The Cottage Smallholder

SIMON: Well done, yes you are very lucky to have a local company roasting coffee. When I was a kid they were actually much more common than they are today and yet back then not nearly as much coffee was being drunk.

JANET: No never use boiling water as you say it wrecks the flavour, they say it scalds the bean, I am not too sure about that bit but it certainly makes the coffee much more bitter and this scalding process may be that the delicate flavours are driven off just leaving the stronger ones. As I said, I pre-heat the cup to minimise the heat loss when the coffee is made, the thick espresso mugs seem to disipate a lot of the heat from the small, albeit double, espresso shots from my machine.

Incidentally do you ever make hot chocolate and put a double espresso shot in it ? It beats the mochas in starbucks etc... and I am beginning to think perhaps I ought to investigate different types of chocolate, dunno.

My current coffee faivs are Kenya AA - I like the edge this has, Dark Roasted Ararbica - smooth chocolaty and gorgeous, Old Brown Java - this is very special, it is actually the first coffee the Dutch planted in Indonesia and it has loads of the old coffee flavour with very little acidity, exactly the reverse from Kenya AA. A light blend that I like is medium roasted Mysore & Mocha but you need a specialist shop to get that made up so don't have it around much. In fact if Simon does actually manage to get to join us in July I would be tempted to be cheeky and ask him if he could see if his local shop can do it cos we aint got anywhere that sophisticated here in rural, but lovely, Suffolk.

Simon, thanks.

Have you seen the linked Barista videos from their Facebook page ?

Try this for a start :

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Don't let Danny see it because he will expect a demonstration when we get to the meet.