Time To Cook

Time To Cook

I recently started watching ‘Breaking Bad’ on Netflix; I quickly became addicted and managed to watch the complete series in about 3 weeks, I loved it!  It got me thinking about my days of ‘cooking’ (roasting coffee) and I realised how much I missed it.  Now, I didn’t roast out of an RV but was not too far from it.   I use to roast in a little shed, out the back of my office, on a 1KG roaster.  Just like Jessie and Mr. White I had many an adventure learning the process (although mine did not include murder, hookers and millions of dollars) it was still a little adventure every time I fired up the Cafemino.  

It has been 6 years since I roasted any coffee and things have moved on a lot in that time.  After a bit of research I quickly realised there is only one ‘real’ home roaster on the market, the ‘Gene Café’. I ordered it from www.bellabarista.co.uk (great website) and it arrived two days later…oh the anticipation… it’s a long time since I was excited about new coffee equipment.  Coffee roasting is not like baking or cooking it’s more like alchemy and chemistry.  You have to take many things into consideration like ambient temperature, how and where your green bean was grown and processed, moisture content of the coffee and so on. You also need to take safety into consideration too as fires are easy enough to start when roasting.

Bella Barista supplied a great little guide to roasting which they wrote themselves, I studied this and decided on a profile that I was going to use. I cleared the kitchen, covered the fire alarm, found my old roasting log, weighed the coffee and most importantly sent my wife and child out; nothing more certain than burning down your house if you don’t pay attention during roasting.  I was prepared!

The most nostalgic trigger for me is smell, the right aroma can bring me back to any point in my life.  As I fired up my new roaster, the grassy aroma of coffee beginning to roast, started to fill the air and it  brought me right back to my little shed (man cave if I’m honest) and I quickly began to remember the little roasting skills I had, great!

My first roast was terrible, which was fine and expected, my second roast was better but still a long way off what I want. This is the beginning of a long journey, I’ll keep you posted!

Craig 

www.coffeeshop.ie

AEROPRESS - How-To Guide

AEROPRESS - How-To Guide

If you have read my blog post about the AeroPress you know that I’m in love with it. I think everybody who likes coffee needs to try the AeroPress, I promise, you will not regret it. The best thing about the AeroPress is how simple it is to use, so here is an easy to use guide.  As with all guides, that is all it is, a guide, I highly recommend messing around to find out what exactly works for you.

• First of all a list of things you will need. The AreoPress, freshly roasted coffee, a kettle, scales, grinder and, of course, a cup.
• Boil the kettle.
• Place one of the paper filters in the basket provided and screw the basket back into the cylinder, place on top of your cup.  Wet the paper by pouring boiling water through the filter, this has both the benefit of wetting the filter paper (removes that nasty paper flavor) and heating the cup.  Remember to throw out the water from the cup.
• Freshly grind about 18 grams of your favorite coffee; your grind should be medium-fine (finer than you would use for French Press but not as fine for an espresso machine) and place the ground coffee in the chamber.
• Pour a small amount of your hot water into the chamber and pre-infuse the coffee, use the plastic spoon provided to mix the water and coffee together, then pour in the remaining water.   The water should not be boiling, about 85dg is about right.  As a rule I wait at least a minute after the kettle has boiled before I use it.
• Quickly replace the plunger; this creates a vacuum and prevents the coffee from dripping into the cup.
• Let the coffee brew for 50 seconds to 1 minute.
• When ready press down on the plunger, not too hard.  I don’t push the plunger all the way down to the ground coffee as I find this can sometimes make the coffee a little bitter. Once I hear the first hiss (air passing through the grinds) I stop (I find that this method produces a cleaner tasting coffee).
• Remove the AeroPress from the cup, what you are left with is a strong tasty coffee.  At this stage I add a little extra hot water to water it down a little, but it’s up to you!
• Now you have tried your first brew in the AeroPress, don’t be afraid to play around with times, weights and methods, and above all enjoy!

Thanks

Craig
www.coffeeshop.ie 

We did it!

WE DID IT!

8 months ago, Catherine and I were talking about a non-existent coffee business that we would both like to run.  Without any real direction (and over a glass of wine), one evening we came up with the name, Coffeeshop.ie, and then we began planning what exactly we wanted to do! Usually it’s done the opposite way around but this time we just needed one small element of the business to exist (the name!) to give us focus.  Over the following months we developed the concept of what we wanted to do, where we wanted the business to go and how we needed to get there and by some miracle here we are, our new website and our new business! www.coffeeshop.ie

Both of us are passionate about coffee and all things coffee related so hopefully you will find something here that you really love, or just like! There will be something new and exciting every week. We are starting small and slow, so please bear with us, we are still waiting on a lot of stock to arrive but expect to be up and running properly by the summer. 

Catherine & Craig

AeroPress, feeling the love and the guilt

AEROPRESS, FEELING THE LOVE AND THE GUILT. 

Guilt is an amazing emotion, it can hit you from nowhere over something that seems irrelevant.  I recently felt a new kind of guilt, a guilt that I did not know was possible, I felt guilty because of a machine.

Let me explain.

I bought my beloved Rancillio Silvia espresso machine about 8 year ago. I can’t even imagine how many shots I’ve pulled on it, from my morning coffee, my excessive weekend coffee drinking, to my year with a 1kg coffee roaster when, in one day, I could put 20 shots through the machine.  I have never really thought about upgrading, well not seriously anyway, I love it. I look after it well, descaling and cleaning on a regular basis, and it looks after me well.  Only once, in 8 years, has it let me down; but it was only out of action for a few days and I reckon if I was in anyway mechanically minded I could have fixed it in 2 minutes.

A few months back I was in 3FE, one of Ireland’s best coffee shops for people that don’t know.  I’m embarrassed to say it was my first trip there, anyhow that’s a different story. I was really looking forward to tasting their coffee so went for the tasting menu which consisted of 2 different coffees. To my surprise and delight I noticed that it was being made with the AeroPress coffee maker. I had read plenty about the AeroPress but if I’m honest I had disregarded it as a poor cousin to a decent espresso machine, and never had any real desire to buy one. I was presented with my two coffees, one Ethiopian and the other was……something? I was blown away by the taste experience that I was having, two cups of the lightest, smoothest coffee I have tasted, mixed with these delicate but complex flavours.  One minute after finishing my coffees I was at the till buying an AeroPress and some coffees to match.

Over the following few days I made some of the best cups of coffee I had ever made. Four things really impressed me about the AeroPress, 1: the simplicity of the product, a simple design and really good value. 2: the smoothness of the coffee, for some reason I can drink a lot more AeroPress than any other kind of brew method. 3: the quality of what was in the cup, some coffees that I would consider undrinkable out of the espresso machine came alive with the AeroPress, and finally point 4, this is the most important one for me, consistency. Every cup I made was great; no over extraction, no under extraction, no dud shots, no real adjusting of the grinder.  All the variables are eliminated. 

This is where the guilt steps in… About 6 weeks after getting my AeroPress I had a hankering for a latte (I go through phases of drinking these). That’s when I realised I hadn't even looked at my espresso machine for nearly 2 months. Unloved, unused, it almost looked sad. As with all guilty situations I over compensated and went back to only using the Silvia but over time it’s balanced out.  I now use them 50/50, and almost to prove a point as I wrote this I’ve had two coffees; one from the AeroPress and one from my very much loved espresso machine.

So go on, get yourself an AeroPress and be prepared to taste some of the best coffee that you’ve ever made.

To finish, and Just to give a little balance on a slight negative note; no matter what people say it does not produce espresso like a proper machine, and I would never use it for a latte….to, of course, the delight of my trusted Silvia. 

Craig. 

---

It won't always be about cups......I promise

Another story about cups????

A short story, but one worth telling.

About a week ago, my wife (not only a kleptomaniac and pyromaniac but also a shopaholic) arrived home with more lovely vintage cups and a story that made me laugh out loud.

While out walking in Dun Laoghaire she passed by a charity shop which had some nice cups in the window, knowing my cup fetish can never be satisfied, she went in to see what was on offer.  After a quick look around, a lovely vintage tea service caught her eye, hidden at the back on a high shelf.  It was in good condition, a complete set from the 1950’s but most importantly … good value.

 

 

Delighted with her purchase Catherine walked back to her parents’ house to show off her latest buy.  With pleasure she un-wrapped the set of cups and showed them to her mum, “Where did you get those?” her mum asked sounding a little bit confused, Catherine went on to describe where she had bought them and how much she paid. After a moments silence Catherine’s mum explained that the week before she had been clearing out some of her own mother’s things (Catherine’s Granny, who she had been very close to, had passed away earlier this year) and had dropped a number of items, that she thought no one would want, into the local charity shop; including that exact tea set.   Catherine had just bought her own Granny’s tea service that her mother had just got rid of…excellent.

I’m happy enough though, not a bad set of cups and obviously destined to stay in the family! That night, we drank some tea (not coffee for once), clinked the cups together and remembered Doreen, Catherine’s Granny. It was meant to be.

 

Craig.

 

Another day another cup.

As I've admitted before I have a cup fetish. Like a proud parent showing off their new born baby for the first time I feel the need to show off my latest addition, a 1920's art deco cup, saucer and side plate.

Bought in Enniskerry, Co Wicklow, my favourite hunting ground!

Coffee Roasting

Coffee Roasting… Well that escalated quickly!

Coffee for me has never been stagnant thing, it has always been a constantly changing process and every other week I was trying something new to improve the flavour in my cup. There were two reasons for this, firstly, and probably most important, was the quest for the perfect cup of coffee and secondly, was my love of the processes involved in the coffee making ritual.

There are always variables involved in making a coffee that affect the taste; everything form the freshness and quality of the beans to the type of grinder and the water that you use. I have spent years tweaking my coffee making process, each time I made progress it was mixed emotions, happy that the coffee was a little better, but disappointment that I was still way off what I thought it could taste like and what I believed I could achieve.

I always had this desire to make coffee taste as good as the smell. I eventually ended up with a good espresso machine, cafeteria, vacuum pot, burr grinder, hand grinder, filtered water and the best coffee cup collection in Ireland (see previous blog post) but I always felt the single factor letting the process down was the quality of my beans.

I began to look for the ultimate coffee bean, after a lot of research (3 days flapping about on the internet… I’m very impatient) I decided that the only way to get the best coffee bean was to roast it myself; excellent, more bloody coffee equipment. This was back in about 2004 when the whole home roasting thing was still very new and I set my sights on a little machine called the Alpenrost.

Ahhh my Alpenrost… it could roast 300g of green beans in about 17 minutes, I know it doesn’t sound like a lot but I only had to roast every few days.

I was very nervous at the start, it’s very easy to set these little things on fire, so my equipment consisted of my roaster, a fire extinguisher and oven gloves (so I could fling the thing out the window if it burst into flames). After a week or two roasting my confidence began to grow and I was bringing the roast well into the second crack.  Filling my house with smoke and setting off my fire alarm on a very regular basis, my neighbours must have wondered what the hell was going on!!!

My First Roast tasted like cardboard. 

The first few roasts were useless but once I got into the swing of things the results blew me away, the coffee was the best I had tasted, smooth, sweet and complex flavours that changed from roast to roast, I was loving this. Never satisfied though, once again I began to think of further improvements; the phrase ‘Bigger is Better’ came to mind.

I began to look at upgrading to a 1kg Roaster, this was a big step; the machine was €2800 and weighed 65kg! I was finding it hard to justify the upgrade, especially as my little Alpenrost was doing such a good job, then once again my future wife stepped in to help. One lazy Saturday I decided to teach her how to roast, I could go into detail of what happened but to cut a long story short after about 20 minutes we were standing in the kitchen filled with smoke, the fire alarm ringing and my lovely Alpenrost smouldering in the sink. As well as being a kleptomaniac (see previous post) I had discovered that she was also a pyromaniac.  To be honest I didn’t mind as it gave me the excuse I needed to plough ahead and buy the stupidly big, financially crushing and completely unnecessary roaster (I must have thought I was going to be the new Bewley’s!).

 My Roaster arriving (not me in the photo)

Ready for its new home

I ordered my Toper Cafemino and several months later it arrived, it was massive, what had I done? In another moment, of what I can only describe as complete and utter madness, I had also ordered a small amount of green beans to get me started……200kg to be exact.  To this day I still have no idea what the hell I was thinking.  

The next few weeks were a roller coaster ride and a very steep learning curve, I’d come a million miles from my lovely little Alpenrost. The ‘Cafemino’ machine was a little temperamental to say the least and took a bit of TLC to get the best roast, but my God the results were mind blowing. I was roasting a Java Blawn just into the beginning of the second crack, I had finally found my perfect cup, my Holy Grail of coffee, it had only taken all of my time, patience, money and a large part of my social life.

My love affair with this roasting beast unfortunately had to come to an end and after moving to new work premises (I had the machine in work) I had to let it go. I had been at the peak of my coffee perfection and now I was back to where I began. It’s not all bad though, as coffee culture begins to really take hold in Ireland, the emergence of the local artisan coffee roasters has given everybody access to mind blowing coffee and as I sit here, writing this, I am drinking a beautiful Sumatra Coffee, ordered on a Friday, roasted on a Monday and sitting in my grinder on a Tuesday.

As much as I appreciate other people skills and the beautiful coffee I can now buy, I still yearn to roast my own coffee again.  I have my new roaster picked out, hopefully in my kitchen in a few weeks, this time however I might keep my wife away from it as we all know where that can lead to!

Craig.