I paid a visit to Coffee Fest NY yesterday and took a few pictures to share (today is the last day of the show, so if you want to visit you have a few hours left, or pre-register for next year). Trade shows are rather unglamorous, full of syrup manufacturers, smoothie products, and other goods & services targeted to all kinds of coffee related businesses, rather than consumers. But it can be interesting if you’re a hardcore coffee geek with a lot of patience. Below are a few highlights from my visit.

The majority of booths at a trade show are like this — free samples of Guittard chocolate? Don’t mind if I do.

 PTs Coffee

The folks at PTs Coffee (below) were really nice. Visiting from Kansas, they had some great coffee available to sample. I really enjoyed the Colombia Villa Loyola, a Caturra Peaberry prepared on the Chemex. It was the best that I tried at the show and I’ll be looking out for more of their coffee here in New York – you can try some at Culture Espresso (article coming soon).

ZPM Espresso

I was really looking forward to checking out the espresso machine built by the guys at ZPM Espresso. If you haven’t heard, they’re the ones who came up with a new design and crowd-funded its development on Kick Starter, raising far more than their initial goal (currently they’re at $370,000). With PID temperature control, the potential for after-market open-source software customization, and a focus on producing a machine for geeks at an affordable price, this is definitely something to keep an eye on. You can still pre-order machines, so check out Kick Starter or contact them directly.

Unfortunately their final prototype was not fully functional at the show, so I tried a shot on the original prototype. It was a solid shot, and according to Steve Rheinhart, who pulled more than a few, the machine was pretty consistent. I’ll be looking forward to reading reviews of the final product and might just purchase one myself. Wish Gleb and Igor all the best with their rapidly growing company.

Birch Coffee

I’d never heard of Birch Coffee, but apparently they’ve been roasting in NY for two years. They had a Kenya that tasted like a ripe tomato, and a pleasant espresso. I’ll have to visit their retail location sometime to try more.

 Dallis Bros.

Dallis Bros. is one of the oldest roasters in New York, with nearly a century of history. They also sponsor competitions like the Northeast Regional Barista Championship (NERBC). I enjoyed one of their coffees from the Dominican Republic and look forward to learning more about them.

Kuma Coffee at Visions Espresso

Kuma Coffee is new to me, but I enjoyed their Panama Elida prepared via Clever at the Visions Espresso booth.

Overall it was an interesting mix of experiences – some nice coffee, some not so nice, and some weird, as every coffee trade show I’ve gone to has been. The $30 admission price ($20 if you pre-registered) is a bit steep, but you could get discounted subscriptions to Roast and Barista magazine, partially offsetting the expense. I had been meaning to subscribe to Roast and took the opportunity to do that. The best part about it is meeting people behind the businesses, and having an opportunity to taste samples of coffee and other products from a variety of companies. It’s perhaps most useful for indie cafes and other businesses looking to improve their coffee service, but if you’re a super geek you might have fun too.

Carlos Aguirre Gano, an inventive barista championship competitor in El Salvador, used a rig to press 3 Aeropresses at once. I don’t know Spanish, but it’s been suggested that he brewed the same coffee at several roast profiles. If you can translate more, please post in the comments :) Now, watch and be amazed (at 20:40).

Update: Johanna in the comments has posted more info. “Carlos used Coffee from the farm La Roxanita, 1st place COE from El Salvador 2011, stored in airtight sealed special bags, opened only to roast exactly 12 days before competition. This is a Pacamara washed from Mr. Ignacio. [...] Carlos used 4 different roasts of the same coffee, 3 different ones for each aeropress to show the evolution of this coffee and how it changes. 1 for his espresso round and cappuccino the darkest roast.”

Thanks for the additional information!

Via Academia Barista Pro, by way of BoingBoing

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?

If you didn’t know, when I’m not obsessing over coffee I’m working on a masters in applied cultural analysis at Lund University. Lately I’ve been researching mobile photo sharing as a practice that is changing our relationship to ourselves, our surroundings, our daily lives, and more.

While taking pictures of your dinner might seem trivial and fun, it also reflects the changing nature of modernity, consumer culture, capitalism, and identity. But I need help gathering information, so I’m excited to start recruiting participants for my study! You’ll be asked to write a journal reflecting on everything you do with the app. I promise it’ll be interesting and hopefully fun, too, so please give the project a look.

Read more & Sign up here! bit.ly/imgculture

I hope you’ll participate, and I would greatly appreciate it if you shared the link in your social networks!

Thank you!

UPDATE: Thanks to those that signed up and contributed! The study is now closed. If you’d like to know more about it, feel free to contact me.

Don’t take it personally, barista friends. :) At FRSHGRND.com we try to showcase companies and individuals that are passionate without undue pretense or unwanted judgment. Nevertheless, the stereotype is amusing and it’s always good to make sure you’re not crossing the line into self-caricature when you talk about coffee.

Video by Sprudge.com, filmed at Four Barrel Coffee.

Modernist Cuisine has put up two videos of cream being poured into black coffee in high-speed slow motion. While most of us probably only combine milk with espresso, preferring to taste brewed coffee in all its unadulterated nuance, the video is pretty mesmerizing. If only they’d done the same thing with a barista pouring latte art!

Read more over at Modernist Cuisine’s blog, where they are trying to figure out why coffee with cream cools 20% slower than plain black coffee. Apparently anyone that wasted their money on Coffee Joulies would have been better off just ordering a latte or adding milk to their coffee.

So, my blogs got infected by some exploit that’s currently ravaging WordPress based blogs. I had to do a lot of maintenance to get things back to normal and decided to try a new theme in the process.

One big change – I’m increasing the photo size throughout the site, so for a while all the old posts will look weird until I get around to changing the source files and re-formatting the posts. (And if I end up being too busy to bother with fixing the old posts, I hope you’ll forgive me :)

Pardon the mess, hopefully things will be more stable from here on out.

Just got back to Seoul from a 5 day trip to Tokyo, and now I have two days to pack up and move to Sweden for graduate school. I’ll be doing the Masters in Applied Cultural Analysis at Lund University and the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. I’m looking forward to meeting new people and exploring the coffee world from my new home in Malmo, though I will miss Korea and everyone here that I’ve been lucky enough to meet over the past two years.

Posting here will be pretty light for a while as I move and settle in, but I have a number of reviews remaining from Seoul, plus around 6 cafes to post from my amazing time in Tokyo. Look forward to that!

Also, it’s come to my attention that Google thinks this site has malware or something. I think that’s a mistake and I’m trying to figure out what to do about it. If you’ve noticed anything feel free to contact me and let me know.

If you’re a coffee geek living here in Korea and want to watch the 2010 World Barista Championship (WBC) streaming live online from London, here’s a little time table converted for local Korean time to help you figure out the schedule.

WATCH IT LIVE – CLICK HERE!

Wednesday June 23
5:30PM – 2:00AM – Round 1, Day 1 (Competitors 1-30)

Thursday June 24
5:30PM – 11:45PM Round 1, Day 2 (Competitors 31-54)
(2010 Korean Barista champ An Jae Hyeuk is second up, competing at around 6:00PM)

12:15AM – 1:15AM Announcement of Semi-Finalists

Friday June 25
5:30PM – 8:00PM — Semi Finals Round (Semi-Finalists 1-12)
10:30PM – 12:55AM — Finals Round (Finalists 1-6)
1:15AM – 2:00AM — Awards Ceremony

You can also visit one of the “Go Live” partner cafes and watch it live in a coffee shop.

Our friends Seung Jin and Diane are blogging their way through a gastronomic exploration of Seoul’s culinary landscape, which led Claire and me to a nice Sunday brunch at the Grand Hyatt last weekend. The food and setting was very nice, and perhaps it was just the company influencing my perception, but I’d say the food and price at the grand Hyatt were the best overall of the three pricey hotel brunches I’ve tried in Seoul (Park Hyatt, Grand Hyatt, W Hotel). Everything tasted fresh and most of the items were well executed. But I’ll leave the food blogging to those more capable.

My first thought when we set the brunch date was that the food would be awesome. Second thought was that the coffee was going to suck. There’s always this mismatch between the food and the coffee preparation at nice restaurants. So, rather than enjoy an awesome meal and then finish it off with nasty coffee, I looked at my bag of Guatemala Finca Isnul (2009 Cup of Excellence) roasted by Republic of Coffee, and started thinking about how I could bring it with me.

The Aeropress stood out as the best tool for the job – light, self-contained, and easy to deal with the mess. Pre-ground coffee* stored inside with the plunger down, then just extend it and remove the filter, pour in water, steep, stir, flip, press. I asked for tea to get some hot water to brew with, and it was probably way off in temperature by the time I got it, but the coffee still tasted much better than the other options available.

The Finca Isnul 2009 COE is a really rich coffee, it tastes like a blend of what I’d thought were characteristics from Central America and South East Asia; sweet red wine-like acidity and chocolate notes very nicely integrated with prominent earthy, smokey, tobacco-ish flavor. Is this complexity characteristic of the hybrid Pacamara varietal? I don’t know; still got much to learn about the agricultural side of coffee. Regardless, it’s an interesting flavor, I enjoyed it a lot.

It was a bit of a risk trying to improvise and do an upside down Aeropress at the table; I was half expecting to spray hot coffee on everyone. But it worked perfectly, and filled two tea cups with great coffee to share with each side of the table!

*Looking at the spent coffee puck, my Kalita hand mill obviously produces a lot of fines. Maybe I should sieve it. Also, I think the grind was a tiny bit too coarse, but whatever!