Yeah baby, finally they are in the shop. (Now already for a couple of months)  The teflon coated portafilters from “Portaflon“. Thanks a lot Jens for sending them over!

Picture from this link

This new portafilters will give us more consistency during the day, and consistency is what we need baby for making a top espresso.. And indeed after testing them thoroughly for some months, I can only say: they rock baby! The next project will be a mod of our Anfim grinder, with timers, so we can work quicker and with even more consistency..

Hello all, we are back with some news from the bar. This week I have finished a new blackboard in the shop, where we will promote every week a new kind of coffee on the Aeropress. The Aeropress is a fantastic new tool to brew your coffee, ideal for brewing your coffee when I’m closed.

For this week we will offer you a fantastic Kenian coffee with the name “Kirigu”. It is a really extraordinary coffee, I brew it with 20gr of coffee and fill the Aeropress up until the mark of 4 with water of 80°C. And this using the normal Aeropress technique. This gives a cup that is very clean with a very sweet, buttery mouth feel and a fantastic after-taste. But most special about this coffee is the temperature trajectory, when cooling down there is a point when the coffee almost explodes and gives free a lot of floral aromas with notes jasmin and pear.

Stephen Leighton from Has Bean has made a great “In My Mug” video post about it.

Dear all, I’m proud to announce you that the shop will be back open next Monday 26 October. Please feel free to say hallo and enjoy with some coffee, it will be a pleasure to have you..

Jens

Nice show Bert in The San Marco village in Aartselaar. You did a fantastic job at the SCAE Belgium championships! (image by Anneleen Van Giel)

Copyright above image: Tine Lejeune

For the first time we have a resident artist in the bar. It’s work from Tine Lejeune who studies at Sint Lucas in Antwerp. She made three collages out of paper material with a lot of depth and hidden nuances. Expect a lot from this lady in the future!

A nice alludation of Roeland on the roast of the week!

While writing we had already some beans passing the grinder the past few weeks. One week ago we had a Burundi, from the ‘Tanganyika’ region on the grinder which was roasted by Caffenation. These beans could be described as strong, wild, earthy, with a full body. Picture below from this link:

Sweet Maria’s has a good summary about this coffee country:

Burundi coffee bears striking resemblence to neighbouring Rwanda, in both cup character, but also the culture surrounding coffee. Burundi is a small landlocked country at the crossroads of East and Central Africa, straddling the crest of Nile-Congo watershed. Sandwiched between Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Tanzania, Burundi has beautiful Lake Tanganyika for much of its western border. This is a country dominated by hills and mountains, with considerable altitude variation, from the lowest point at 772 meters (Lake Tanganyika)to the top of Mount Heha at 2670 MASL.

The first arabica coffee tree in Burundi was introduced by the Belgians in the early 1930s and has been growing in the country ever since. Coffee cultivation is an entirely small holder based activity with over 800.000 families directly involved in coffee farming with a total acreage of 60.000 hectares in the whole country with about 25 millions of coffee tree.

Burundi’s coffee, like Rwanda’s, is primarily Bourbon varietal, grown at high altitudes ranging from 1250 to 2000 MASL. Like Rwanda, coffee is planted by smallholder farmers; each farmer is tendering abount 50 to 250 trees. Historically, the coffee was sold as bulked “Ngoma Mild” coffee (an Ngoma is a traditional drum). The farmers bring coffee to washing stations (wet-mills) and theses are organized into “SOGESTAL” management groups, each with about 30 stations in them. Coffee has been sold only by mixing all the stations in the SOGESTAL into one big lot, so separating qualities was not possible. Several years ago, the coffee market was “liberalized” which means that individual washing stations can keep the coffee separate, and it can be marketed to buyers by station, and by “day lots”, the harvest for a short period of time. With this comes the new possibility to find the gems of Burundi coffee that were formerly mixed in with the not-so-good lots. So new possibilities are emerging in Burundi, and it is a coffee to watch!

The coffee for this week on our grinder is a blend made by Caffenation consisting completely out of organic certified beans. It’s a three bean blend composing out of:

• Dominican Republic: Santo Domino Organic
  
• Bolivia: Organic
  
• Ethiopia: Mokka Harrar Longberry organic
  

The blend is called “A little green bag”, and is very well balanced in flavours, with notes of dark chocolate,  sweet syrupy caramel and nuts. Definitely something I like a lot..

So come and see what is in the cup! I’m sure you like it..

This week we feature a bean from Ethiopia, that is grown in the Limu area. Limu coffee is renowned for its good cup, sweet, spicy/winey flavor and balanced body, with a dark chocolate after-taste. The beans are medium in size and have a distinctive rounded shape.

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This bean is roasted to a City+ degree according to the Sweet Maria’s pictorial roasting guide. Come and see what is in the cup!

Yes yes! After looking around for a while for an upgrade for the Faema Smart I was able to do a good deal for a second hand (but as good as new)  La Marzocco Linea. This machine can be called a historical classic, it definitely helped to establish the independent coffee scene throughout the world.

This machine will put us a on level higher of quality due to the dual boiler system which gives us more temperature consistency, even when pulling some glasses of tea. And at the same time keeping up a constant steaming pressure, so steaming up pitchers will be easier.

One of the options for the machine we will have installed are Portaflon portafilters, this will give a much more constant flavour profile of the shots throughout the day. This Portaflon portafilters prevent the build-up of coffee oils in the portafilter which steadily occurs in a normal brass one. These build-up gives a rancid and bitter taste to your shot, and that is something we don’t like.

Also due to a dual boiler system the group heads will no longer be running too hot, with again a lot of build-up of coffee oils. So overall flavour consistency will improve vastly.

Normal the machine will be in town on Thursday or so feel welcome to come and take a look at this beauty.. For more specifications you can download here the product folder of the Linea.

Hell Yeah!

Belgium is making a good statement in the coffee world. We now have a world latte art champion, Peter Hernou did a great job. Here you see him on the third place from the left. We had an excellent year on the different championships. On the Speciality Coffee Association of Europe (SCAE) website you can follow the progress that Belgium has made over the different years.

For his show you can see the clip over here.