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.

We have a new champion in Colin Harmon, who will represent Ireland in Atlanta in the April World Barista Championships. I think there are many who work in coffee in Ireland who may not have known Colin before the finals, and in some quarters his name wasn’t being mentioned as a potential winner (simply because he was a relative unknown – not because they thought he was crap). To the rest of us, who have seen how he has immersed himself in the deep end of coffee since ditching his career in finance (less than 1 year ago), there was little surprise. As his father said to me after the win, Colin has his family bored to tears listening to him go on about coffee. Well done mate, all those late nights have paid-off.

I make no apologies about the choice of songs on the clip, but I do apologise for the audio levels at the end and the interlacing, I may rectify that at some stage.

For now, enjoy…

2009 Irish Barista Championship from The Other Black Stuff on Vimeo.

PS if you click on through to where the video is hosted on Vimeo the quality is better (HD) and the interlacing is a lot less drastic.

HERE

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.

M&D (Moynihan & Dent) operate a stall in the funky Georges St Arcade. They sell a veritable plethora of

Doesn't look half bad here. Didn't taste half bad either. Not half...

beans and teas, and have probably the best selection of Moka pots and other quirky little brewers in Dublin. They also have a stall in the Farmer’s Market in Howth on a Sunday (and possibly elsewhere on other days). We wandered in anyway, and asked for a suggestion of something that would work well for espresso. The Cuban blend, which to me is one of the darkest, oilest roast I’ve ever seen, was not something I was eager to put in my grinder (the oil would linger imparting flavour on subsequent coffee). So the Java blend was suggested. I asked when it was roasted, and was told 4 days ago. Great I thought.

Bodum Vac Pot Top bowl of the Bodum Santos vac-pot with the Nuova Simonelli Grinta grinder in the background.

The beans, residing in big bins, were weighed and transferred to a plastic bag which was sealed. The bag had no valves, so I was slightly concerned that if it was 4 days post roast, the beans might still be degassing, and could cause a problem. Not the prettiest of containers, but functional. The sticker on the bag describes the blend as “A strong, dark roast coffee with an earthy flavour, lovely in the morning!”. The word Java has maybe lost its meaning in recent times and has merely become a synonym of coffee, or worse still a computer programming language. This Java, however, refers to the Indonesian island from which the coffee originates.

Vac Pot Brew The final stages of the vac pot brew. The heat is removed and the resulting vacuum draws the coffee down into the bottom bowl.

Normally we’d dial in the grinder and make a double espresso and a latté, but we didn’t get as far as the latté this time. On first inspection the espresso looked good; the colour was dark with some mottling. On closer inspection though, the crema was very bubbly, big bubbles instead of the expected microbubbles, and it seemed very thin for a coffee roasted only 4 days previously. Something was awry. To describe the taste as “rough” would be generous. The overriding flavour characteristic was earthiness (as promised), the body was thin, we debated whether there was a hint of sweetness and some brighter notes in the background, but we struggled hard. The thought crossed my mind that I’d been slipped a bag of robusta surreptitiously. We didn’t bother with a latté, and we didn’t finish the espresso. Instead we thought, maybe this really should be filter only, and we got the vac-pot out of the press to test this hypothesis.

Oh how I love my vac-pot, except when it clogs, which is frequent enough. On this day though, it behaved itself. Vac-pots (also known as siphon coffee makers) fall into the broader category of devices for making filter coffee, which includes press-pots, drip filters, and others. The basic principle is that you have two bowls separated by a filter. A long tube from the top bowl penetrates towards the end of the bottom bowl. In the top bowl you place the ground coffee, in the bottom bowl the water. Then you apply heat. As the water heats in the bottom bowl, the increasing gas pressure forces the now hot water up into the top bowl. You keep the heat on for a couple of minutes to brew the coffee, and then remove the heat. As the bottom bowl cools the gases contract creating a vacuum. This vacuum draws the coffee through the filter leaving the grinds in the top bowl and beautifully smooth tasty coffee in the bottom.

At least that’s the theory. No matter what you’re brewing with you can’t improve the bean you start with. As a filter coffee M&D Java seemed somewhat more suited. Still though, it wasn’t great. It all tasted a bit flat, apart from the aforementioned earthiness. In fairness to them, they say on the front of the bag that it’s “earthy”. It’s earthy at the expense of nearly everything else though. Some people like Marmite, so maybe I can appreciate the possibility that this is to someone’s taste, but neither of us liked it. If you had told me someone put some soil in the end of my cup, I might have believed you, and that’s where I’ll finish flogging these beans to death.

Perhaps it is unfortunate that this is the first coffee from M&D we have chosen to review. I don’t want this review to paint them in a bad light; I think they do some interesting coffees. The Cuban coffee I mentioned before, I have had previously, and I’ve seen merit in it. It’s roasted to the point where the roast flavour is very prominent, but there are some cool funky flavours lurking in there too (you just might have to clean your grinder when you’re finished). We’ll endeavour to look at another M&D bean sooner rather than later and see if we have some kinder impressions to offer.

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.

Modern me, despite being more than a little obsessed with coffee, does not drink a lot of coffee outside of the home. Modern me is an embittered snob. To my discredit I look down my nose at the unwashed masses drinking their lattés (most often), accepting mediocrity, unaware of the flaws – ignorance is bliss. I held myself back as I witnessed a woman who received a latté and complained that she had ordered a cappuccino was satiated by the addition of some cocoa powder to the top of the foam. I look at coffee chains opening new stores all the time, and my heart breaks for the shiny new La Marzoccos and Mazzers that will never produce a great espresso, or cappuccino, or latté.

I go to restaurants, award winning restaurants whose chefs clearly have an appreciation for taste and flavour, chefs so skilled that they make haute cuisine seem effortless. These same restaurants produce espresso that can only be described as effortless; a dark black liquid bereft of flavour and aroma, with an imperceptibly thin crema. I just spent €30 on some halibut – couldn’t you spend 50c on some fresh coffee beans? Needless to say, more and more I am rounding off my dinner with a glass of port instead (Coffee 0 Alcoholism 1).

The situation is not uniformly grim though. Both established and up-and-coming pioneers exist who are driving quality coffee in all parts of this country. Some of these are nationally and internationally recognised names, while others have a more local reputation. Irish coffee importers travel the world; they cup samples of the latest crops. They taste the coffee at origin, trying to identify that lot of coffee to add to their next blend. They often spend far more than fair-trade price on these coffees. There are big roasters who supply supermarkets, multiple independent coffee retailers, and some of the coffee chains. Bewleys for example has done more to push speciality coffee in Ireland than anyone else and have been doing so since well before coffee became trendy.

Latte Pour

There are medium sized roasters supplying cafés and also the end-user (you and me). One advantage these guys have perhaps is that they do not have the unjustly quaint reputation that Bewleys has in some quarters. Despite the growing commercialisation of these medium sized roasters they still have an air of the independent “artisan” about them. Then there are the smaller guys selling roasted coffee on the internet, in farmers markets, or in their independent café. At all points on this scale you can see that there is appreciation for what makes great coffee. Conversely, even down to the artisan guys, you can see the concessions made in the name of remaining viable (pre-ground beans going stale on supermarket shelves).

At the retail end the chains dominate, and the masses flock, comforted by the familiarity and uniformity. Not all of these chains are equal, but nearly all have a lot of room for improvement. Typically observed problems are: filter baskets insufficiently cleaned between shots, stale beans, dosers full of ground coffee going stale, under-extracted shots, topping up already hot milk with cold for steaming (mmm bacteria), and overheating the milk. Many independent retailers are equally culpable, and the increasing domination of the market by the chains is inevitable if these independent retailers don’t demonstrate the potential for greater quality.

There are some great examples to follow. Perhaps they are not immediately obvious, but if you search them out you will find them. There are the Italian guys whose heads were wetted in the Italian espresso scene, whose baseline for a good espresso tends to be quite high. If you follow a group of Italians around for long enough maybe they will lead you to these places. There are plenty of Irish guys too, in Dublin, Galway, Cork, and elsewhere who “get it”. They understand the importance of freshly roasted, freshly ground beans. They train their staff to know the difference between good and bad coffee. They insist on better coffee. These guys don’t live in isolation though. Behind them there is the chain. The chain goes back from retailer, to roaster, to importer / buyer, ultimately to the co-op or farm where the green coffee emanates.

Naked Portafilter

Surely the guys making the brilliant coffee are rolling in the euros and like a virus the idea of quality speciality coffee is spreading? It’s not that simple. The unwashed masses I referred to previously are in fact the greatest obstacle to improving the standard of coffee commonly accessible in Ireland. No one really wants to create crap coffee, everyone wants to take pride in their product, but the roadside is strewn with the corpses of coffee shops with principles. What’s the point in getting the finest beans, and observing the best standards and preparation techniques if your customers neither understand nor appreciate the difference? Despite the increasing familiarisation with terms like macchiato, ristretto and arabica, they are little more than buzz-words to many.

With this in mind it is the objective of this website to draw attention to those in the Irish coffee scene who strive for excellence, not to criticise those who fail to meet these standards, because ultimately the market defines the standards, and our market is not there yet. This website wants great coffee in Ireland to become the norm. Moving the standard of coffee forward in Ireland need not be an exclusive elitist effort. In fact to really succeed it cannot be that. Through awareness, passion, and example the bar can be raised for everyone. If this website, in any small way can put a little spotlight on those whose cross this is to bear, then it will have succeeded.

Modern me wants to drink more coffee outside of the home.

P.S. This website does not advocate stalking Italians.

P.P.S. Maybe a little.