This afternoon we
received an awesome visit from
Lukasz Jura, a coffee guru form Warsaw (and winner of the 2009
AeroPress Championships). Luckily, we had just finished pressing a fresh pot of
Mundo Novo just moments before he walked in the door. (Not perfect since it was a press of blade-ground coffee :) We talked about specialty coffee in general and in Poland for about three hours over coffee and lunch. Trust me, when you are a nerd, this is not hard. He confirmed what we had suspected: there are no local roasters to be had in Poznan. Oh well. Saw that one coming.
In the meantime, he left us with two half-kilos of his
proprietary espresso blend (roasted in Norway). He mentioned something about a blueberry note in the beans over lunch, so I was anxious to pull some shots. Fast-forward to 7pm. Open the bag of beans and it was like-WHAM! Blueberries! But
despite pulling 10 sets of shots, i could not reproduce that
gorgeous smell in the cup...darn. Even though
Lukasz recommended against it, we french-pressed the coffee afterwards. (sh! don't tell!)
Despite the heavy body from the press, I loved the blueberry and cocoa notes :)
Definitely planning to work with these beans more this week. I'll let you know how it goes.
This last week has been fabulous. Not only the highest grossing week in FOREVER, but also everyone's been in a rockin' mood. Something about the super-positive newspaper column Thursday night put us all in The Zone. Helka's been e-mailing a few more papers. Aaron's been churning out the paperwork. And me? Well, my Beehouse pourover filtercones finally came in so you KNOW what I've been doing. Testing and tasting like crazy!
My goal is to create a method for the beehouse that creates a strong, but not bitter, cup of coffee. Poles are looking for the strength in their cup when they order coffee, but the average Joę puts quite a bit of cream and sugar. I chose the Beehouse because they could offer some barista control, while ensuring a minimum 2-minute brew (which we are definately going to need if we aim to please).
The hardest part is the crema. Poles are very concerned with this little detail in their cup. After all, when they order "black coffee" in a coffeeshop, they are expecting a café lungo (go on, i had to look up a recipe too). This wouldn't be a problem, except for the crema. The pressure of the espresso brewing forces the crema into the cup. At the same time, a high-quality pourover has foam in the filtercone during brewing, but that is not forced into the cup. Thus, Poles have been told that crema is the key to spotting a great cup of coffee (and they are right when it comes to the lungo).
If I'm going to create something Poles love, I need to speak a lot more Polish! Wish me luck!
