To the victor belong the spoils.
Well the main course of this post is the video below. It’s sloppily edited and composed, but I hope it will give a flavour of the day. Being a judge for the semi-finals on the preceding day I did get to taste several of the finalists drinks as well as those of some of the other semi-finalists, and I can attest that I was surprised at how very high the overall standard was. (more…)
Earthy you say...
I wasn’t sure if I’d write this review. In fact, I had completely scrapped it. In the introduction / mission statement of this website I said it was the intention of this site to draw intention to what we thought was great, not to criticise what we didn’t like. At a certain point though, if everything is positive, there is no context and it becomes one big generic advertisement for coffee. We didn’t seek out some coffee so we could break our negativity cherry; there are far more obvious targets for that. Instead we ambled down to the M&D stall in Georges Arcade fully ready to buy some nice fresh coffee beans, make a few cups of this and that, and start singing the praises. Reality got in the way though. (more…)
The Other Black Stuff
Sitting in a courtyard in Covent Garden, drinking a cappuccino, this is where coffee came to life for me. I had drunk coffee before (mostly instant) but this was a watershed coffee, ordered in a whimsy. It made me aware that there was more to coffee than I had previously realised – warm, sweet, and satisfying. The problem now is that being ten or more years further along this coffee journey; I cannot remember if this coffee was any good. I suspect modern me would probably never have sat down in the place in the first instance. Instead I would have surreptitiously identified a glaring flaw with some element of the coffee preparation technique and exited stage-left without delay. That or I would have sat down, glanced at a neighbouring table, identifying “soap bubble” foam on top of a latté and resigned myself to having a tea or a soft-drink. If past me had not ordered that cappuccino though, modern me might not exist. The space-time continuum is in jeopardy. (more…)