Coffee Tasting

Posted on 2011/02/12 12:09:57 (February 2011).

[Thursday 10th February 2011]
I'd made the mistake of sharing a list of what I considered to be good places for coffee in London with a colleague from the office who is clearly at the cutting edge of coffee geekery. He had poured scorn all over my list, and had determined to take me and a few other people from work today for a "field trip" to Notes Music & Coffee where they'd arranged for us a coffee tasting of four different coffees, each using a different bean and prepared by a different method - first a paper filter, then a cloth filter, then a complex contraption with a sort of bunsen burner which I think was just called a "syphon" (see the picture) and then one more which I wasn't really paying attention to as by that point I was in a caffeine induced haze (I'd rather stupidly forgotten this was happening today, and had a couple of espressos at the office before we came). They'd chosen different types of beans to suit each piece of apparatus, and went about the whole process with an impressively scientific rigour using stopwatches and thermometers - water temperatures had to be in a strict range, and the timings for both steeping and draining were also done to a precision.

I'm not even nearly enough of a coffee connoisseur to appreciate the coffees we had to their full but it certainly was a fun experience - it's always great to see this level of obsession over food and drink. I did particularly like the second coffee though - the one with the cloth filter - which had a really great oily feel to it - something you'd lose with a paper filter, and perhaps just wouldn't notice as much with the silt you get in a cafetiere.

In other news I phoned up to get my blood test results this afternoon, and it sounds like I probably don't have glandular fever. The sore throat had seemed to actually be going away the last few days, but then today I felt a distinct twinge again. That said, I also started to get a runny nose (and over the next couple of days I definitely developed a cold) so maybe it was a new unrelated sore throat?

In the evening Chie was out at her evening class again, so while I was waiting for her to come back I made curry - three different curries in fact: a vegetable balti, some saag aloo, and some mutter paneer. This all came out rather well I'm pleased to report.

Ah! Yes, I tried to develop coffee geekery a few years ago. Read-up and tasted copious amounts... In fact I probably still have all the books and equipment scattered around. I think, in the end, I decided it was better to *buy and drink* good coffee elsewhere rather than actually try to make it myself. Less self-recrimination that way!

Posted by Nigel at 2011/02/18 21:35:24.

Post a comment