come to mind as nice efforts, as do the growing number of combined cafe/office spaces, brew bars or ‘slow’ bars, the temporary Penny University shop, events like Coffee Common, the open bar and roasting space at Coffee Collective’s Norrebro shop in Copenhagen, and blended multipurpose spaces like Prufrock at Present.

Have you come across any cafe (or other establishment serving coffee) you thought was particularly creative, breaking the mold and redefining the coffee experience? Or do you think there’s enough variety as is?

The video above (which I find funny, I don’t know about you) has been making the rounds today. It’s similar in tone to an older video, below, that makes fun of customers with similar attitudes.

Of course the videos aren’t perfect representations – the majority of quality focused cafes are actually trying to serve a product using quality ingredients and best practices. They aren’t trying to dupe consumers with cynical marketing hype or gimmicky novelties (i.e. “Malaysian bat guano coffee,” standing in for abomination that is Kopi Luwak). Rather, most of the people I’ve met in the specialty coffee business truly believe in what they’re doing. There’s an almost missional zeal in the coffee world, an evangelical desire to win converts, to open the eyes of the non-believer to the rapturous wonder of a Kenyan coffee that tastes like berries, or the aptly named espresso “god-shot.”

But that zeal can backfire and end up coming across like the videos above. I think a lot of coffee professionals forget how hard it is to learn what makes “specialty” coffee special, and forget all the work they did to learn (cupping, doing comparisons, talking or listening to respected professionals and award winners, dialing in and learning how to evaluate a “good” shot or a brew, closely tasting the same coffee over time, or at different roasts, or different methods of processing, etc.).

While some people might get hooked and enjoy diving into this arcane coffee world, the majority will never come close to this level of self-education, and professional baristas & coffee professionals shouldn’t expect them to. Some will immediately notice taste differences and either enjoy it, dislike it, or be indifferent. But regardless of preference, the majority will be some blend of folks who are primarily consuming the intangibles of the experience more so than the taste, who will never be able to produce a good cup at home, who will prefer adding milk or sugar, and who will say that they prefer the ‘burnt sugar’ flavor of a Monsooned Malabar even after trying that glorious Kenyan.

I think, more than anything, this illustrates the semiotic precariousness of marketing and identity construction. Quality-focused cafes need to differentiate themselves in the marketplace, but these videos give the impression (which I think may be more common than we’d like to believe) that “specialty coffee” is a sham kept afloat by the hot air of snobbery, elitism, and self-serving declarations of “good taste.” The challenge, as I see it, is both to encourage consumers to want to put in some effort to learn (which usually leads to a desire to teach; a win-win), and to package it (i.e. advertising, marketing, public trainings and cuppings, and friendly interaction and engagement with customers) so that it’s easy to learn. This means being open, inviting, and persuasive rather than judgmental, exclusionary, and accusatory.

But what do you think? Do you like a bit of the “Soup-Nazi” treatment with your coffee, is that part of the fun? Or do you feel put off by this? What kind of service do you expect and appreciate from your favorite cafe? I’m supremely curious, so please chime in!

Lilla Kafferosteriet, a cafe and roastery in Malmö, hosts occasional cuppings on Sunday afternoons. I’m terrible at keeping up with the Swedish coffee scene (I don’t speak Swedish) and would never have known about these, but luckily Oscar from Portafilth.com keeps me in tune with where the coffee geek action is happening in Malmö.

Last time I went to a Lilla Kafferosteriet cupping, it was a series of coffees from different regions in Harrar, Ethiopia. The other weekend they were doing something even more interesting: cupping the same coffee brewed with four different kinds of water. If you drink your coffee with milk and sugar, this is the time to tune out and go watch Youtube or something. But if your interest is piqued, read on.

Måns, barista of what I gather is the ‘specialty’ focused slow bar at the back of Lilla Kafferosteriet, started off the cupping by explaining how water’s chemistry, acidity, and mineral levels affect the flavor of brewed coffee. This was in Swedish, so I didn’t understand a word of it. But I’ve read a bit in the past, and some information about water content and coffee brewing can be found at David Schomer’s blog or at Cirqua or Everpure’s websites (both major water filtration suppliers). The SCAA also has a 56 page ‘Water Quality Handbook,’ which you can buy for $35 from the SCAA, or you can read about it on Home-Barista.com.

In short, brewed coffee is mostly water, so it’s important to have water with chemistry that plays well with the soluble materials in the ground coffee. To taste the difference, we had before us the same coffee brewed with four different kinds of water: Pur Pur, a specially formulated bottled water for coffee brewing; Lilla Kafferosteriet’s own filtered and conditioned tap water; unfiltered Malmö tap water; and Evian bottled water.

Evian and unfiltered tap water both muted the flavor of the coffee, obscuring the acidity, and for lack of a better word the ‘sparkle’ of fleeting flavors and aromas that fresh roasted coffee should have.

The filtered and conditioned tap water was much better, tasting like what I’d expect a good brew to be with balanced and defined acidity, sweetness, and bitterness. The Pur Pur was marginally better tasting, bringing out a little more nuanced sweetness and acidity, but not with enough difference that you’d notice it if you weren’t looking for it.

All in all this just underscores what I’d mentioned while testing the Coava Disk at Solde, that you need to, at the very least, filter your tap water when brewing coffee at home. I’m not about to advocate buying bottled coffee-brewing water (like Pur Pur) all the time, it’d be excessive and wasteful I think. But it might be a nice exercise to try once, compared with what you’re usually tasting. It could be an eye opener.

(Look out for a proper article about Lilla Kafferosteriet, as well as the rest of the Malmö coffee scene in the future — been busy with my masters program, but I’m working on it!).

Portland based Coava Coffee Roasters must be making a killing with their new metal Kone filter for Chemex, and Disk filter for the Aeropress. Both of them seem to be spreading around the world, judging by all the twitter reports and blog coverage. Last week I spent a morning over at Solde Kafferosteri with Dan and Oscar testing out the Disk, and preparing for Oscar’s debut as an international barista competitor in Poland (haha).

Dan from Solde was nice enough to have us over on a Monday morning. The roastery is literally on the wrong side of the tracks, out in the industrial port area of Malmö. We started with a cupping, and then set about the day’s task. Serious, but without any pretensions of scientific rigor, we tried a variety of tests aiming mostly to satisfy our own curiosity about what tastes good. Our main question was the effect of the metal filter on taste, compared to paper.

My personal opinion is that the paper filter tasted too bright and imbalanced compared to the same coffee prepared with the metal filter (using the same grind). With the Disk it tasted more developed, fuller in flavor, with more perceived sweetness.

That said, when the coffee was on the heavier, earthier side (i.e. a Sumatra) I thought the paper filter tasted very slightly better (but not by as big a margin as the lighter coffees prepared with a metal filter). Now, like I said this isn’t a test to end all tests and it really doesn’t prove much, so take it as just one small point of reference. I know that in the past I’ve been happy using paper on the Aeropress, so the next step would be to try comparing different grind settings optimized for each filter…

But I did come to one conclusion, and feel my taste buds somewhat vindicated — when I first arrived in Malmö I felt like the coffee I was brewing at home tasted muted. That set me off on a quest, first, for bottled water – none of which worked well. Then to find a water filter, which, after much searching, I eventually found at a health food store. I guess no one in Sweden buys them, because none of the big stores stock them. And the cashiers look at you funny if you ask about water filters. This is Sweden, only quacks (and coffee geeks) filter their tap water.

But at our little cupping, sure enough the difference was noticeable. Brewing with tap water is like tasting coffee with cottonballs in your mouth. So… buy a water filter if you brew coffee at home.

UPDATE: Coava has split into two companies: Coava the roastery and cafe, and Able Brewing, which handles the production of coffee gear. The Able Brewing / Coava disk filter can be purchased on Amazon, as Able Brewing’s site is still under construction at the moment. A third revision to the disk filter is coming out later this year, so keep an eye out for that.

Full disclosure: We paid for the Disk filters, international shipping and all. And I have no financial interest in the Swedish water filter industry. This is not a conspiracy. Though, if I could secretly make a fortune by recommending filtered water to Swedes, that’d be awesome.

In Korea I tried a lot of cafes, and drank a lot of bad coffee on the way to finding the great cafes that I’ve written about here. Coffee is expensive (I’ve paid as much as $15 for a bad cup of coffee in Seoul), so after a while I started avoiding places with signs that the coffee might not be good. Here are those rules of thumb – but keep in mind that there are numerous exceptions and you sometimes just have to try a place and hope to be surprised!

1. If the shop roasted its own coffee in house on a prominently displayed small batch roaster (or especially an air roaster), it probably meant that you were going to get either bland or terrible coffee. Naturally there are many exceptions, but in Seoul it was very very common for all kinds of cafes to roast their own coffee to give them the aura of artisan production and promote misguided ideas of freshness, when in reality someone on staff just burnt the beans every time. I went to one shop who literally roasted the coffee for you AFTER you placed your order (it was bad). You have to judge whether the roaster is there for style, or if it’s there because someone that works there knows what to do with it, which is hard to do just by looking in a store window.

2. If the signage includes Chinese characters it probably means the owner is from the old school of coffee pioneers in Korea, and thus influenced by (what I assume to be, based on bits of information here and there) older Japanese philosophies of coffee roasting that dark roast, or even burn all the different coffees to achieve a ‘caramel’ and ‘roasty’ flavor. Avoid, because it’s depressing to see so much great coffee wasting away as dark roasts with very little flavor nuance.

3. If the menu offers 10-20 single-origin coffees, chances are none of them have been carefully roasted to bring out the best flavor and instead they’ll all taste fairly generic. They’re also probably stale because that much variety doesn’t turn over quickly. There are, again, exceptions at the places that really take their coffee seriously – you can see some of them in my reviews. But the practice of offering a huge selection of poorly roasted single origin coffee is so normal here that the good cafes really are exceptions to the rule.

If you have any other suggestions for what to avoid, chime in with a comment! Or if you object, tell me why :)

Nice little video from Sweet Maria’s.