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Italy Trip continued (Trieste-Susegana)

The Trieste show finished 5pm on Saturday afternoon. In the tradition of the Expo, the last afternoon revolved around the exhibitors visiting each others stands with bottles of bubble to open and enjoy. The crowds were thinning after 12, and there was time to get to know our neighbours. On one side of us was Sandalji, a standard splendid in Canary Yellow- well lit and setup. In front of us we had Bazzara Espresso (the flamboyant and charming Francco Bazzara at the helm). To the side Royal Espresso machines from Congeliano. Within a stones through Demus, Nuovo Simonelli, Ancap Cups. Soon the show was over for another 2 years.On the Sunday Astoria/CMA organised for a group of us to visit Venice- to enjoy some coffee and to see how Venice café life works. The group left Trieste at 9am, and we arrived in Venice around 11am. We had a coughing and spluttering baby in tow. He had picked up a cold in the cold winds we had been buffeted with in Trieste. The Venice visit was great. We visited the Doge Café as well as Florian on Piazza San Marco. Although the history of Florian was obviously fascinating, I was more impressed with the Doge. They are located in a tiny sliver of a café not far from St Paul Piazza. The shop is, well, difficult to find. A couple of weeks later when I returned by myself, I was pretty fortunate to stumble across it again. I think though if you can speak Italian, it would be no problem. The café sells around 7kg of coffee a day, and is well known by Venetians. The internal setup is cosy, space is utilised to the last square inch to display the huge range of single origins- Galapagos, Rwanda, Indian, Laotian origins to name just a few. They have 3 machines, 2 Brasilia pumps and a Brasilia Lever (3 Group) which is used exclusively for extracting SOS’s. The shots they pull from the lever machine were all rich and creamy. It got me wondering about the lever… more on that in a later post.The Florian is regarded as one of the grand cafes of Europe. From the outside you can not fail to notice the waiter staff- all men- all dressed in white dinner jackets. The café is nearly always full, and was for many years segregated- men doing their drinking in one place, the ladies in another spot. Fabulously decorated in paintings hundreds of years old, it feels like you are stepping back in time as you go through the door. An Elektra machine dominates the bar area, while staff are not scuttling, but ‘moving with purpose’. We tried two drinks here- an espresso (which I must say I have trouble raving about) and a kind of Italian Mochaccino- a shot of espresso mixed with chocolate and topped with cream- a bit like a con panna, but subtly different. The feel of sitting in the drawing room “of the artists” is thrilling and difficult to describe. I would return for the ambience, but maybe not for the beverages.After a full day in Venice the group retired to CMA/Astoria’s home town of Susegana, up in the rolling foothills of the Dolomites. The town is simply picturesque- you could not have picked a better spot to build an Espresso Machine factory. The NEW factory, a beautiful state of the art facility, was completed just as we were visiting in 2006. At that time the old factory consisted of 4 units spread either side of a busy road. Getting around and transporting half made machines between factories was difficult (and perhaps dangerous!) The new factory has everything well laid out under 1 HUGE roof. Pressing machines, conveyor systems, cutting tools and even a couple of robots work away under eco controlled lighting and heating systems. We – Zan from Thailand, Roberto from Philippines and Angke from Romania were not there as tourists. We had 3 days really full on training with the +4U and the new thin/Slim Sara Super-automatic. The training facility was excellent and soon we were able to do pretty much anything associated with the technical side of both machines. Of course 3 days training was also accompanied by decent food- lunch at the Susegana factory cooperative café (all the factories pitch in and subsidise this facility which serves some very tasty Italian fare). Dinner at various local Trattoria. Not surprisingly most of the machines we saw in the town, and the neighbouring town of Congeliano, were San Marino, Astoria or Wega… all CMA brands.Training finished Wednesday and we said our goodbyes to all. Roberto and Christine (his partner) headed off to Venice, Zan back to Bangkok (or was it Bari???) and us to Naples and Sorrento… It had been a busy three days and there was much more to fit into a tight program. To top that off a chill was in the air, a coldness that meant snow was on its way…!
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Coffee Kids Voice from the Field: Pedro Osorio

While visiting our partner CAMPO in Oaxaca, Mexico, I ran into Pedro Osorio. We'd met the previous year when Coffee Kids staff visited the community of Santa Cruz Tepetotutla. The community is located on the side of a mountain in the Chinantla Alta, an area rich in biodiversity with expansive forests, clean water and the perfect altitude for quality coffee. CAMPO has been working with the community for a number of years, but now local committees are taking charge of development in the town.2120960765_bba6c9242f_o.jpgPedro Osorio is on the natural resources committee representing six communities in the region working together to protect the area."We are currently trying to promote eco-tourism. We built a community hostel for up to 20 people. The idea of this project is for people to see what we do on a daily basis. Some services we offer are tours to visit some of the rare forests, and they are very interesting with waterfalls and springs that you can visit."A lot of our children are emigrating to the cities and other countries and we decided not to just sit and cry, but think what can we do to confront this situation. So we are looking for ways to give more opportunity to our children. And we realized the importance of our culture and conservation. For us the principal theme is conservation, that you don’t contaminate your water, don’t degrade the habitat. If you destroy that, you destroy yourself. And there’s a lot of work to be done, but it doesn’t end there, there’s a lot to do."The organization CAMPO was the piece that helped us focus our efforts. They gave us the ideas and supported our efforts. They helped us when we first formed a cooperative. And we had problems and failure, but we never stopped. We built a school, there were problems, but we learned and we passed that onto others. A few years back, they’ve let us move on our own, and now we have realized we can do it on our own and CAMPO has moved onto help other communities."They perfectly understand the communities, the dynamics. To realize the changes we need, you need to understand, and they really put it together."Whenever you want, you should come to visit us in Tepetotutla"
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Trieste- Italy trip

The flight through to Venice's Marco Polo Airport took us almost 18 hours, including the transfer in hyperdelic Dubai International. With the baby in tow it was not an easy trip. He is at the age where "Interactive" can be replaced by ACTIVE (in capitals). It was misty coming into Venice. The Emirates plane seemed to be floating endlessly down through a sea of grey, whispy cotton fluff. At the last second the mist lifted and we bumped down on the tarmac.Although I have flown into Rome before, it was the first time I had encountered the efficiency of the staff in Venice. We were quickly through customs and on our way through light afternoon traffic to Trieste.The previous 24 hours had been a mess. We were supposed to fly midnight on the 10th of November... which I thought was the evening of the 10th, not early am of the same day! A frantic phone call from the airport "where are you???" alerted me to my error. Living someway out of Jakarta making that flight was an impossibility. Fortunately the very, very efficient staff at Emirates managed to accomodate my error and got us on a flight 24 hour later. As I had planned for the later flight, this actually created no extra problems for us.Trieste is located up against the hills on the edge of the Adriatic. Sparkling in summer, the sea is icey blue in November. Driving there in the van we could not help noticing the outside temperature guage was locked on 4 degrees centigrade... bloody chilly after the 32 degrees in Indonesia!We checked into our Hotel on Via Roma and made a mad dash to our favorite restaurant on the Grande Canal. Although it was 2 years since we had been there the staff, menu and quality of the food remained unchanged.The morning of the first day of the Trieste Espresso Expo was cold and grey. The "Bora" (a cold wind blowing down from Icey St Petersberg) was buffering the city at about 120kph! We were glad to get into the Espresso Expo Hall. We were at the Indonesian Exhibit with two other companies. Merdeka Coffee had been here before- with our 2006 effort being pretty succesful. This time around we were doing an espresso blend, the other 2 companies selling various greens from around the Island nation.I had a brand new +4U Astoria to play with. This initially proved rather intimidating, as the machine is as similar to my old San Marino Lisa R as a bike is to a Ferrari. However with some guidance from Paolo and Jason (CMA) and Chartree (Zan from BX) I managed to get acceptable shots by early afternoon. The next 2 days were perfect!The Expo was seemingly quieter than 2 years ago. I think this was for a number of reasons. 1/. Last time the Expo ran Fri, Sat and Sunday (giving 2 weekend days for visitors). In 2008 we ran Thu, Friday and finished Saturday. The weather and the current economic malaise also probably helped none. Still, we had a number of visitors from Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Greece, Albania, Germany, France ("you know what Merde means in French???"), UK, Holland, Sweden, Norway, Slovakia, Austria, Spain, Mexico, India... and Thailand to name just a few. The comments were generally very good and we hope to get some business out of the show.Evenings during Expo events are normally taken up with dinners. This was no exception with several good meals enjoyed in good company with good red wine and the local speciality, sparkling Prosseco.I would recommend a visit to Trieste either during the show, or at anytime. It is a true coffee city. Apart from Illy being based here, many of Italy's biggest green bean importers (Sandalj, Alberto Hesse, Cogeco and Demus) aslo are there. The cafes are numerous, the coffee good and the atmosphere genial.To be continued...
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4:50am

I just put the water on for coffee it's 4:50am here on the east coast - got up early and needed to get working too much to do and not enough time to put it all into action. Here is to a good mug of coffee and a great day.
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Roundign up Customers

So, I'm gathering 2 groups.Group 1: Coffee fanatics or coffee drinkers who normall drink straight espresso or americanos, or italian-style capps.Group 2: General public, focusing on people who normally drink flavored lattes and "wet" cappuccinos or frappes only.
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World Barista Champions

2000 Monte Carlo,Monaco Robert Thoresen, Norway2001 Miami, U.S.A. Martin Hildebrandt, Denmark2002 Oslo, Norway Fritz Storm, Denmark2003 Boston, U.S.A. Paul Bassett, Australia2004 Trieste, Italia Tim Wendelboe, Norway2005 Seattle, U.S.A Trouls Overdahl Poulsen, Denmark2006 Berne, Switzerland Klaus Thomsen, Denmark2007 Tokyo, Japan James Hoffmann, U.K.2008 Copenhagen, Denmark Stephen Morrissey, Ireland2009 Atlanta, U.S.A. ....so noone can ask in future; who's James Hoffmann!!!VIVABARISTA!
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Sumatra Lintong Triple PickLake Toba cooperative. Wet-hulled at high moisture content.Acid- 5+Body- 7Texture- Smooth pulped orange juiceFrom the roast- green pepper and garrigue (loam).Dry aroma of soft vegetal acid with slight citrus present supported by sweet caramel.Wet fragrance of butter caramel, sweet acid (orange), and loam.At cupping break- cherry and lemon aerosol (like paint- good acid), sharp spice like fennel and moist green pepper.Flavors...When hot- caramel dominated with a vanilla extract finish.Off hot- bittersweet cocoa emerges nicely to mix with the buttery caramel. Loam starts to hint.Drinking temp- sweet lemon/orange acidity, bittersweet cocoa, butter caramel, loam earthiness in the sinus. Awesome stuff. Juicy, big and smooth. A bit of a departure from the usual gritty character.As it cools- hint of blueberry, butter caramel, cane sugar cola and more loam mustiness.It finishes with caramel, soft vegetal acid still present, dry roasted vanilla extract and smokey garrigue.I'm a big fan of the gravelly side of the musty loam that comes from the wet-hulling process used in Sumatra when it's done well. Reminds me of Bordeaux's rive gauche, Graves et Medoc. Musty but not baggy, tons of layers and big and satisfying. Acid is coming more and more into prevalence in the psyche in Indonesia meaning lots of interesting coffee to choose from. This particular pick has me more intrigued than I have been in awhile for Sumatra. Hope you dig it as well.Cheers,Scott
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Variables

Here are some of the variables for the experiment.

Mezcla: Blend of 3 Mexican regions, roasted seperatly to different levels, then blended. Roasted 2-7 days ago.
Molido: 9 grams of ground coffee in the single PortaFilter. 14/15 grams in the Double PF.
Maquina: Rancilio Epoca, 2 group Semi-auto.
Mano: Barista will use 1 ounce shots, pulled in 22-28 seconds (time started when flow begins).

Combinations for Americano taste tests:1 Shot with Single PF in 10oz cup.1 Shot with Single PF in 12oz cup.2 Shots with Double PF in 12oz cup.2 Shots with Double PF in 16oz cup.3 Shots with Double PFs in 16oz cup.Drinks will be prepared in their respective desposable cups, but then served into smaller cups for tasting.The cuppers will be customers or potential customer who drink americanos or drip coffee from coffee shops at least 3 days per week, with or without sugar.
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