Exile Coffee

I was caught on camera this year by Davy Mac (@davymac) at Barcamp Belfast, see if you can spot me

The ever pleasant, ever knowledgeable Steve Leighton of Has Bean fame, kindly lent me a prototype coffee roaster last month at the cost of a review. Being me, I promptly got caught up forgot about it and so last night was actually the first time I got to power it on.

About Our Ratings

Our ratings are not intended to cause offense, but instead hope to promote quality and good practice in the coffee industry, directing business owners to the areas that need improvement, providing a better experience for all.

I had the opportunity to tag along to the UKBC Regionals in Hillsborough on Wednesday, camera in tow. The set-up was definitely biased towards the competitors and judges, leaving us photographers clamoring for good angles and light. So, I did my best.

Yesterday was a long day, for no one more so than the baristas that competed in the Northern Ireland heat of the UK Barista Championship.

The live blog is long and rambling, I’ve moved it behind the link below to tidy up the front page a litte.

As posted on twitter earlier this year, I had intended on entering the UK Barista Championship’s Northern Ireland Heat, this Wednesday and Thursday in Hillsborough and as posted last week on twitter, I had changed my mind. The reason? As much I would like to think otherwise, not working in a retail environment is a serious detriment to a barista’s skill set. Everything from speed, workflow and consistency can all suffer from lack of practice and as mentioned in this post title, my latte art, especially, is a massive fail.

In the coffee shop environment I previously worked in, we used the machine below, a Basilia Belle Epoque, 2 Group. Although suffering from relatively small boiler size due to the vertical design there was enough pressure to run both groups and steam milk at the same time, for a fairly consistent period of time. Even though it was recommended here that it should not be used on a busy site, we rarely experienced problems.

On some recent trip to Belfast’s shiny new Apple Store, I took a walk down Anne Street (what is with the ugly half tile, have pot-holed tarmac street btw?) and found an absolute gem of a shop, The Cookie Box.

Now I know this blog is generally about coffee (or what passes as coffee) but to be honest I’ve never even tried any of the coffee there, because even walking past I was stopped in my tracks by the sights and smells of about a dozen different varieties of home made cookies. It’s only a small shop, opposite Forbidden Planet, and most of the room is taken up by the kitchen, almost putting the counter on the street itself, but what it lacks in size it makes up for in taste.

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I like Starbucks. There, I said it. I’m sure Steve will be spiking my next coffee order and I’ll have to start sleeping with my eyes open, but there is no denying the truth. In my defense, however, it is not for the reasons you may think. I’m not a slave to the corporate machine, I’m not a caffeine junkie, I don’t like huge sizes and I certainly don’t want a shot of vanilla and whipped cream in my cappuccino. The many faults of Starbucks, which have been flogged to death all over the web, are superfluous to my reasons. I want to focus on a few changes over the last year and whether or not they are nothing more than marketing ploys; the introduction of the ‘Pike Place Roast’ in the USA and the switching to Fair Trade in the UK.

My wife and I recently returned from a short break to Nice on the Cote D’azur (you have to love those cheap Ryanair flights) and I thought I should mention the copious amounts of coffee, drank on the trip. European, primarily Italian coffee holds a fabled place in the hearts of coffee aficionados, with good reason, with Italy being seen as the birthplace of the espresso and so on. Cafe culture in the south of France has a very similar feel to that of north Italy (random tour bus fact, Nice was the birthplace of the Italian unifier Garibaldi and almost became part of Italy). Walk into any cafe, restaurant, patisserie (of which there were many) and you will find a well used, sometimes quite rustic, espresso machine taking a pride of place on the counter.

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Over the coming weeks I hope to serialise a talk I recently gave at BarCamp Belfast. In this way and without the time constraint I hope to develop each point fully.

Irish barista Stephen "flyingthud" Morrisey won the World Barista Championship at the weekend.

Poppy Smith’s – Armagh
Score 62/100

It's a sleepy Sunday afternoon for me, after BarCamp Belfast yesterday and the media team in Church this morning. Time I think to relax, catch up on some reading and enjoy my new sample roasts.

I remember, at least I think I remember, (it could have been on televison), a time when staff in a shop were there to help and assist you, even if they were only after a sale. Fast-forward to the brave new world we live in and you’ll find the majority of shop staff are no longer there to help you or their company;

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Not just confused, but kinda dirty too. Why? Because I’ve just been in Starbucks and I really enjoyed it!

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I love jumping on the bandwagon, this time its Belfast’s new gem, Victoria Square.

To say that I like coffee is a bit of an understatement, people that know me would usually use words such as “obsessed” or “snob.”

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