Maxwell

This post is a little update on the water and coffee project that we have been working on. In February I was invited to speak amongst illustrious company for the first Tamper tantrum Live held in the U.K. It took place in Birmingham at what was also the first Superheat format for the UKBC. Tamper Tantrum is the brain child of Steve Leighton and Colin Harmon. The format allows the speaker to choose their own topic and they get 20 minutes on stage to present, this is followed by a Q&A session with the audience. The variety of speakers who have...

The great news is that both I and Seb won National coffee competitions which means we will be off to Rimini, Italy to compete in the world competitions early next month. The bad news is that with this and other staff commitments, it means we don’t have the resources to run the shop for the week we are away. Only Jason an Elliot will be home to staff the bar. Don’t worry though, we have come up with a solution. It’s a pretty cool one which should hopefully be an event in its own right. As we don’t have the...

This post is mostly triggered by a talk I attended at the University of Bath (it’s really neat having the University up the road) by the head of marketing from Brew Dog. This talk was put on for a group of current MA students. The talk itself mainly charted Brew Dog’s meteoric rise since they began in 2007. The talk was really engaging and interesting, especially given that the whole talk was lubricated with examples of Brew Dog’s wares. It was an exercise in branding strategy, communication and positioning. A Q&A session followed and provided plenty of food for thought,...

Seasonality has become a key aspect of speciality coffee and part of what distinguishes it from commodity coffee, of course this sits alongside the most important difference, which is that of flavour. Traceability and provenance are tied up with the seasonality factor, but one of the main reasons for focusing on coffee as a seasonal product was the way past crop tastes. The coffees would lose all of their positive acidity and often much of their wonderful character, on top of this they would develop baggy, musty and generally nasty flavour. The time frame for this degradation was not set...

As mentioned in the last post, we are currently working on a water project that will become a little book. Part of that process is the inspiration for this article. During the project we organised blind taste testing sessions, and we drew up our own scoring sheet for participants to use. We did this in order to split up a few specific sections and try to achieve more objective and quantifiable results in relation to the tests we were doing. Below is a link to one of the graphs that displays the sensory results of one coffee blind scored across...