dotCross Coffee Project

We built a travel kit! Here's to bringing good coffee everywhere you go this 2015.  In the kit:  Aeropress, with Able Disk Able Travel Cap for storing beans in the empty plunger space of the Aeropress. Hario Slim Mill  AWS Blade 1000 x 0.1g Herschel Chapter Dopp Kit 12 oz coffee cup for scale. We laid the Aeropress and the grinder down in the main section, with the weighing scale vertical at the end. 

Tim Wendelboe. 'nuff said.

Actually, no. Tim Wendelboe's a legend in the specialty coffee world, and is a WBC champ. He's part of the Nordic movement that started ultra light roasts that aimed to up-end then-existing notions of what coffee could be. They remain one of, if not the lightest, roasters in Oslo (and probably in most of the specialty coffee world). The idea of sourcing for fresh coffee directly from farmers and cooperatives was also put into action by him and his peers. Pretty stellar stuff.

All brews are done by Aeropress here "for consistency".

The shop space is kinda small, particularly because their roaster sits right in the center of it, but is really homely. They roast weekly, so be sure to check that out if you're ever in Oslo.

Today, we feature Belleville Brûlerie, a one and a half year roaster based in the northeastern Parisian neighborhood of Belleville that has been doing pretty great stuff.

I just had my first cupping session in Paris there, and I must say it was quite an experience for several reasons:

The entire thing was conduct in French (though the cupping leader was kind enough to provide some translations). And more than that, the terms used aren't exactly directly translated from the English words used. Instead of acidity, we have attaque (literally, attack); instead of aftertaste, we have longue en bouche (literally, that which is long in the month {which really, is the lingering taste in the mouth}).

We did a pretty interesting cupping of vastly different roast levels here, ranging from the ultra-light-just-past-first-crack to a more developed city+ roast. Basically, there were coffees reminiscent of Tim Wendelboe's amazing Hunkete and those of Counter Culture's lovely Baroida. Needless to say, this was both impressive and pretty awesome.

A point about Kenyan coffee production soon turned into a discussion about Kenyan politics, which eventually turned into the declaration that the concept of washing stations was trop communiste.

Some minor differences - we didn't get to break the crust of the coffees, and we did the cupping in glass cups (small differences).

Back to the language thing - it was really difficult to keep up (at my language level), and I could basically only catch words like fruits rouges, cuir, citron, etc whilst the more subtle points were completely lost of me.

Interesting information tidbit gleaned from the parts of the conversations I got, the Paris office of Firefox has a La Marzocco espresso machine in their engineering department.

This particular Nekisse Shakisso from the Sidamo region in Ethiopia, as sourced and roasted by Coutume Paris, must be one of the best coffees I've had in a while.

It's a pretty interesting natural processed coffee, but without the off-notes of over-ripe fruit. Instead, you get a nice hint of blueberries and white flowers, with a mild but present acidity. Awesome stuff.