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. 

Hi there… my name Is Craig and I’m a (coffee) cupaholic

Hi there… my name Is Craig and I’m a cupaholic…

Not many people know of my cup fetish as it’s not something a man in his mid-thirties would usually own up to… but I think the time has finally come for me to be honest with you all!

So here goes…It soon started after I had fallen in love with Coffee; one day while drinking from a particularly horrible specimen (you know the kind) I realised that I wasn’t enjoying the coffee I was drinking as much as I should or could!  Looking at the ugly, but functional, cup in my hand I recognised that it was the cup that was putting a dampener on this particularly good coffee and somehow I needed to remedy this.  So my eternal search for a good coffee cup began… and my cup fetish started.

 At the start it was a very basic obsession.   I was living at home with my folks and as you can possibly  imagine their cup collection was terrible…  every time I lovingly made my coffee using my hand grinder and stale Gloria gene beans (ah bless), I had to drink it out of my ‘favourite’ cup otherwise It just would not taste right.

As I progressed with my love of coffee I also progressed with my new obsession of cups! Cups became so important that I would avoid cafes that served coffee in the wrong receptacle (If I’m honest I still do this…) I believe if people can’t put the effort into choosing good cups it probably doesn’t bode well for the coffee quality, completely irrational I know!

After buying my first proper espresso machine I quickly realised I needed proper cups.  I scoured the internet and finally decided on the lovely 'Danesi Caffe' cups, 3 different sizes, espresso, americano and cappuccino.  I spent days making espresso and cappuccinos just to see what they looked and tasted like in these ‘amazing’ new cups.

My obsession with cups has even led to marriage (lucky girl!). I met my now wife about 6 years ago and it was soon after we met that she headed off to Italy for a few days with work. On this trip she visited the Ferrari car museum and factory where she had an espresso. She tried to buy the cup but they weren’t on sale… there she was sitting there looking at this small little cup and thinking how much her then ‘new’ boyfriend would love it, she even took a photo of it and sent it to me…she mentioned it to a colleague how much she wanted the cup and even though, as I mentioned previously the cups weren’t for sale, she still somehow managed to ‘acquire’ a Ferrari Factory espresso cup (she maintains that her colleague presented it to her later!... I’m not so sure!!!) That cup, one of the first of many that she has since given me, is now one of my favourite cups and it was after this that I knew that she was not only a keeper but also a kleptomaniac….

My latest craze is buying antique cups, I know most were originally tea cups but in my head, once coffee goes into them they become coffee cups. I have managed to get my hands on some beautiful old cups and my most recent purchase turned out to be a little gem.  While out in Enniskerry on a recent coffee trip I popped into a local antique shop; from across the shop I spotted a stunning and unusual old cup.  I really wanted it… with my best poker face on I casually asked how much, the old man behind the counter said “I’ll take a tenner”, “will you accept €8”, we shook hands,  the deal was done.

When I got home I began to look at the markings on the base of the cup and saucer, it’s like a little puzzle waiting to be solved, different letters, shapes, colours tell you different things… so from my research I discovered I had bought a rust colour ’jungle print’ pattern on ‘daisy shape’ cup and saucer from 1890 made by Shelley Folely Wileman, which are selling for between €40 - €60 on Ebay. My coffee cup obsession has now become an investment which is a fantastic justification for buying more cups.

So, does the right cup affect the taste of the coffee? I absolutely believe it does; maybe not for any physical reasons but for me the cup is as important as the beans, the grind, the water temperature, the water quality, the barista, the café … the cup is an essential piece of the jigsaw which creates the perfect coffee experience and for me the final piece in the puzzle.

By buying this expensive coffee equipment I’ll save money….or something like that.

By buying this expensive coffee equipment I’ll save money….or something like that.

 

 

Yes, it’s a phrase we have all uttered to justify some obscure, coffee equipment, purchase.  A few years ago I bought a coffee tamp for €70, I justified the purchase as 'value for money' as I’ll use it every day and have it for the rest of my  life, this is true... but I will also have the other 3 tamps I bought since for the rest of my life!  Now, I just buy what I need (want/afford) and don’t worry about the justification, it’s easier.

This brings me to a point where spending money on lovely, new, coffee equipment saved me money… genuinely.

My work used to be based in the middle of a bustling town that had 10 coffee shops, all serving reasonably good coffee, times were great.  We then decided to move to a new premise in a lovely new industrial estate in the middle of nowhere, this turned out to be a coffee disaster.  There was a little village beside the industrial estate with 2 coffee shops and a Spar, the Spar was a no go and the other 2 cafes were not much better; weak, burnt tasting coffee will not do.

It turned out the best coffee I could get was a 6/7 minute drive away, this does not seem like much but when you take into consideration the time waiting for a coffee and the return journey it was adding up to 20 minutes missing from the office every time I wanted a coffee (this doesn’t even include the 10 minutes of arguing about who's turn it was to go).

I’d had enough of this, I sat down and worked out that I was buying 3 cups of coffee a day, 5 days a week, 50 odd weeks a year; at €2.20 a coffee that adds up to €1650, this doesn’t even take into account my time/petrol/other people in the office. The decision was made; I was bringing coffee making in-house.

After a bit of research I settled for my home setup, Rancilio Silvia and Rocky grinder, at €600 it was good value. I now have my hobby in the office, great coffee and each cup costs about €0.20c, I went from spending €6.60 a day to €0.60 a day, adding up to a saving of €1500 a year (I also have a new home for one of my spare tamps).

Craig.

https://www.facebook.com/Coffeeshop.ie