In my previous blog post, I looked at some of the essential items you need in order to create a set up at home to create great espresso. I focused primarily on espresso machines and the different types on the market – in this blog post, I want to look at some of the other bits of equipment you need to complete your set up, including grinders and measuring equipment. Should I buy a grinder with my espresso machine? Absolutely 100% yes!!! Coffee reacts very aggressively with oxygen. When we grind coffee, we produce billions of little particles that then react with the surrounding air. This happens so fast, that you will measurably lose aroma and flavour within the first 3 minutes after grinding. Your coffee will taste stale and will not reveal its full potential. Which grinder should I buy? There are so many grinders on the market, it’s hard to say in one word. So let’s talk about the types of grinders first. We have conical burr grinders, flat burr grinders and blade grinders. Blade grinders are more like blenders, they crush the coffee and create a quite inconsistent particle size. This is absolutely ok if you want to make filter coffee, but for espresso we definitely need a very fine and even particle size. Conical burr grinders often work with smaller rotation values ​​than disc grinders, but are not quite as uniform in terms of the grinding result.In grinders with a conical grinder, the coffee beans are crushed between the inner cone and the outer wall. The distance between the cone and the wall becomes smaller and smaller, so that the beans are ground more and more finely. The degree of grinding can be changed via the distance between the cone and the wall. In contrast to a disc grinder, the grist is not carried to the side, but rather falls down - and into a collecting container. For this reason, the speed of a conical grinder is lower and the coffee is ground very gently. Disc grinders/flat burr grinders are the most widely used today. The beans are ground between two inwardly curved grinding discs lying on top of one another. One of the two discs is driven by a motor, the other is stationary. The distance between the two panes is slightly larger on the inside than on the outside. The bean gets between the discs from the inside, is broken up here and then transported further outwards by centrifugal force. Since the grinding discs are closer together on the outside, the bean is ground finer and finer. To adjust the degree of grinding, the distance between the discs is changed. The grinding discs are mostly made of steel or ceramic and are very durable if it is a good coffee grinder. What material should my grinder be made of? In my experience a solid espresso grinder doesn’t cost less than 400 Euros. There are exceptions of course, for example hand grinders that are very durable but they also cost about 230 Euros and obviously you have to manually grind each dose. There are two main materials used to make coffee grinders, both of which can affect the quality of the coffee you’re making: (i) stainless steel, and (ii) ceramic. Stainless steel grinders are becoming increasingly more popular among coffee fanatics. While some purists swear by ceramic, these blades have a couple important features worth considering. Stainless steel, because it contains chromium, is corrosion resistant. So, these grinders should not rust when you wash them. However, steel does conduct heat and these grinders are slightly more affected by hot environments, shortening their lifespans. Also, these blades will lose their sharpness faster than a ceramic blade. But, stainless steel will start out much sharper than ceramic, giving you more precision in your grinding. This means you can expect more uniformity with these grinders. They also don’t typically produce any fines, which can help increase the longevity of your filters. But this also means that your espresso may taste a little different. With a steel grinder, you are going to get a cup that tastes and feels clean in your mouth. Because of the precision you can expect with a steel blade, you´ll be looking forward to coffee that is brewed exactly how you like it regardless of what brewing method you use. That being said, steel grinders, both automatic and manual, work especially well with alternative brewing methods such as pour-over and French press. They are also preferred for single-source, non-espresso beans. Ceramic grinders are currently more popular than steel for domestic use. There are a couple of reasons for this, but it's mainly due to their high-strength blades, which are especially long-lasting. They start off less sharp than a steel blade; however they will retain their original sharpness almost indefinitely. However, ceramic will not stand up so well against bigger impacts. So if it stays on your counter, it’ll last you a long time – just don’t drop it or put anything too strange in your grinder. Also, some coffee-connoisseurs like to claim that because ceramic does not conduct heat, you won’t have to worry about the temperature affecting the oils in your coffee. However, aside from a few vehement palates, there is little to no evidence to back this up. While heat conduction might be irrelevant, the fact that ceramic does not rust or otherwise deteriorate when exposed to warm environments or moisture can be a considerable plus. These kind of burrs are mainly used in manual grinders. What else do I need? The most important and most under-appreciated item to make coffee is a SCALE!!! Making coffee means following a recipe. If I am trying to bake bread and just add whatever I feel like, I will most likely not get the same results. It’s going to be wildly inconsistent!!! It seems like the hardest challenge for me to convince not only home baristas but even baristas that work in cafes to use scales. It is so important, I can’t even emphasise it enough. If you do not weigh your coffee, you will never get the same result twice and you can not dial in your coffee and changing grind size will not make any sense. Let's use the following recipe as our go to recipe: 18g in the basket 38g out 25 second extraction time Without a scale, I cannot check any of these variables. Because the extraction time depends not just on the grind size but also on the amount of coffee that we use. If I use 18g and my extraction time is only 15 seconds, I will have to change my grind size to a finer grind setting. If my coffee with 18g is running 45 seconds for 38g out, I will have to use a coarser grind setting. To make life a little bit easier with handling the output weight, I think for at home it is definitely ok to use a shot glass with a mark so you know roughly if it's enough. URBAN MYTH: You can not make a full cup of coffee with an espresso machine!!! Our espresso has a set recipe. Letting more water pass the basket until the cup is full will only extract bitterness! Your coffee will taste bitter and washed out. What you should do is: prepare a cup, fill it up with hot water out of the hot water output on your machine and let your espresso run on this water. We call this americano if using a single shot of espresso or long black if using a double shot. But what is very important to know: there is NO SUCH THING as a cafe crema!!! This is simply an invention for full automatic machines and does not work for espresso machines. Additional equipment I recommend a tamper that fits perfectly into your basket. The machines all have different diameters but are easy to find out online. A tamping mat will also help you to keep your kitchen bench protected. Microfiber cloths are a perfect and sustainable solution to keep your machine and portafilter clean and can be washed at 90 degrees, perfect to get rid of any milk germs. They are also a good tool to clean the portafilter instead of using a brush, as the cloth cleans the basket and dries it at the same time. A knockbox should be appropriate for the amount of coffee waste that you will be producing, to save space, I recommend a draw that fits underneath the grinder. This way you can also just swipe the coffee that might have sprayed into the draw with a… A grinder brush will help you to keep your grinding area clean, and will be helpful when you want to get into hard-to-reach places, such as the inside of your grinder or machine. If you are into milk and latte art, there are so many different companies nowadays that specialize in making the best latte art jugs. Just keep in mind, you are making the patterns, not the jug. Once you have all your equipment sorted, and you weigh your coffee, you will get way more consistent results. If you want to know more about how to store your coffee, check out my article about ageing coffee and if you want to know more about dialling in, read my article “how to dial in coffee” I hope you found this helpful and if you have any questions or suggestions, please do not hesitate to message me via my contact page.

All across the world, there is an increasing number of people that are choosing to prepare their coffee at home. From affordable, small and automatic pod machines to expensive, high-tech espresso machines, there’s an ever-growing number of ways to prepare espresso without leaving your house. As a Barista Trainer, I get in touch with a lot of coffee passionate people that want to improve their home barista experience. Most of the time my students are very frustrated, as they do not seem to be able to get a consistent result and feel like coffee is always a ‘hit-and-miss game. That is why I want to talk about the basics of how to extract great espresso at home (without getting frustrated). In the following, I provide a quick guide to how to set up your ‘coffee corner’ at home, covering what I believe are some essential items and knowledge to get your home brewing to cafe standard. Knowing the difference between espresso machines The decision to buy an espresso machine often comes out of passion, love and the romantic idea that you can serve latte art heart cappuccinos to impress all your friends and loved ones. The market is currently full of a range of espresso machines, starting at 100 Euros up to 6000. Before you go out and spend all of your savings, it’s important to know the difference between the two main types of espresso machines: the single circuit system and the dual circuit system. If you are a strong believer in espresso, black, no milk and no latte art needed, then you will be fine with a single circuit system machine. These machines are usually cheaper as they have only one boiler that heats up the water. You can set this boiler, which is usually quite small (about 300 mL) to two different temperatures. Either around 94 degrees for your espresso extraction, or if you have a guest that insists on milk foam, you can set the boiler to just over 100 degrees to make some steam. This temperature change will take a couple of minutes and will only produce a very limited amount of steam. Another downfall for the latte lovers is that the pressure of the steam is quite minimal and might dilute the milk. However, if you are interested in making a solid espresso, this machine will be perfect for you. On the other hand, the dual circuit system machines have a steam and hot water boiler, as well as an additional heat exchanger (or in some cases, two boilers). The water that you will need for making espresso will only come through the heat exchanger and will be heated to 93/94 degrees. The boiler is much bigger that the one in the single circuit machine (usually more than 1 litre), and is able to constantly produce steam. You will have a separate manometer for your steam pressure that shows 1.2 bar for your steam and 9/10 bar for the group head. With this machine you can simultaneously pull espresso shots and steam milk, which is perfect if you want to create some beautiful milk beverages. What should I pay for my home machine? Unfortunately, owning an espresso machine can be a pricey hobby. I would recommend machines above 1300 Euros, as they are just built better (in my experience) and the price tag reflects the quality. This doesn’t mean that you need to buy the most expensive machine available. Remember, you also need to calculate other purchases, such as a grinder and extra equipment like a tamper, a tamping mat, a knockbox, cloths and milk jugs (more on this in the next post). When shopping around for a machine, I would recommend checking the materials used in the machine. What material is the boiler made from? Anything with aluminium is much cheaper, but also a no go because it corrodes and can be harmful to your health. I would go for stainless steel boilers as they are durable and high performing - but of course, they’re also more expensive. Decalcifying: Urban Myth Contrary to popular belief, you can NOT decalcify your two circuit system Machine!!! If you add a decalcifier to your water tank, the machine will suck this water into the boiler that always has a level of water in it. That means you now will always have decalcifier in your hot water boiler and that is probably quite toxic. These machines can only be decalcified by a proper technician with an ultrasonic bath (which can be expensive). You should bring your machine for a small maintenance to a workshop once per year, and every five years it needs a big service. When using a two circuit system machine, you should always use filtered water – I suggest a filtering system like the ones BWT are offering, otherwise some people use bottled water (but that is just wildly unsustainable). To read more about essentials in creating your home espresso set up, check out Part 2 of this guide here!

What do we mean when we say ‘tasting’, and how important is it for specialty coffee? Understanding tasting is one of the most interesting journeys I have ever been on. Developing the ability to taste and understand coffee has helped to not only become better at what I do, but to gain a better perspective of the world of coffee and the potential we have to improve quality. Everyone has an ability to taste. Taste helps us to define what is edible and if goods are expired or inedible, or even poisonous.These areas of the tongue can be developed differently with each person but what is clear is that we all have the ability to taste. In the below, I want to talk about how we taste, how we can develop our tasting skills and why it is so important for specialty coffee. How do we taste? In a very rudimentary understanding, our tongue can taste five basic flavours - sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami. Umami is especially important as it helps us to define textures, combined flavours and aftertaste. Our tongue is made up of several different areas, all of which are sensitive to different tastes and sensations. The below image is a bit deceptive - it isn’t the case that only the tip of the tongue tastes sweetness; it’s more that this area is the most sensitive to sweetness. Our entire tongue is able to identify and experience different sensations. What is difficult is that modern food and new ingredients compromise our ability to differentiate between certain flavours. Salt and sugar are typically used in very high concentrations in most pre-made groceries and drinks. These high concentrations desensitise our natural taste buds and if we then drink anything sour or bitter, the experience we have is out of proportion. This is why most people find it difficult to taste sweetness, particularly in coffee. We’ve all had that customer who has tasted a sweet espresso and said “Ugh, this is bitter!” It is more likely the case that they are used to such concentrated levels of sweetness (say, in a can of Coca-cola) that their perception of sweetness is desensitised. Acidity and bitterness are usually quite dominating, and get mixed up a lot to the point that consumers don’t even know if their taste actually is bitter or sour - they just know its not sweet enough for their taste. The base of tasting is learning to appreciate food and drinks without additives or concentrations of one particular sensation, such as sweetness. I had the luxury to get my food knowledge from scratch, because I did a chef's apprenticeship and learned a lot about taste and flavour during this time. I learned to smell ingredients very actively, to take time to soak up everything a dish had to offer, to understand what boiling or heat in general does to it and how it changes the experience. Smelling is just as important as tasting as it helps you to identify flavours. It also helps our brain to memorise, create neural pathways to identify sensations, and to connect certain emotions to taste, all of which is very important to help remembering taste profiles. Even if we commonly distinguish taste as one sense and smell as another, they work together to create the perception of flavour. If you’re looking to develop your tasting skills, the first step is to avoid pre-made, artificial products or additives. The key to learn more about tasting and even to taste more is to strip back and eat and drink more pure. Put down that lemonade, and instead try to smell and taste a fresh lemon! Go to the local farmers’ market and smell the difference between varieties of tomatoes, or taste the difference in acidity between a red apple and a green apple. Learning about taste isn’t just great for your skills in coffee - it’s a delicious journey! Why is taste so important for experiencing coffee? Coffee is a very complex beverage and has an overwhelming amount of different flavours that can be tasted simultaneously, as well as followed by each other. It also changes its flavour drastically with temperature. Only a few degrees can change your taste from chocolate at 68 degrees to red apple at 60 degrees. Because these flavours are so delicate and volatile, tasting the fine differences is difficult; however, once you understand them a whole world of flavour will open its doors. There are many great resources you can use in order to help guide your journey in tasting - I highly recommend the SCA flavour wheel, as well as its explanation in the sensory lexicon by the World Coffee Research team. Once you read through those flavours it gets easier to understand what ‘vegetative’ means, what exactly we mean when we say ‘fresh’ or ‘stale’, and what we can refer to in other ingredients. The most important training part is to constantly repeat and continue tasting - in coffee, this means actively analysing the coffee every day. I use my dial-in sheets every day that I work behind the bar to measure the sweetness, acidity and texture of the coffees I am preparing, and make sure to add tasting notes as I go. In my opinion, that is the only way you can practically develop your taste buds and understand differences in coffees, particularly when you are working behind a bar. If you have the opportunity to do this several times a day, you will notice how the flavour of coffee can change ever within a day as a result of temperature, humidity and exposure to oxygen. How can we use tasting for dialling in? For dialling in coffees I have a very simple rule. The coffee should be as ‘sour’ as it is ‘bitter’. If the coffee is balanced in the middle of these two sensations and neither of them is too overpowering, we can focus on finer tasting notes like certain fruits, chocolates or flowers. If your coffee gets too salty it is often worth checking the water quality. If you want you and your whole team to get better at tasting and also to get calibrated I would recommend the following steps: Dial your coffee in together every day. Whenever I am at the coffee machine, I dial in one Coffee just for regular milk beverages, one different coffee for oatmilk ( the oat milk blend is usually more chocolaty and a bit heavier) and then we have an espresso that is served without milk. On top of that we have a batch brew, that changes every day. Taste how the espresso tastes together with the milk. It’s no use tasting an espresso by itself if you’re planning to serve it with milk, as the sweetness and fat of the milk will shift the balance you’ve achieved with the espresso. Ask yourself questions like, ‘How much milk weight do I use?’, ‘Is the espresso more intense with 38g out or with 40g?’, or ‘Is 100g milk enough or should I go up to 110g?’ Once I’ve hit the sweet spot with my dialling in, I am writing these parameters down on dial-in sheets (located at the end of this blog post). Kind of like this: Coffee: Sinfonia Age: 18 days Dose in: 19 g Dose out: 38g Seconds: 26 sec Flavour notes: Milk chocolate, super sweet, dulce de leche Those little dial in cards are attached to all grinders in the shop so that everyone knows the dial in of each coffee. They are laminated, and I can write on them with a white board marker. This way, I can clean them after the shift and write a new recipe on them the next day (which is not only convenient, but saves you wasting paper every day). For the Batch brew it is quite similar: Coffee: Chelchele Ethiopia natural Age" 14 days Dose in: 105 g Water / Temperature 1.6L / 95 degrees Grind Size: EK 14.75 Flavour notes: Clean, apricot, peach, creamy candy Why is this important? So any person, even the ones that aren’t that experienced in tasting coffees yet, have a guideline on not just how to make this coffee but also what to tell the customers. It is important to learn that taste changes and that dialling in can be quite fragile and emphasise on different expressions of this coffee every single time. Tasting and dialling in together Once I have dialled the coffees in, all the people working in the cafe taste them together. It is important to start with the filter coffee/ batch brew, because it will probably taste the lightest and you need a fresh and clean pallet before trying it. After we all agree on the flavours we jump over to espresso. It is very important to stir the crema in the espresso to get a round taste experience! I usually stir my espresso 5-10 times before trying it in three sips. This way I realised I get the most out of the coffee and also can taste light unpleasantries better and can correct them afterwards. Our next taster is the milk beverage, in our case a classic cappuccino with a single shot of espresso and usually around 110g of steamed milk. Usually we get overwhelmed by the sweetness of this coffee and even if I usually don’t drink milk and it is perfectly fine to use a spit cup and not drink it, I think I realised how important it is to really dial in your milk coffees. These are the most consumed drinks at a coffee bar, so just focusing on serving a brilliant hand-filter twice a day is not going to be enough. If we want to be top notch we have to give the same attention to all our drinks. The last coffee we try is the oat milk coffee, as this alternative milk gets ordered nearly as much as normal milk and to be honest, I am really very proud that our oat milk coffees taste just so amazing. We have actively decided that the normal milk blend isn’t the right fit for the oat milk and tried many many different single origins and blends to come up with a perfect fit for our oat milk drinks. They usually taste like hazelnut buttercream candy and I just love it. If you are to take anything away from the above, it should be this: Write everything down and make it easy to access for everyone working with you. This will improve the quality and consistency of coffee not just for you, but for your whole team Taste everything together and talk about what you taste. It can be intimidating to express your opinion in a room full of people when it comes to taste - however, the more you do it, the less scary it will become. It will also help you to learn how other people taste, allow you to calibrate and to share knowledge with your team. Use tools and guides. Taste something familiar, but you can’t quite put your finger on what it is? Sometimes it is helpful to think in colours as our brain associates colours more easily with flavour: “This espresso tastes light red, with an orange finish.” This is where flavour wheels are so helpful - it can help you to associate these colours with flavours! How does temperature affect taste experience? When we are tasting espresso and especially filter brews, we should always consider that coffee is extremely organic and it reacts extremely well to temperature changes. For other products, it isn’t always the case; beverages like Cola or beer taste best at a preferred drinking temperature. Coffee, however, can change its expression as the temperature changes, without compromising on quality, and can develop different qualities when it cools down. On my dial-in sheets, I include hot, medium and cold drinking temperatures. There are very few customers who will drink an entire coffee when it’s freshly made and hot, so it’s important to understand how they will experience their coffee as it cools. Make sure to taste coffee not only when it’s freshly made, but to taste the development and change in flavours as the temperature changes. Realising how the flavour changes will help you adjust your brewing temperatures and understand different coffees better. For example, I recently made an Ethiopian natural filter coffee with 91 degrees (Celsius) hot water. I tasted lots of chocolate notes when it was hot, but cooling down it developed a beautiful stone fruit quality which ended cold in peach and cream. Imagine you’re a customer and the barista tells you not only initial tasting notes, but how the coffee will taste and change over 10 minutes! You would feel like you are learning something, that the barista not just knows their stuff but is also concerned about your taste experience. If I was that customer, I would be in heaven. Why are tasting skills important in the long term? I am releasing more and more how important it is to be calibrated with your team so you can push together in the right direction or at least in the same direction and build up a brand flavour. It is also crucial to understand what you are actually selling. A barista that never tries their own drinks is driving blindfolded, and will not be able to relate to any customer feedback. Once we start really putting our focus on the flavours that we consume, we will elevate not just our tongue but our mindset on what flavour can be and what I can do with it. A good example is when I am training for competitions and I have to make up recipes for example for coffee cocktails. These recipes can only be made if you understand how your flavours work together and what they are based on. Another very important part in working with coffee is sourcing and deciding which coffees you want to offer. And it is as easy as this: if you don’t taste the coffee that is on the market and that other roasters offer, you don’t know what’s trending. I am constantly ordering coffee from all over the world to stay updated and this way I can go into a cupping session and tell the importers very clearly what I am looking for. How can I improve my tasting abilities? By taking yourself time to actively analyse taste and aroma and to write it down. In addition to our dial in sheets, we have a coffee diary in which we record recipes that we’ve used - that way, if I have trouble with one coffee I can look back at the dial from last week and see what a co-worker has done, or I can ask the roaster if they have changed anything. Often it happens that they then say “Ah yes, we had to change the ratio” or “We have a new crop for this blend”. This helps me learn and realise what I have to change with this coffee now. Maybe the dose, maybe the temperature. I know I’ve already said it, but smell is just as important as tasting with your mouth - so smell whatever surrounds you! Smell the vegetables in the supermarket, the fruits at the market, drink natural wine and compare that to beer, or even just do small experiments with your brews. Does stirring change my flavour experience? Is this coffee different hot or cold? How does appreciating the aroma change the overall experience of taste? Unfortunately, taste is where most people working in coffee struggle (at least, in my experience). They want to know how coffee works and how it tastes, but haven’t gone out of their way to develop their sense of taste. Stay curious, question yourself and find other ways, write everything down and then start again with a new coffee. I hope you found this article useful. It was so much fun writing it and if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to message me. If you really liked my words, feel free to share this article with your colleagues and friends. Happy tasting, Nicole

As a Barista that also works in retail, I often hear comments from my customers such as “I want a coffee with Robusta because that makes better crema”, or my favourite one, “A good espresso has a thick crema”. For a lot of people, the importance of crema is clearly bigger than what I actually believe it to be, at least as an indicator of coffee quality. For this reason, in this blog post I want to talk about why coffee has crema, how it tastes, what it tells us about extraction, how important it is for the taste experience. Importantly, I want to talk about how marketing has implanted a picture of crema into the consumers head that is seriously questionable. Why does coffee have crema? During the roasting process, coffee builds up a high concentration of CO2 (carbon dioxide). Whenever you brew a freshly roasted coffee, you will notice that it starts bubbling and expanding as soon as the hot water hits the dry coffee bed, or when it pours out of the portafilter. In filter coffee, we refer to this as “blooming”, an important step to release the CO2 out of the coffee and to prepare the coffee to give us all of it’s beautiful flavour. When we are making espressos, the pressure that we use is much, much higher than just gravity methods like filter coffees, such as pour overs. The water that passes through the coffee bed with up to 9 bars pressure can hold much more of the existing CO2 from the coffee; as soon as it passes through the coffee, the pressure dissipates from the liquid. The CO2 that was extracted due to the pressure from the machine now pops into million little bubbles that rise to the surface of the espresso. These millions of little bubbles form a layer, which is what we call ‘crema’. You might notice more crema on fresher coffee as it still contains more CO2; similarly, you will notice less crema on lighter roasted, or older coffees. This is valuable information for every barista as we can now react on the way that we dial in our coffees, using different brewing temperatures and grind sizes and maybe even adjusting the pressure of the machine. What it doesn’t tell us is, if a coffee is good or bad – it’s just different. A (super) short history of espresso Let us go back in time to the start of the 20th century. Back then, the vast majority of the coffee sold in Europe was Arabica. Italy has just invented the commercial espresso machine, a big hot boiler that made espresso with pressure. Unlike our machines today, you couldn’t set back then was the temperature - so all the coffee was made with water that was nearly 98-99 degrees C. By our current standards, this temperature burned the coffee and made it bitter but nevertheless, this was the first espresso introduced to the European market. Then, there was a period of very difficult times between the economic crisis, war and more war. Coffee was not the most important thing that people had to worry about, so the USA was able to benefit from their close access to coffee in the America, and bought more coffee to be used in their traditional filter coffees. After World War II, the European economy slowly got better and people wanted to finally drink (more) coffee again. So many people, in fact, that the market couldn’t keep up with the demand. So, producers and importers researched and discovered a species in 1897 that was easier to grow, cultivate and be grown at a wide range of altitudes: Robusta. As it was easier to cultivate, the caffeine content was higher and the beans were generally quite large, it was easier to make more profit. The only problem was that it tasted completely different to the more commonly known species, Arabica. In comparison, Robusta was bitter and harsh - however, it produced much more crema. The idea was to use smaller amounts of the bitter Robusta coffees, and to blend them with the higher quality Arabica beans, in order to cover the growing demand. From this, the classic 80:20 coffee blend was born. To make the difference between both coffees less obvious, the industry roasted all the coffees quite dark so that the consumer couldn’t taste the difference anymore (or they just didn’t know how to roast well). Importantly, some really smart marketing people remembered that the machines at the start of the century were so hot, that they mainly produced bitter coffee. That was a perfect disguise for the new also very bitter coffee and the phrase “Italian roast” was established. This style of coffee was so bitter that it was nearly undrinkable without sugar. So, these clever marketing people advertised these blends with phrases like ‘Your crema should be so thick, it has to hold the sugar for at least x amount of time.’ Some companies referred to this as the “sugar test”, and in some places is still considered a mark of quality for espresso. Even today, in some parts of Italy many people say "Quando il cucchiaio sta a piedi, c'e abbastanza zucchero nel caffe", which roughly means, "When the spoon stands up straight, there's enough sugar in your coffee". I still remember these advertisements, and have experienced the 'sugar test' and 'spoon test' first hand on my trips to Italy. These ads, combined with the persistence of these 'tests' during the emergence of modern coffee culture, have resulted in many people thinking that this is how espresso was supposed to be consumed. But the question remains – why add sugar if you could just start drinking coffee that is not unbearably bitter? So, a quick recap: The consumer wanted coffee, the market found a cheaper coffee, and blended and roasted it very dark. This resulted in bitter coffee with lots of crema. This is how generations of people drank coffee and think that this is the only way how coffee should taste like. And that is ok. I’m not in a position to tell people that their perception of taste is bad, because taste is heavily involved with emotions – if that was the first taste experience they had and this moment was really nice, they will always say this is the best taste. What I can do is tell people there are other tastes which are more delicate, more refined and less bitter, and I can invite them to discover it with me. This way, we can celebrate new coffees that focus more on the product, rather than on the marketing. How does crema taste? If you ever drink just the crema of a coffee you will realise that it tastes quite bitter and harsh, kind of like if you only taste the foam of a draft beer without drinking the refreshing liquid itself. And it makes sense. It is, after all, a lot of CO2 and it binds a lot of the non soluble substances in the coffee like small particles, oils and sometimes even ash. Now that sounds horrible and it nearly gives me the feeling I should take the crema completely off the espresso. But sometimes a little bit of bitterness can add a new dimension to your espresso, especially if it is a lighter roasted coffee. Every time I drink an espresso I take a spoon and stir a couple of times. This way I can mix all my layers and experience the full potential of the coffee. It also helps to cool down the espresso, and that also often reveals more sweetness and clearer fruit structures. What can we see in the crema? You might notice sometimes that the crema in an espresso has dots or even ‘tiger stripe’ patterns (see image below). These are the visual representation of your extraction. If the contrast is super high (meaning you have really dark spots in your crema), that can show an over-extraction of your coffee, meaning it has extracted too much and can taste bitter. A pale light beige crema can show you under extraction, which results in a sour coffee with little body. Your crema might also change depending on the shape of your cup. Smaller cups will hold more crema, as the millions of little bubbles are in a thicker layer and will take longer to dissipate, whilst wider cups will spread the crema into a very thin layer and disappear more quickly. Taste testing different espressos, I have come across light roasts that are incredibly elegant and clean and when served in a wider cup, this coffee will have a heavier body and a different mouthfeel than it would in a classic espresso cup. A very thick crema can be a sign of a very fresh (maybe too fresh) coffee; or on the other hand, it can mean that the roast was super dark. So actually, the commercial image of a super thick crema with lots of tiger stripes on it would be a coffee that I and many other specialty baristas probably wouldn’t enjoy drinking. How important is crema for our taste experience? Despite what I have said above, crema is an important part of espresso. An ideal espresso is one that is balanced – not leaning too much into sweetness, fruit qualities or florality, but one that encompasses sweetness, acid, bitterness and different expressions of tactile (mouthfeel and texture). In this way, the bitterness, thickness and occasional oiliness of crema is an important part of balancing out the thinner, more sharp and more acidic components of the espresso that are in the lower layers of the cup. If you mix the crema with the rest of the extracted liquid, it can give you this creamy or silky mouthfeel, as well as add body and texture to your espresso. What I find so exciting about this is that the amount of stirring and mixing you do will change the temperature of the espresso, which will change the taste experience (ever heard a barista competitor say "Stir 5 times"? That's why). When I dial in a new coffee, I taste it with different recipes of course, but once I am satisfied with my extraction, I start stirring it for different times and then tasting it. For example, stirring twice you might get dark chocolate; stir 5 times, you get a nougat quality. This is incredibly exciting and these are the experiences that you can easily communicate to your customers - trust me, I have done it so many times and yes, maybe I get carried away and am way too excited about flavour in general. Customers are generally interested in the change of flavour and also about me telling them about how to experience this change. This can aid baristas when talking about crema, saying things like "The crema itself isn't the best part, it's when you mix it all in that the espresso becomes balanced", or "Try tasting the coffee straight away, and then stir it 10 times and taste again - it will be much better and taste like x, y, and z." I hope you found this little excursion into crema helpful – if you have any feedback or questions, don’t hesitate to message me and if you like, please feel free to like and share it! Thank you for reading! Nicole

I love drinking black coffee. I drink it all day and in all its forms, whether it's a beautiful filter coffee or a sensational espresso. Working in a coffee shop, however, most of my customers are more interested in milk beverages than anything else, including both plant based and dairy milks. A lot of baristas might turn their nose up at preparing and serving milk-based coffees, thinking that they are inferior or ‘less specialty’ than black coffee. However, there are ways to serve our customers the best possible specialty coffee experience with milk-based beverages, without compromising the idea of specialty and delivering an unforgettable coffee. In this blog post, I want to write about my experiences working as a barista in both Germany and Australia, and explore how to create the best milk-based coffee possible – to do that, I’ll look at coffee selection, extraction, ratio and temperature. Coffee selection Let's start with the choice of coffee. As specialty coffee has become more mainstream over the last decade, the general consumer has come to understand the difference between different roasts, ie espresso and filter. However, as many roasters are now also blending and roasting specifically for preparation as milk-based coffees, this has added a third category to communicate. In the shop I work at in Berlin, we have always had 2 standard blends on the grinders. One is (a) our milk based blend, a combination of full bodied coffees with a high percentage of natural processed beans, that tastes chocolatey and a bit heavy. The other blend (b) is a combination of two washed Africans and one washed South American coffee. In this particular combination you can really taste the florality and lightness of the Ethiopian coffee, paired with the juicy, red berry qualities of a Kenyan and to elevate the body of this coffee and give it a round finish, the South American bean combines all those flavours and gives it a chocolaty finish. Both coffees taste great by themselves – but while blend (b) develops a very fresh and fruity taste experience and tastes best on it’s own, the more chocolate-driven blend (a) has an amazing potential to be used in a milk beverage. The natural sugars in the milk add extra sweetness to the beverage, pairing with these chocolate notes in blend (a) to create a delicious coffee. If we were to add milk to the more floral and fruity blend (b), these more delicate flavours might be overpowered or washed out by the milk and this pairing might not go so well. So, we have these special coffees blends designed to be drunk either black (as espresso or americanos) or as milk-based coffees, in order to give the customer the best experience possible. As we’ve read, we know that picking up any coffee roasted for preparation as espresso and adding milk doesn’t always turn out the way we plan, due to the flavour profiles and body of the coffees. When we are mixing coffee with milk or plant based milk alternatives like oat milk, we need to consider the gigantic dilution that is going to happen to our (usually) single shot of espresso. That's why we should use strong-bodied coffees that have a chance to keep up with dilution. In my experience, natural processed coffees work fantastic for this use, and in roasting we look to increase the development time (the time between the ‘first crack’ and the end of the roast) in order to increase body and caramelisation in these coffees. What I also came across during my time in Australia is the use of carbonic maceration coffees or anaerobic processed beans for milk-based coffees. Their character is also quite heavy and sometimes even a little bit boozy. In combination with milk, I could really elevate my drinks and suddenly I had the most insane sweet fruit qualities in my milk drinks, such as banana, blueberry muffin or raspberry candy. Learning about those coffees has changed the way I look at milk beverages now. I’ll admit that I always saw them as a compromise to great quality and as boring, but with those coffees I got hooked. I was, and am excited about how I can dial in these coffees, and which milk ratios I can use to create something truly special. Extracting espresso for milk drinks Due to the dilution I mentioned earlier, I have learned that the espresso that you use for this course should be dialled in quite concentrated. If you dial in an espresso by itself, let's say you would use a 1 to 2 ratio like 18g in and 36g out. This extraction gives you a balanced espresso. If you extract 38g out you might even get a more juicy finish and a lighter drinking experience. If you combine this coffee now with, let's say, 120g steamed milk, all those amazing qualities might get lost or overshadowed. What I have learned instead is, to create a more concentrated version of this coffee by decreasing the brew ratio (such as 20g in and 35g out). This way it will not be the best version of itself without milk, but with milk it can keep up with the milk and still be present, even if we diluted it. As a coffee cocktail competitor I like to compare this to a harsh spirit like Vodka. By itself, it might be way too harsh and a bit too intense to drink – however, if the Vodka is the right quality and if we dilute it with soda water and maybe a slice of lime, we get one of the most refreshing drinks ever. It shows how much we can benefit from using the right ratio. (Check out my previous blog post on brewing ratios here) How important is milk to coffee ratio? Another important variable to consider is the size, or volume of the cup that you will be using for your milk beverage. The ratio I use in our shop at the moment is a single espresso with 19g on 110g steamed milk – with this recipe, the milk makes up about 85% of the beverage. Now if you have ever weighed your milk during your dial in (which I recommend), you’ll realise that what I am using day to day is a pretty small cup. It’s not tiny, but it is also not gigantic. When I look at different cups in the market and available at other shops, I realise that they have a standard size of about 200mL (which would mean that milk makes up about 90% of the beverage). How should any espresso be able to hold up against such a huge amount of milk? Assuming they’re using a similar amount of espresso in each cup, this amount of milk would literally drown or wash out the coffee flavour entirely. This is why we should really focus not just on the look of our cups, but also the functionality, total brew weight and the coffee to milk ratio. By dialling in every single espresso in the bar at the start of the shift and tasting the different expressions those coffees have, I learned to adjust milk amounts and extraction yields every day. Over time, I have found that even 10g more or less of milk will drastically change the flavour of a milk-based coffee beverage. To control the milk amount we are using at the bar, we use automated milk foaming systems such as Uber Milk. I have worked with this device and find it incredible how much you can speed up your workflow and simply get so much better at making amazing milk coffees with incredible consistency. Those machines help the barista to use the same amount of milk per cup, as well as the same temperature and the same consistency every time. If you’re making milk-based coffees at home, you obviously won’t have a machine like this – however, the more consistent you can be with your texture and temperature, the better. Temperature for milk-based coffees Milk sugars / lactose absolutely elevates the flavour and sweetness of our coffee. But at the same time, these components of milk are very sensitive to heat. If we apply too much heat, the lactose and sugars will caramelise too much and turn bitter, just like if you caramelise sugar too much. Likewise, the behaviour of the protein structure in different milks will drastically influence the flavour profile and overall experience of milk-based coffee; if you heat up UHT milk, a 4% fat dairy milk and oat milk all to the same temperature, they’re all going to have different textures, mouthfeels and all create different flavour experiences. When using fresh dairy milk, currently the most popular milk for specialty coffee, my preferred milk temperature is around 63 degrees. When using plant based milks such as oat milk (see my blog post about plant based milks here), I prefer to keep the temperature a bit lower – this stops the protein structure of the oat milk creating a dry mouthfeel, which occurs with excessive heat. From the preparation of espresso and filter coffee, we know how flavour profiles and tactile in coffee can change depending on the temperature. The same occurs in milk drinks, and the experience of a boiling hot milk coffee is very different from that of a milk coffee at a good temperature. When preparing your milk coffees, I would strongly recommend checking your milk temperature with a thermometer, to see whether you are steaming too hot or too cold. Like with a lot of coffee topics, it is all about finding the sweet spot. In my time working in the coffee industry, I have felt like I have done a full 360 turn. I first began working behind a machine preparing milk-based coffees, then gradually ‘moved on’ to competition-style espresso and filter coffees, exclusive micro-lots and experimental fermentation. However, I have realised that it’s not much use focusing on the smallest percentage of coffees served, like these rare and experimental lots, if the main beverages we are serving are not the best they can be. By focusing on the different variables in the preparation and serving of milk-based coffees, I believe that we can further elevate consumer experience and education on a faster and bigger scale. By educating other baristas and customers about milk temperature, special roasts for milk-based coffees and specific coffee-to-milk ratios, we can help to increase awareness and knowledge of the specialty coffee industry. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading my insights about making milk-based coffees – as always, if you have any questions, please feel free to contact me via my Contact Page or Instagram. Happy brewing, Nicole

Working in a roastery and consuming lots of coffee privately, I am faced with a very ugly side of the coffee world - packaging waste. Recently, I have been trying to reuse a lot of the coffee bags I purchase and receive, but I know that there are more and more recyclable and even biodegradable options on the market. As the effects of climate change become more apparent every day, businesses across the world are looking for sustainable or more environmentally-friendly alternatives to use. In the coffee industry, this means trying to reduce waste and emissions, with one of the most difficult challenges being packaging. As part of an R&D test to experiment with sustainable packaging options, the team from MTPak has given me the opportunity to test a couple of different bags in different materials, shapes and sizes. The ones that I tested were (i) a fully recyclable bag, (ii) a biodegradable bag and (iii) a standard foil lining bag. Before I dive into the details of the test itself, I thought it would be useful to go over the different kinds of packaging used, and why packaging is so important for coffee quality. What are the most important features for coffee packaging? Coffee bags are usually the best marketing canvas for a coffee company, but a bag is useless if it doesn’t maintain the quality of coffee. The most common bag on the market is typically a bag with a one-way pressure valve for releasing CO2 and an aluminium foil or plastic lining inside the bag. Valves The one-way pressure valve is essential. It is semi-permeable and can help the coffee to degas without the bag exploding. They allow the excess CO2 expelled by the roaster coffee out of the bag and doesn't let oxygen to enter, so that the coffee is kind of surrounded in a fresh keeping environment inside the bag. To learn more about why degassing is important, click here. Many baristas would have had the experience of passing a customer a bag of coffee and watch them immediately squeeze the bag and smell the air (or CO2) coming out of the valve. More times than I can count, I have had to patiently explain that this is not a sniffing or aroma hole, but is in fact a pressure valve and all you smell is the CO2 from the degassing coffee. ‘CO2 hole’ doesn’t seem as great as ‘aroma hole’, but that’s the truth! A lot of the time, the valves used aren’t recyclable – however, there are some great new options on the market offering a more environmentally friendly alternative. Interior lining The aluminium foil lining is a little bit trickier, as this is usually the one item that is not recyclable. It does however provide an environment that is safe from light, exterior aromas and heat, all of which can influence and change the flavour of coffee. Heat is particularly bad for ageing coffee – if you have coffee beans in an environment that is too hot, it can make them oily and dry, rapidly speeding up the ageing process of the coffee. The inner lining of a coffee bag works a little bit like a cooling chamber – not only does it keep the beans at a steady temperature, but compared with other options the heat damage is lower than other bags. Taste tests have proven that this kind of bag helps the coffee to age very consistently and this is exactly why so many roasteries order these kinds of bags. Testing the bags So, to repeat: the bags I tested were (i) a fully recyclable bag, (ii) a biodegradable bag and (iii) a standard foil lining bag. All three of these bags have similar shapes, sizes, pressure valves and zip locks; plus, I heat sealed all of them the same way. For each bag, I used 250g of the same coffee, roasted in the same batch on the same day. From previous experience, I knew that this coffee tended to ‘peak’ around the 18th day after roast, if kept in ideal conditions. So, the idea for this test was to roast this coffee, place 250g into all three bags and then taste test 18 days after roast. The coffee I used was a Colombian bourbon from El Zacatin. This coffee has a very bold profile, it is super fruity and sweet, has flavours of blood orange, red punch, cinnamon, red plum and cools down to a very juicy red tea flavour. The profile was super steady with high sweetness, medium acidity, medium to high body and medium to high aftertaste for a period of five days between 16 to 20 days after roast. Coffee: Farm: El Zacatin, Colombia Varietal: Pink bourbon Process: Anaerobic fermentation natural Roast: Filter On each day I taste tested, I used the same recipe for each coffee, from each bag. The taste testing was done blind, meaning a colleague of mine marked the bean samples without me knowing which coffee is which. In order to keep a record of my taste tests, I used my dial-in sheets (you can find a link to them at the end of this blog post). Brewing recipe: 20g coffee 300 ml water 92 degrees water temperature 29 clicks on a comandante hand grinder 30 seconds bloom 5 pours with full drainage ( 60g bloom - 60g - 60g - 60g - 60g) 3:30 brewing time (on average) The results 1. Standard bag (brown paper, foil interior) I am very familiar with this kind of bag as I have worked with these bags since I have worked in specialty coffee. They are extremely robust, easy to print on and because the outside is made out of paper, you can put additional stickers on those bags that will definitely hold. They are easy to stack and can hold 250g or even up to 500g. The zip lock-style seal is easy to use and helps maintain freshness at home. As stated, I packed the freshly roasted coffee on the day of roasting and opened it on day 18 after roast. I brewed the coffee according to the above recipe and got a little bit of an alcoholic vibe from this coffee, which is quite common in anaerobic fermentation coffees. The acidity was a little bit sharp and I tasted some blood orange flavours. The aroma was very present and definitely reminded me of red punch and wild strawberries. I would very happily drink this coffee and maybe just give it an extra 2 days to go down in acidity a little bit. 2. The recyclable bag The first impression of this bag was that I absolutely love it! I love the shape, I love how the bag feels (the texture is a little bit rough), I love the print quality it provides and the colour spectrum that you can choose from. It also has a zip lock and I was able to heat-seal it without any problems (I’ve had issues in the past with recyclable bags). I have again filled the bag with 250 g of freshly roasted El Zacatin filter coffee from the same batch and taste tested it 18 days after roasting with the same recipe. Compared to the previous bag, the acidity was way more structured in this coffee – it was bright and not quite as heavy as the other one in the standard bag. I tasted all of the flavours of blood orange, red punch, cinnamon, red plum and red apple. It was crisp, fresh and sweet. This coffee blew me away and I would definitely buy this bag. 3. The biodegradable/compostable bag The bag itself looks super modern and the print that you can apply is sharp and has a great contrast. It has a zip lock to keep the beans fresh and just like the other bags it heat sealed perfectly. The bag I used was white paper and unfortunately it wasn’t very light proof, which could impact the ageing of the coffee. What I loved is that the bag is explicitly labeled as compostable, except for the zip lock and the valve. The customer just has to cut those out before placing it in the compost. This is a huge step in avoiding unnecessary waste. The bag has a little bit of an odd shape which could be good for brand recognition but I have to admit it was a bit tricky to get the beans out again. After the 18 days I also tasted the El Zacatin out of this bag and the flavour of this brew was unfortunately a bit flat. It seemed like the coffee aged way faster than in the other bags and that reflected on the taste experience. Overall it was a little bit muted in flavour and not as bright – I think that this may have been from the additional exposure to light. On a positive note, I do think though that if you have an espresso blend that usually needs an ageing period of about five weeks, this bag could help you sell this coffee faster and get great results within three to four weeks. So if you want your coffee to age faster, maybe this is the way to go. Overall I am fascinated by the new opportunities that are becoming available to the coffee industry, which allow us to work together towards a sustainable future. It is great knowing that there are companies actively working on better alternatives to packaging that not only prioritise the environment, but are looking to maintain coffee quality as well. My favourite bag in this test is, by far, the recyclable bag. However, this is just my test and you may have your own opinion - so, I encourage every single coffee enthusiast, barista and roaster to test and taste different packaging to find their perfect fit for storing our most loved beans. If you're interested in sharing your results, share them with me via my contact page, or share it on Instagram tagging @nbattefeld with the hashtag #packagingtest . I feel very fortunate that in my hometown, Berlin there are a lot of shops that offer to refill bags or tins to reduce packaging waste. Even in the shop I work in, we have a lot of customers coming in with their empty bags to get them reused at least one more time. Dark brown glass jars have proven to be a great and decorative alternative as well. I realise that not every roasting business is able to have brown glass jars, tins or reusable options. For this reasons, it's great that packaging businesses are investing in creating a range of sustainable options for coffee roasters, so that we can try to reduce the harm we cause to the planet. Thank you to the MTPak team for allowing to test out these bags! I hope you found my packaging test helpful, if only to show you that packaging can have a huge affect on the flavour and quality of coffee. If you have more questions about this test or packaging options, don’t hesitate to ask me. Happy taste testing! Nicole p.s. the links to my dial in sheets are below. For a thorough explanation, visit my previous blog post here.

Anyone that works in coffee has fantasised about having their own roaster at home – not a gigantic 120kg roaster, but a small sample or domestic roaster to roast your own samples and experiment with profiles. In the last couple of years, we’re seeing more and more ‘micro-roasteries’ pop up throughout Europe and across the world, with coffee professionals using their skills for small-scale production (or just for fun at home). We’re also seeing the emergence of more companies designing roasters for consumer use, both as part of cafe service and at home. The roasters that I have looked at in the past are two of the most well known – the ROEST roaster and the Ikawa. I’ve been able to use both, using the Ikawa as a sample roaster for the shop I work at in Berlin and the ROEST because a friend of mine had one of these roasters at his house in Australia. Finally, a few weeks ago I got the opportunity to get my hands on a second hand Ikawa roaster, and I didn’t hesitate! I used a good chunk of my savings to buy it – I’ve been wanting to buy a roaster for home for such a long time, but had never found a price that was justifiable (for me) or felt like it was the right time. I was also lucky enough to recently receive some incredible green bean samples from my Australian friends at Project Origin - thank you, guys! The timing couldn't have been more perfect. What can you learn from roasting at home? First of all it's a huge relief to stay at home on my day off if I wanted to try something new with roasting, or sample a coffee. I always had to go into work on my days off to experiment or train, and even then it's been hard having the peace and quiet to roast. Getting up and being able to actually have a slow morning without rushing is fantastic! I started roasting coffee over 7 years ago, but of course I was always following the instructions my bosses gave me. Moving between businesses has already helped me so much, as I have started understanding more about coffee quality and high batch production, how storage and temperature affects roasting and how to properly clean a roaster every single day. But after a while, I also realised there is a limit of experimental roasting when you always have to roast at least 10kg in a batch – this coffee costs money, and even if you’re not roasting the most expensive coffee in the world, it adds up. Also, coffee offerings usually don't change every week, so when you’re working for a bigger roastery there’s limited opportunity to experiment with new coffees all the time. With a smaller sample roaster you have a lot more freedom to experiment and try new profiles. Whilst at my workplace we have used the Ikawa mainly to roast samples to decide which coffees we should buy in the first place, I now have the option to tweak my roast profiles at home to learn and to understand how tiny temperature changes can change the whole character of a coffee. How can roasting at home improve roasting coffee on a larger scale? Due to my experiences and my taste development as a barista, I can typically taste if a coffee has to be dropped into the roaster with a higher or lower curve. For example, I have learned that peaberries (coffee beans with a special mutation) usually need super high start temperatures, as they are so hard and dense that they need more energy to develop. Some processes need different approaches to roasting (or ‘roasting curves’), just as different origins and varietals need different approaches. Some roasts even darken after the roast due to their processing, such as carbonic maceration coffees. By writing all these profiles down and then comparing them with my dial in/tasting sheets, I am constantly learning new things about varietals, processes, roasting and ageing of coffee. There are so many different types of coffee roasters that use different materials, applications of heat and different software to roast coffee and measure this roasting process. It isn't as easy as transferring a roast profile at home to the roaster at work - however, roasting in these smaller amounts can help you to better understand the behaviour of different varietals, processes and origins. These lessons can then be applied on a larger scale in your work, and make you a better roaster in the long term. Whether you’re experimenting with a home roaster, or experimenting with new ways to prepare and extract coffee at home, I encourage everyone to spend more time and energy on tasting, testing and innovating! There’s no perfect profile, recipe or method to making a great coffee – however, the more you understand, the closer you will come to achieving it. What’s the best way to store roasted coffee at home? While I am getting further into home roasting, I’m also doing a lot of experiments with degassing and ageing of coffee, and trying different materials for coffee packaging. I can store my samples in a controlled environment in basically anything I want to test. At the moment I am testing the difference between recyclable, compostable and standard coffee bags (more to come on this). I'm also planning to test out storage of tins vs. glass jars, and how coffee ages when the bag is half full compared to when it is completely full. To compare and monitor the taste between the different bags, I am using my dial in sheets (read more here). In order to monitor how each bags affects the flavour, I brew the coffees with the same recipe which also helps me to practice my brewing. Coffee is typically sealed in specialised bags with one-way valves and the tops heat sealed ... but obviously no one has this at home. So, my advice is to try and reuse old, empty coffee bags you've used in the past, and/or to store your coffee in a sealed container out of direct sunlight. Should you buy a home roaster? The experience of using the Ikawa and ROEST in the past had already opened my eyes to what home roasting could add to my skills as a coffee professional. Now with my own roaster, I think it's even more valuable as a tool to develop skills in roasting, tasting and understanding how coffee behaves. I've started seeing sample or domestic roasters as a real option to develop and learn how to roast different styles, to share roast profiles and to understand my own competition coffees a bit better. It's also made me rethink about all the money I have spent in the past on equipment, and made me ask myself have these tools really improved my coffee knowledge? Even after a few roasts and taste tests with the Ikawa, I can confidently say that this will improve my skills as not only a roaster, but as a barista. So, should you buy a roaster? If you are willing to invest the money, if you have the time to roast and experiment and you genuinely want to improve your coffee knowledge - definitely. If you're just a keen coffee drinker that will enjoy the smell of roasted coffee at home ... you probably don't need a roaster. But hey, do what makes you happy! In the coming weeks and months, I'll be sharing some updates about my home roasting journey. If you have any questions in the mean time, please feel free to contact me. Happy roasting, Nicole

I have been working for quite a while in the specialty coffee industry, but I still seem to never stop learning and understanding coffee. Working as a barista and being hands on the machine is the most important part of my job, as this is where I can learn and understand the most. For many people, entering the coffee industry is the pursuit of a dream and passion for coffee. The first step is usually getting a job working on a register, as a waiter/waitress or, if you're like me, washing (a lot) of dishes. I often hear from people that they want to turn their passion for coffee into a profession, or career. Making this jump is hard work and even when you manage it, sometimes you feel like you 'haven't made it' yet - believe me, I still feel like that a lot of the time. There are several important lessons I’ve learned as a barista that helped me to turn my passion into a career. Coffee is about hospitality. One of the most important things you learn is that even if the job is a little bit repetitive, being a barista is mainly about customer service and hospitality. In my experience of working in several cafes, in a roastery and on the competition stage, I've realised that every aspect of the coffee industry is about serving and helping others. When many people enter coffee, they have an idea that they'll work on the register, then on the machine, then win a competition, then become a roaster or green bean buyer, and so on. Within this idea, there's a notion that at some point, you'll be able to stop serving customers - I can definitely tell you this is not true. Sure, once you're working on a coffee roaster or in an office, you might not come face to face with customers every day. But you are still there to help serve, sell and communicate the message of coffee, which has travelled across the world. The hospitality aspect of coffee never stops - so embrace it, and be the best you can be. Harnessing passion and motivation. No one is going to come into your bar and tell you that they will show you everything you want to know about coffee for free, train you and help you do taste experiments all day long. I always had to find my own inspiration and that is the thing that is always the hardest. Work a full shift, give the best service possible and then after the shift stay longer to cup coffee or make hand brews and train brewing techniques. For my first coffee competition I worked everyday and stayed at least four hours after work for five days of the week for training; for my second competition, I stayed at the shop 7 days a week and even came in on Christmas Day. This isn’t to say that you need to spend all your spare time at work – it’s important to maintain a balance between work and your personal life. I’ve learnt over time that the best way that I learn is by motivating myself to go the extra step, and to use my spare time for training. If you can find a way to motivate yourself to put in this extra effort, your skills as a barista and/or roaster will flourish. A lot of people have the idea that career in coffee is an amazing, romantic job. A lot of the time, it's super repetitive and labour intensive. Being able to motivate yourself and harness your passion for coffee will not only make your work more enjoyable, but it will make you a better coffee professional. Share your motivation with others. Motivation is the key and if this is really a job that you are passionate about, then try to build a community around you that you can share your passion with and that you can develop with together. I was lucky enough to have experienced that myself during my time in Australia – the people I met there are incredible and so passionate about their job. We met up for coffee cocktail sessions nearly every Sunday, just trying out new recipes, making ferments, hanging out for cuppings and always chasing the best flavour. My skills developed due to the people around me and I became more inspired. Now, I basically have ferments going 24/7 at home and am always trying to involve others in the process of tasting and experimentation, so we can grow together. For roasting, this means trying and experimenting with new profiles, and involving the team in the process of judging and providing feedback. Over time, this will make us all better baristas (and roasters) and improve the quality of the coffee we serve. Involving a team at a roastery or coffee shop can be really difficult and at times, discouraging. Not everyone has the time, patience or interest in doing lots of tasting and providing feedback. However, if you can find people that share this passion, you can motivate each other and become better coffee professionals. Focus on the basics. Over the last years new products and toys are popping up every single day. And that is amazing! But there are things that we should focus on and other things that we can invest in once the basics are set. I did a whole backflip in this regard. At home, I had an Espresso machine, about 15 fancy tampers and a horde of shiny milk jugs. But did that help me understand flavour? Did the cool beanie or pin or merchandise help me extract better coffee? Over time, I have realised that coffee is such a fragile product and that if I wanted to understand it better, I would have to start understanding fermentation better, I would have to understand roasting better, and that I would have to invest in better beans and get more information about harvesting and geographical features of origins. Recently, I sold my prized Espresso machine and reinvested the money into a roaster - I had the opportunity to buy an Ikawa and went for it straight away. Cupping coffees isn't that costly if you are using small amounts, and for me monitoring flavour has become far more important to me than showing off with my home latte art. There are a lot of great machines, tools and new products in the world of coffee – but it’s no use investing in them if we don’t have a good understanding of the basics of coffee first. And last, but not least... Prove that you're a professional. It's very likely that there will never be a moment when people say to you 'You're a coffee professional.' The only thing you can do is prove to yourself that you are a professional, or that you are doing your very best to advance yourself in a career with coffee. It's not enough to know a bit about coffee machines, steaming milk and pouring cool latte art - there has to be a passion to learn more, to innovate, investigate, and be curious. I'm not anywhere near where I want to be with my knowledge and a lot of the time, I wouldn't refer to myself as a coffee 'expert'. For this reason, I am constantly learning, growing and experimenting so that I can advance myself in my career and help to create a world of better coffee. If you want to talk more about making the leap from passion to profession, please get in touch! Happy brewing, Nicole

In 2021, the marketing of dairy free milk options could change forever due to an Amendment that has been passed in the EU Parliament. Amendment 171 will restrict plant-based milks and other products from using packaging that is similar to dairy products, or from referring to dairy (e.g. 'Does not contain milk'). Crazy, right? I personally do not agree with this amendment at all. I am a huge fan of dairy-free milk and I truly believe that the consumption of the amount of regular milk is neither sustainable nor healthy. For these reasons, I wanted to look at different options that are available on the market and share my experiences with you. With the team at Röststätte, I have tested a number of plant-based alternatives to cow’s milk, including Coconut Milk, Rice milk, Pea milk, Oat milk, Soya milk and Almond milk. We tasted several options for all of these different milks, and provided a general score out of 10 for their functionality for milk coffees.* *(A quick note - I am in no way affiliated with any plant milk companies, and all the below comments are just from the experience of myself and my colleagues. I have not named any particular companies or products, and rather am providing general feedback.) Let’s start with… Coconut milk: I love coconut, especially coconut yogurt. Cooking with coconut milk gives a very tropical taste to all your deserts and even curries. However, I have not come across a coconut milk that goes well with coffee. For me, the acidity structure of the drink clashes with the taste of coffee and sometimes it even curdles. There are professional barista coconut drinks available, but so far none of them has convinced me. 3.5/10 Rice milk I think rice milk is great for people with allergies as it has the lowest allergen rating of them all. But taste wise, again I have to say I am not a fan. Rice milk is very thin, watery and tastes a bit bland. The starchy vibe doesn’t do any good in combination with coffee and I would rather recommend it to be used with cereal than in a cappuccino. The drinks I made were flat, dry and bitter. It’s also quite hard to steam and the foam doesn’t last very long 3/10 Pea milk This is a completely new product to me and I have to admit, I had to get used to the idea. Once you do a blind tasting and forget that it is pea milk it actually tastes nice, foams beautifully and can add a creamy texture to your drink. It’s very good for people with food allergies as it contains neither wheat nor soy. The coffee qualities and the structure of the coffee can shine through, though I think that the sweetness tastes a little bit chemical. 8/10 Soy milk The classic. The first alternative milk to conquer the world and in many countries, still number one. Generally, I don’t like how soy milk always has this really dry finish. I find that it foams very very thick and ‘blocky’, and often curdles when mixed with black coffee. Despite all this, this milk deserves respect as it led the way for so many other milks to come. So even if I don’t really agree with the taste experience you get with most soy milks, I would still give it 6 points as it has earned its place in the modern food shelves. 6/10 Oat milk Aaaaand we have a winner. There is nothing as hot and hyped in the last years in Europe (and the rest of the world) than oat milk. First of all, the taste: itss creamy, itss kind of sweet and it carries the flavour of the coffee. Its foaming abilities are insane and the texture is like if you would land on a cloud. Next fact: you are way cooler if you drink oat milk. It has literally become a lifestyle and for me it is the biggest example in showcasing how sustainability and food consciousness has arrived in day to day life. At Roststatte, we easily sell as many oat drinks as normal milk and people are demanding it more and more.For me this milk definitely wins by far and the only minus i could say is, that it always has this little bit of a porridge vibe … but hey, I love porridge. 9.5/10 (most because of the porridge resemblance and foaming abilities) Almond milk This is a milk I actually only had to work with in Australia. Almond milk is quite thick, heavy and fatty so it will carry taste, but it also has a lot of bitterness which I didn’t really enjoy. It doesn’t foam very well either so with coffee I think it’s not a great match. I do, however, really enjoy it in other drinks like tea or chai latte. 4.5/10 If you want to know more about the situation in Europe regarding the plant milk regulations, check out Oatly's campaign here, or this link for more general information. You can also help to challenge Amendment 171 by signing this petition. I hope you found this helpful and if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask me. Until then, happy plant milking.

Recently I developed some easy ways to help my team and myself to keep track of our coffee dial ins, how our coffees behave and when they taste the best. But let’s start at the beginning. What does 'dial in' mean? This term, “dialling in,” is an absolutely necessary step in making a coffee delicious. It simply means finding the ideal variables for a particular coffee and a specific brew method – essentially, creating a recipe to extract and prepare a particular coffee. These variables can include grind size, water temperature, brewing technique, dosing or even the age of the coffee. To get the best result out of your coffee you do have to consider an awful lot of variables but, when you get it right you can get the best expression out of your brew or espresso! Why is it so important to dial in your coffee? Even if your coffee gets dialled in once, it will change a lot during the same day! As the temperature and the moisture in your room changes, so does the coffee. This means that the original recipe you use at the start of the day may not be the best way to prepare the coffee later in the day. We also shouldn't forget that coffee is a natural product and that hundreds of beans from many different trees are in one bag of coffee. Those beans might be selected and quality controlled but still, they all are just a little bit different and might have different densities or flavour notes. Checking your taste and the quality of your coffee is fundamental if you want to know what you are actually selling to your customers. Tasting coffee every day (and maybe even multiple times per day) will help you to understand your coffee and how you can manipulate variables and technique to get a certain result, it will improve your pallet and you can give your customers better advice on how to brew certain beans. How can I taste more efficiently? To help me keep track of coffees I have tasted, I’ve developed two different ‘dial in sheets’, where you can write down your recipes, your flavour notes and how your coffee develops when it cools down. This is also super important for roasters (link to dial in sheets at the end of this article). I have been able to review my roast profiles and adjust the roast curves accordingly, as some coffees reveal under or over development only on certain days after roasting. So what I do is: I taste my roasted filter coffees usually after 5 days after roast (read more about ageing coffee) and my espresso roast usually after 10 days after roast.If you are only just starting with tasting your coffees, please try to taste your coffee each day after roasting. You will experience how important degassing is for a coffee, when certain coffees peak, and how the ageing of coffee can vary between process, packaging and roaster. For example: in Australia I had the pleasure to work for ONA Coffee, a world-renowned coffee company that is ground-breaking in taste testing and flavour research. I found that a lot of their coffees used to have an ageing time of between 7 and 15 days until they 'peaked'. However, back in Germany with a completely different roaster (Loring instead of Giesen) I've found that the ideal degassing times have nearly doubled. Most of the coffees we roast at Röststätte have their perfect age earliest at day 13 (Filter roast). Using the dial in sheets Start with a recipe that you are quite used to. Keep in mind that some natural coffees need less temperature that washed coffees, that lighter roasts can handle more heat that dark roasts and that very fresh coffees might need a longer blooming phase that others. I will give you the following example for filter coffee: Let's say I am using a filter coffee thats 15 days old. I could add this information and the name of the coffee with the date and number of the roast batch on the top. I will use 20g of coffee on 300 ml water with 92 degrees, 29 clicks on a Comandante grinder (just as an example) and I will use 35 sec of blooming. My pours will be in five 60g intervals of water ( also, just as an example) and my time in total will be 3:30 minutes. I want to see how the coffee develops as it cools down so I can write down all the flavours I get directly after brewing, then maybe three minutes later and then maybe 7 or 8 minutes later. Based on my overall taste experience, I can now judge this coffee. Maybe the acidity is quite high and sweetness can be improved. Now having all of this information written down, I can: (i) start changing my variables one by one (never change more than one at a time as this will make it impossible to trace back which change actually lead to a certain result), or; (ii) use this chart to monitor how my coffee behaves over time. I use it for both, in order to find the best recipe and on the other hand to keep track of roast profiles and dates. Let's do another example with an espresso roast: Let’s say I am dialling in an espresso thats 22 days old. I can write down the process, batch number and details about the coffee over the top of the chart: I am using 18g in a 18g basket and am extracting 36g out in 26 seconds. My sweetness in medium, acid high, bitterness medium. Flavours of blood orange and chocolate and jasmine (just as an example) My texture is medium low, my weight is also a little bit under medium and the finish is medium to medium high. It's not bad, but I want the acidity to go down a little bit. What I could do now is: updose (add more coffee to the dose), OR pre infuse, OR higher temperature, OR finer grind, etc (Remember to only change one variable at a time!) Now, you can monitor how your taste will change and how your variables will shift over time. What's the conclusion? Tasting your coffees and understanding how to adjust and change flavour are the most important tools to offer better coffee. Developing these skills will not only educate yourself and your staff, but in the long term also your customers as they will experience a better service by people that really know what they are talking about. At Röststätte we are dialling in our bar coffees all together with all the staff members every morning and together we discuss flavours and write them down. To give a better service to our customers that buy our beans, we taste test all of our coffee at least every day for a whole month before releasing a new coffee, so we can provide the best brewing recipes and the most accurate flavour descriptions. To help you become better at monitoring your dial ins, I have attached both dial in sheets to this article - please share them with every coffee enthusiast you know! I hope this article was useful and you have enjoyed reading it. If you have any questions or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to contact me. Happy brewing! Nicole

This drink is inspired by a toy that I forgot I had. In 2017, I had one year to prepare myself for the 2018 World Barista Championship. During that time, I experimented with different methods and recipes ... a lot. One of my ideas included smoked chocolate, so I bought a so-called 'smoking gun'. This device only costs about 120-150 euros and can be used to add a distinguishable smoked flavour to any ingredient. This might not be an ideal flavour quality for coffee, but can really add a depth of flavour and lasting finish to other ingredients in a signature drink (or in this case, a cocktail). I ended up not using it in 2018, because I had to withdraw from the competition. However, the idea stuck in my mind and I've been waiting for an opportunity to use it! Recently I went through all my competition equipment and there it was: the smoking gun! I immediately had a new idea for a cocktail: the Smoked 'Coffee Margarita'. Ingredients: 3 cl Cold Brew X 1.5 cl Parton tequila 4 cl smoked lemon juice (see more details after Method) 2 cl simple syrup 2 drops of coffee bitters from Happy Baristas Ice cubes Tajín (Mexican spice mix) Method: 1. Combine all ingredients into a Boston Shaker. Shake hard on ice. 2. Double strain into a margarita glass, or any fancy glass with a good surface area for the garnish. 3. Decorate/garnish with a sprinkle of Tajín. This Mexican chilli salt has a really nice citrus notes to it, and will add a spicy finish that highlights the tequila. And, it's so much fun to drink! Drink with friends and with a taco in your other hand. Flavour notes: Dark chocolate, sweet lemon drops, maple syrup, wood fire roasted marshmallows What’s the used spirit? I have used the Cold Brew X coffee liquor and blended it with a tequila. It gives a lot of body and sweetness to the tequila and smoothens it out. To add an other level of depth I added 2 drops of coffee bitters at the end, it also will add a flavour note of dark chocolate. How do I use the smoking gun? So the smoked ingredient is the lemon juice. To make the juice, I freshly squeezed 2 medium sized lemons and used maple wood chips (available online) to smoke it. It is useful to have a container where you can just close the lid and let the smoke and the juice soak in for about 2 minutes. The juice will get a mild and smoky flavour. I hope you liked this cocktail recipe and enjoy making it yourself! If you have any questions, send me a message!

Why is coffee ageing important? Let’s talk about ageing coffee. This is a topic that is very close to my heart. It the last two years, the concept of ageing has completely changed my view on how I use, store and taste coffee. It can help us to best understand how coffee changes over time, and this aids coffee professionals in using coffee and communicating with their customers. In 2019, I moved to Australia and started working for one of the best coffee companies in the world, Sasa Sestic’s ONA Coffee. I was excited and curious to see what I would learn during my time there and I can tell you one thing: these coffee nerds didn’t let me down. They introduced me to the concept of properly ageing roasted coffee beans in order to maximise flavour and experience. What is ageing coffee? You may have noticed that a lot, if not most specialty roasters label their coffees with the date of roasting. For a lot of consumers (and baristas), the idea that ‘the fresher, the better’ has dominated the way they purchase and use coffee. However, the flavour profile of a freshly roasted coffee is completely different to a coffee that is 14 days old, and understanding when your coffee is perfectly aged is key to creating the best experience possible. During roasting, a chain of physical and chemical reactions takes place, the so-called ‘Maillard reaction’. It splits simple sugars into multisaccharide, evaporates air, increases the volume of the beans and as we explored, builds up CO2. After coffee is roasted, it begins to simultaneously expel CO2 and become more exposed to O2 (oxygen). We want the CO2 to leave the bag, but no extra O2 to enter – hence why we have one-way valves on our bags. This build-up of CO2 can significantly affect brewing and make it much harder to get a tasty cup. The coffee has to rest and ‘de-gas’ before it becomes easier to brew and tastier to drink. Ageing is essentially finding the point at which your coffee tastes best after roasting. Think about it like opening an old bottle of wine and decanting it, or letting it ‘breathe’ until it tastes perfect. With coffee, you ideally want to hit a balance between (a) the loss of aromatics and (b) the build-up of carbon dioxide. For most coffees, this process happens in a window of 6 to 23 days after roasting. The coffee will ultimately reach a ‘peak’ where the expulsion of CO2 begins to drop, and the additional exposure to O2 causes the coffee to age faster, lose its aroma/flavour and become stale. If you have ever opened an old bag of coffee, you know what I am talking about. Image: Röststätte Berlin Does roasted coffee have an ‘expiry date’? So yes, coffee doesn’t last forever (sad, I know). It is an organic product and like others, its flavour has an expiry date. As a roaster, I have realised that whilst much of a coffee's distinctive qualities are determined by where it's grown, its varietal and how it's processed, a lot of what we experience in the cup is an expression determined by roasting. If you've had the opportunity to take in the smell of green (unroasted) coffee, you'll know how the aroma more closely resembles grassy, grainy and straw qualities. This aroma changes after roasting and gets very much like popcorn, sweet malt and chocolate – of course this varies depending on the coffee itself. Likewise, if you have ever smelled the difference between a freshly roasted coffee, a coffee that is 1-3 weeks old and a coffee that is several months old, then there is a distinguishable difference between the intensity and quality of aromas. The short answer is no – you can technically use coffee beans months after roasting. However, the quality of flavour in your coffee doesn’t last forever, and understanding when it tastes best will improve your experience as a barista and consumer. So when is coffee perfectly aged? In the first few days after roasting, coffee flavour changes immensely. Many of the flavours listed on the bag or that the coffee is renowned for will be ‘muted’, or not reach their full potential. Over time, these flavours will become more apparent and will be of much higher quality. It's important to consider how you'll be enjoying your coffee. For more gentle brew methods like drip or pour over, you can start using your coffees a little earlier. For high-pressure methods such as espresso, it's important to give the coffee a bit more time to rest and develop further. So if you want to know how long you have to wait, the answer is very simple – try your coffees every day! For every coffee I get in my hands, I store it and try in incrementally over a time frame of about 5-23 days after the roasting date. This way I can determine when it was at its flavour ‘peak’, helping me Do different processes age differently? One of the tricky parts about coffee is that the rate of ageing differs between different process. After trying, testing and tasting coffees over the last few years, There are some guidelines I have realised. I find that washed process coffees usually peak between 8-15 days, whilst natural processed coffee needs a few days longer and hit the sweet spot between 15-20 days. And then we have the crazy funky ‘carbonic maceration’ or ‘anaerobic fermentation’ coffees. Depending on the level of experimental processing they behave like real divas and need to de-gas and rest for up to 23 days. How do I stop my coffee from ageing further? My time working in Australia and experimenting with ageing blew my mind! I found it incredible that coffee ageing was not only common knowledge among the staff, but that all the coffees that were used in the venues were always served when perfectly aged. One of the most special parts of their coffee ageing and service was the ‘Reserve Menu’. In addition to a list of house blends and different single origins on the regular menu, there was also a special menu of rare, experimental and unique coffees that had been aged and frozen. By placing the aged coffee beans into vacuum-sealed bags or test tubes, the baristas were able to effectively stop the ageing process completely – this means that the coffee was perfectly aged and ready to use for years to come. These techniques have been gaining in popularity across the world of specialty coffee during the last three years, and have the potential to change the way we buy, store and sell coffee (more on this in my next blog post). Photo: Röststätte Berlin Applying ageing to the specialty coffee industry I believe that it is absolutely essential that roasters and baristas invest in proper research and testing on ageing, and to start supplying ageing recommendations to their customers. Without informing the customers about the perfect age of your coffee, they will never be able to understand why coffee can taste so radically different from day to day. As coffee professionals, we can avoid the frustration and guesswork that many consumers experience when experiencing different coffees. By providing information about ageing, we can help them to learn, grow and to become better with their brewing techniques and tasting. Providing ageing dates also helps to be able to set dates for storing those coffees for longer time by freezing them. With the team at Röststätte, I have already started giving not just brew guides, temperature settings and detailed flavour guides for each coffee, but have now also added specific ageing and freezing dates for each coffee. This way, consumers can get the most out of their coffee and work not just more precise and efficient but also more sustainable. If you have any questions about ageing, freezing or anything coffee related, please feel free to get in touch! Happy brewing, Nicole Battefeld-Montgomery