I shall be joining Ben Kaminsky for a lecture on the 2nd of July at the Joe Pro location and, if you are able, I hope you will join us. It starts at 6.30pm, and will end around 8.30pm (or whenever the Q&A stops – I suspect it may end up being a pretty involved session). Some info on Ben’s part: Ben will be presenting some of his research on coffee and espresso brewing, grinding, and roasting, that are sure to answer some long standing questions (e.g. Is espresso brewing inherently flawed? What actually constitutes an espresso roast?). He will also be outlining how to produce a “coffee shot”, the new way for brewing filter coffee that he thinks will likely replace the industry’s best and fastest brewers to date. Ben recommends you understand the basic elements of extraction, including practical use of an extract mojo if you want to get the most out of the class, though beginners are also welcomed. I will be talking about how some of this fits into the wider picture, where I see speciality going and the challenges ahead. I’ll discuss wages, careers, profitability and how that all fits in with actually having a passion for coffee. I will also get to talk about the stuff that I’m generally not allowed to do at things like the SCAA. Tickets are $75. They are available here . Side note: I’d recommend grabbing a ticket in advance, rather than aiming to get one on the door… Related posts: Brewing outside of Gold Cup This isn’t really supposed to be a contentious or confrontational post. It is just something I’ve been thinking about for a while. Lots of people now have sufficient equipment to... Back to the mysteries of the bean I was involved in a training session under the broad title of advanced barista. It was just one person so we were able to tailor it to exactly wha the... SCAE Brewmaster Certification In the world of Speciality Coffee filter coffee isn’t very sexy. One criticism leveled at the SCAE is that it seems obsessed with espresso and yet espresso only makes up...

At Last the Soap opera is over. One of the most emotive and responded-to blog posts I have ever done was this one here, on the plight of the amazing farm Machacamrca. http://www.hasblog.co.uk/no-machacamarca-this-year I did and update a few months back here http://www.hasblog.co.uk/machacamrca-update where things looked to be getting better It was a truly sad [...]

Sad to see that David is going to stop writing. I hope he, or someone else, archives it using a free service. It resonated with me, as I have considered stopping writing here several times over the years. This part particularly stood out: As a collective (coffee geeks/specialty industry talking heads / starfuckers and starfuckees) we lend too much credence to unbridled theorists. The positive reinforcement from comments, retweets, attention perpetuates this kind of malignant behaviour. It becomes self-fueling, and unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your point of view) it can be rewarding in a roundabout way. Thought is cheap though. Developing a compelling, yet ultimately shallow narrative is also cheap, and easy (see most TED talks). Action, work, making something, creating change is much more difficult and often less heralded. I hope to do more of the latter and less of the former. ”Fin” by The Other Black Stuff Related posts: The problem with the blend…. Inevitably we are moving closer and closer towards controlling certain aspects of espresso. Be it experimentation with brew pressure from the folks down at Versalab or Andy Schecter, we are... Writing responses From time to time I’ve suggested to people that instead of commenting, that they instead start a blog and post a proper response that is entirely their own. The hypocrisy of this... Off to Colombia tomorrow Really looking forward to it. Will try and post from there – depending on connection of course. Memory cards emptied, camera batteries charged and a few barista bits and pieces...

I had a vague realisation recently, though don’t know if it actually means anything. I think there are two different ways that roasters think about the coffee they sell. Some, typically speciality and smaller roasteries, tend to think of the coffee they sell as ingredient. Similar to any other ingredient that a chef might buy in, sourced based on a combination of its provenance, its flavour and its price. I think many of us quite like this idea, of coffee as an ingredient that can be used skillfully – though as we’re quality focused we’re probably pleased there aren’t many techniques (like brining, for exmaple) that could be used to improve cheaper cuts. Then there are coffee roasters, who we might think of as being much larger, more commodity, who don’t really sell coffee as ingredient. Instead they create products. They have research and development teams, product development budgets and protocols. Both sell bags of roasted coffee. The mindset is vastly different, as is the methodology. It is pretty hard to find a way for R&D and product development thinking, if what you are selling is a simple ingredient. Maybe there is nothing in this. Maybe I’m just wrong and simplifying everything to the point of meaninglessness. However, I think that if you want to innovate in coffee then it is important to look for different viewpoints and mindsets to see if they take you to new places. Related posts: Aida’s Grand Reserve I am very much aware that promoting my own products or business on a personal blog very quickly spends any currency of goodwill that I might have built up. There... Doing your coffee research I think it is fair to say that the coffee industry shows an interest in the science of coffee. Up until this point most of this science has been more... About My name is James Hoffmann, and this is my personal blog about coffee. I am the World Barista Champion 2007, having won the UK Barista competition in both 2006 &...

In April we released an E Book for Ipad owners to read and enjoy. Apparently not all of you share my apple addiction, so we have managed to export this into a hand PDF so you can all stop being angry at me now. We get asked about how to prepare espresso a lot, what [...]

Some of you may know I do this project with my buddy Colin Harmon called tamper tantrum. A chance for coffee professionals to come together to talk about coffee stuff. This year were hosting the event at the World of Coffee event in Nice France, and we announced our line up last night. We did [...]

The laser particle sizing analysis results are back for my samples of coffee grounds (see previous posts), and they make for fascinating reading! I’m currently digesting the information; pulling and playing with key segments of the data (each sample has 50 data points of % and size), replotting graphs in different ways, and generally trying to interpret the meaning of the findings overall, and make them translate into practical usefulness. Potentially, we might also look at having some of the samples rerun, or remodelled, or even test for new things with new samples. Many of the results concur closely with expectations, and suspicions, arrived at through more simple, manual methods - simply adding a greater level of detail and transparency to what’s actually happening. Whereas some of the results are confusing, and some are wildly surprising …and might surprise many people, I think. At the cafe, Naturelle is currently my predominant selection for the espresso even more so than usual (although as ever, I will of course be putting other coffees on in-between here and there as well!) - but the blend is going through almost constant change right now, so it remains continually fresh and exciting, and so, even more than usual, this blend in some ways far from just one static offering. Almost each new batch from the roastery recently has had new components, or new flavour possibilities, on offer, and often some more significant redialling from the get-go has been required …as well as the usual constant tweeks to keep it happy! But as ever, the variations within the best shots are loosely based around balanced combinations of clean, delicate, juicy, light, sweet citrus and fruits, florals, brown sugars, chocolates …and more! We are currently still offering Rwandan Koakaka, and Colombian Santa Barbara, and now also new crop classic Kenyan Kirimahiga AA – as cafetieres, or as beans for home. So far I admit I have not got around to watching anything of the 2013 WBC – apart from Mat Perger’s set, after a customer sent me a Tweet regarding his use of nutation (as this is something they know I have utilised for some time now). This made fascinating viewing. It was great to see someone challenging so many conventions; pulling shots into frozen cups to rapidly chill shots down to body temp, brewing lungos with a filter roast for signature drinks, and grinding for all espresso with a unimodal filter grinder no less!!! All this made me quite excited, and optimistic. In the end, the nutation was actually probably the least noteworthy part, for me! Sure, elements of many of these points that he highlighted, although unconventional, are not new, and actually reflect ideas that people have been talking about and using for some time (for instance, I almost routinely prefer to pull shots for myself into room temperature cups, and then rest them even further before tasting, and then also taste through to cold. And even more so with filter. And I know I am not alone). But still, as there are many things with speciality coffee that are held as almost absolute, and which are backed-up by countless references on the top forums and blogs, it’s always refreshing see people questioning the way we are ‘meant’ to do things (rest time is another good one), and suitably inspiring to see these points taken to the highest level, on stage. The only trouble is, each time you remove any of the few supposed ‘certainties’ from processes that are already subject to a vast range of interrelated, complex, constantly moving variables, they get even more complicated …but also more interesting!

Looking through the Allegra London Coffee Guide, I noticed that each of the 125 places inside has the price of coffee listed for most drinks. 124 of them served espresso, so I thought it would be a little interesting to have a look at the distribution of prices charged. Essentially this the price for a double espresso – many places serve doubles as standard (mostly due to naked portafilter use), and so if two prices were listed for espresso I used the higher of the two. Prices range: £1.30 – £2.60 The average price charged: £1.89 The mode price: £2.00 The distribution: via chartsbin.com Anything meaningful to take away from this? Well – pricing that has 5p increments isn’t very popular. (May as well round up.) The mode is more interesting to me than the average. I’d say that the lowest pricing is probably bad data, and is for a single espresso (or at least I hope so). One could dig further into the data, map out average price by part of the city – see the impact of rent on the price of coffee. You could go further and split out the outside/cart operators from that too, though the takeaway would likely be that they stand a higher chance of profitability (but maybe not high turnover). Does the pricing itself mean anything? Is it expensive? Is it cheap? I can’t really comment. All I would say is that if I were planning to open a shop, and focused on serving high quality drinks, I’d know with some confidence that the market can bear at least £2.00 quite comfortably. I would also add that as a consumer my expectations do change with the pricing. I’m extremely unlikely to spend £1.30 on an espresso, because I would suspect it wouldn’t be good. However, I’d expect that a £2.00 be pretty damned tasty… Related posts: Pricing This is the second post in a series that I started with Trust. I want to examine a bit more closely what we communicate and can accomplish with pricing. I... The price of coffee at home There have been two great posts from Coffee and Conservation recently, detailing Julie Craves’ year of consumption. I buy a lot of really high-quality coffee. The average price per pound (not including... Trust This is the first in a series of posts on quite a broad topic within coffee, that covers not only elements of brewing but sales, consumption, successes and failures and...

Yo Yo here we gooooooooooo…………….. This is the 6th in a new line of guest coffee blends that we are introducing in 2013. Each month there will be a new blend for which there will be an original label in a different style of bag, and of which there will only be 500 made. Each [...]

The problem with quality is that it is neither a requirement for, nor a guarantee of, success. I’m pretty sure that everyone reading this is, to some extent, a believer in the importance of (product) quality. Be it green coffee, roasted coffee, or cups of coffee – we all value the quality of it with respects to our time and resources. However, it often seems to me that we spin this tale around ourselves; that as long as what you do is of excellent quality then the rest will take care of itself. I wish this were true, but every day it becomes increasingly apparent that it isn’t. Just because your cafe serves great coffee, doesn’t mean it is going to be a success. It seems blindingly obvious when written like this, but all too often I feel like our message is the opposite of that. You might argue that your definition of success is different than mine. You might argue that your passion runs so deep that you see no other choice than to pursue quality, and to offer anything else is morally repugnant, or failure. If this is the case, then I might ask why you chose to commercialise the thing you love? You might be chasing quality as a route to recognition – though this is something that is difficult to sustain month after month, year after year. Back to the context of cafes – we often talk about how quality can overcome location, you can become a destination cafe. Or quality might turn a tiny location into a viable business. Quality above all else. I held this view for a long time, but “the foolish and the dead alone never change their opinion.”1 Now I see the capacity and ability to achieve quality as success. Everything else is a hurdle in the way of doing what I want to, which means that profitability, marketing, efficiency, systems and structure must be achieved in order to get to a place where quality is possible (and even enjoyable). This isn’t just semantics, it is more about a mindset and prioritisation of goals. Starting by trying to achieve great quality regardless of these hurdles is a very painful path, from which few emerge unscathed. Quality is not the means to an end. It is the end. Footnotes:James Russell Lowell (1819 – 1891), My Study Windows,1899 Related posts: Le Coffeeing – Some thoughts This post is a result of the rather excellent post on Chemically Imbalanced. I’m grateful to Ben at CI for consistently writing such good stuff, even if it takes three... Thank you I just want to write a very short thank you to everyone who has contributed recently. I genuinely did think about packing the blog in, but decided to keep writing,... A little project I am not one for New Year resolutions. I certainly have some goals for this year, but that doesn’t feel like the same thing. However, I have embarked on one...