Platopus Coffee

Passage Coffee is run by the 2014 World Aeropress Champion! In fact, we went out of our way to visit -- we got off at a train stop that’s by Keio University on our way to somewhere else, just to check out the cafe.

We got to pick out the beans that we wanted for our coffee. Because this was  the place for Aeropress, I ordered a cup of the Passage Blend. It was good! Well balanced and fruity. Aeropress with an EK43 grinder is something pretty rare to get. I do wish I had tried the Ethiopian Alaka, but we had tried a similar coffee at Trunk a couple days before, also from an Aeropress.  

Served in a tea cup!

When in Tokyo, we took a trip to Kiyosumi, a quiet neighborhood around the kiyosumi gardens. It also happens to be a small hub for local coffee roasters, including Blue Bottle. The tables were packed, and people were sitting outside the shop because there were no seats left! I think the majority of people were ordering espresso based beverages, because the pour over stations were mostly left empty. 

I ordered a Kenya single origin drip, and it was plenty tasty. It was poured through one of Blue Bottle’s custom drippers - aesthetically pleasing but probably not that impactful on flavor. Aroma was tomato-ey, fairly typical of the lighter roasted Kenyan beans that I’ve tried so far, but the taste was fruity and sweet. A very light body though - I guess super light roasts are popular in Japan now - was under the impression that people there preferred coffee roasted a bit darker. 

While on our Kiyosumi coffee tour, we followed the coffee map to this small and cute shop, Sunday Zoo. The owners and only employees are a retired couple, who had a dream of opening a cafe... and then went and did it! They roast small batches of coffee from around the world in a tiny sample roaster (perhaps only a 500g batch size?!) and serve pourovers from glass v60 drippers, one cup at a time.  Like other small coffee shops in Japan, we got to pick out a single origin from several glass jars with tasting notes, which was then ground fresh and brewed in front of us. I chose a Guatemalan coffee, which was very good. Rather mild, with notes of caramel and fruit. We talked to the owners about San Francisco, and they fondly recalled their trip in the 90s. :D Way before Blue Bottle and 3rd Wave coffee, our barista recalled he really enjoyed Peets. 

In September, Alex and I took a trip to Japan to catch the end of Mt. Fuji climbing season, and also to go back to Tokyo and nerd out on the new specialty coffee subculture there :)

I heard that the neighborhood of Kiyosumi Shirakawa had a lot of small cafes, so we decided to take a morning to walk around there.

Our first Kiyosumi stop, we dropped by the Tokyo expansion of the NZ based Allpress Espresso. ^_^ Always good to support businesses from back home!

Kiwi Cafe means Flat Whites!

The building looks way bigger on the outside, namely because only the bottom floor was public.

But the cafe also does special afternoons where they invite the public into their back room to learn how to use a machine to pull espresso drinks! I thought it was super cool how they were encouraging ordinary people to get into coffee :) 

(([12-1-2017] Disclaimer: This post has been sitting in our drafts for a while (HAHA), these beans were roasted back when we were still using our popcorn popper to roast at home! For an indication of its age, our popcorn popper broke because coffee chaff flew into the heating coil and it started smoking black bad-health-indicating smoke........ it’s ok, we got an SR500 after that and have been using it ever since.))

Purchased this from Amazon because it was cheap and had a prime shipping option. It was intended to be the first roast that we did. Seemed relatively inoffensive and flexible from description, and we’ve found that it roasts up fairly consistently. We’ve used it in both our popcorn popper and the FreshRoast. It hasn’t dazzled us, but then again, we’re also completely n00b roasters. Roasting it light tends to leave grassy-ish flavors (that Winnie described as ‘wet cardboard’ tasting). More research that we’ve done suggests that we could get higher quality beans for the price we paid (I guess Prime shipping is a premium)

Here’s an example roast - roasted a bit past first crack, but heat was applied too fast, so there is visible tipping (scorching). I think the best roast for this is to get to the end of first crack. Strong chocolate and caramel flavors come out of these beans then. 

In August, I took a trip to a few countries around Europe and Iceland with my mom! To my surprise, I found Reykjavik Roasters there, a specialty coffee roaster that is actually quite great. It’s amazing that beans get moved so far North from the equator, and even more amazing how tasty the coffee that they roast is! 

They do a series of espresso drinks, aeropress, and pourover + drip. Even though things are typically very expensive in Iceland, the prices at this coffee shop were actually pretty comparable to US prices

The cafe was opened in 2008 under the name Kaffismiða Íslands, by a board member of the World Coffee Events organization Sonja Björk Grant and Ingibjörg Jóna Sigurðardóttir, a multi-time world barista champion! 

Obviously, the coffee I got was very tasty :3 

And since Iceland was quite cold for summertime, the roaster that’s right there really warmed us up! It was super cool to see them roasting small batches in their small space. My mom was so intrigued.

A few of my close friends from back home now live in Melbourne’s CBD, and Little Rogue is one of their favourites. So obviously while organizing to meet up with them, this was their spot of choice. It’s tucked in a little alleyway that would look sort of sketch in the night time, but there’s a lot of cool street art on the walls outside. The cafe is also really low key, so if I wasn’t looking for it I definitely would have walked by without realizing it’s a cafe. It doesn’t help that the text above the door (which is open and therefore non-visible from the street) says ‘propeller hospitality... pty ltd as little rogue’

There was a lot of choice in terms of beans you could get with your espresso! I guess they rotate varieties during the year:

And there was a lot of siq art on coffee cups too:

I also thought their logo was cool, but that’s probably because I’m a geometry nerd. It was definitely tasty coffee, and the owners were nice. Seemed like a really popular place for (hip) high schoolers to hang out, and the aesthetic was slightly different from the norm these days too which was kinda neat (small place, lots of plants and otaku symbols).

Alex recommended that I visit one of Matt Perger(of Barista Hustle fame)’s cafes while in Melbourne, so I went to ST. ALi -- it was sort of in the middle of nowhere but I did a loop around South Melbourne between the convention center and the NGV (National Gallery of Victoria) just to drop by.  

They seated me when I came in even though I was just going to have a coffee, which was very nice. I went for a latte with their Orthodox blend because I’m boring. It was very tasty though!

Look how cute their cup is:

The cafe also serves some pretty tasty looking food, but I had already eaten lunch by the time I got there so I opted not to gorge myself. I liked the coffee a lot so I bought a bag to bring home. They had to open a new box of beans for me! I guess the Orthodox blend is really popular.

Patricia Brewers was voted as the Best Coffee in Australia of 2016 according to Yelp -- that, plus a bunch of my friends who live in Melbourne had good things to say about it, so I popped by to check it out during my visit.

Like many cafes in Australia, coffees are priced according to whether or not they have milk -- a white coffee is any espresso drink with milk, and filter is any non-espresso coffee. Patricia is interesting because they market themselves as a ‘brewer’, not a roaster; they take beans from other roasters and blend them and use them! Here, you can see that they had beans from Seven Seeds, Market Lane, and Small Batch when I visited.

I ordered a flat white with their Small Batch Konga Ethiopia single origin beans. The baristas were all super nice, and the drink was served with a complimentary seltzer water. 

The aesthetic of the cafe was quite unique too; there were many references to old industrial kitchens, with white tile and off-white aprons made from rough old fabric being worn by all the baristas. It almost felt like I was at the back of a bakery. There isn’t much seating in the store, but there were a few small windows with ledges that patrons can stand by and read hipster lifestyle magazines while they sip coffee. It’s also tucked away behind a building so you have to go down a small alley to get to it, and it felt very weird because there are lots of people hanging around outside in this kinda dingy-looking alleyway; except they were clearly not the people that one would normally find hanging about alleyways, because they were all obviously well-dressed professionals drinking coffee. 

Took a visit this past weekend to Verve, on the corner of Church and Market. It’s a nice cafe, with a lot of counter space to accommodate a ton of people on the inside. While table space was limited because of the opening weekend crowds, the baristas were handling the drink volume very well. 

Ordered a 1+1, which is a single espresso and a single macchiato (which tastes like a latte pretty much), but for only $0.75 more than a normal double espresso. Nice, bright espresso, but I wanted a little more body from it. Tasty though! I’ll be back for more!

Er... This was mainly to practice latte art and serve to guests who like dark roasts. It tasted rather ‘roasty’. :/ It’s labelled as a “medium” roast, but it tasted pretty dark. Not as dark as Starbucks or Peet’s but rather dark. Heavy flavors of burnt caramel and roasting. 

Winnie: I originally got this coffee because I was at Trader Joe’s trying to get some almond flour to make macarons with, since our local Safeway doesn’t stock any. I quickly looked up some reviews online and most people seemed to think that the Kenya AA coffee was the best that TJ’s had to offer, so I went ahead and got some (I knew it would be raining that weekend, so I wouldn’t be able to roast beans in our popcorn maker outside, and we were also almost out of whatever beans we had at the time). I ended up making espresso-flavored macarons with these beans, which turned out great (for a noob making macarons) :D! In terms of espresso flavor, I don’t like these as much as some others we’ve tried, but for $7.99 for 13oz, this caffeine addict is thankful it was there in a time of need haha. It’s definitely a dark medium or a light dark on the spectrum. 

These tasted best in milk drinks, providing some of that classic, intense, slightly bitter coffee flavor to go milk.

On a scale from 1 to tasty, this was a relatively (eh) tasty.

https://www.intelligentsiacoffee.com/tikur-anbessa-ethiopia

Also got this bag for free at the Intelligensia tasting. :) It’s a washed Ethiopian variety. `Tikur Anbessa` (ጥቁር አንበሳ) means `Black Lion` in Amharic (the language spoken in Ethiopia).  

We brewed in both the aeropress and the espresso machine. The aeropress  tasted great, but the espresso was pretty finicky to get right. However, when everything did turn out (a long extraction time and a 1:1.5 yield) make an extreme sweet and fruity shot, with no hints of bitterness at all. 

It had a flavor profile to other Ethiopian coffees that we’ve had in the past. Floral-y, fruity, and sweet, with a little bit of acidity (unless we messed up the extraction, in which case it was usually really sour).

On a scale from 1 to tasty, this was a very tasty (when done right). 

https://www.intelligentsiacoffee.com/house-blend

Went to the Intelligensia SF weekly coffee tasting and was rewarded with a free bag. :)

The barista helping out with the tasting mentioned how the first Intelligentsia House Blend she had was about 14 years ago, and it still tastes just as good (if not better!) with all the same flavor notes as she remembers from the first time!

Flavor notes are sometimes weird but I actually tasted fruity nots in this coffee. There were intense pineapple flavors in each shot of espresso that I pulled with this coffee, as well as a little bit of chocolate. The body was a little weak, and the aftertaste not particularly strong, but overall it was very tasty. It was consistent too - not difficult to get a good extraction. Would recommend to anyone who wants to try a blend from Intelligensia that’s not the Black Cat. 

On a scale from 1 to tasty, this was a very tasty!

Bought this from Amazon via Bohdi Leaf after we were inspired by an Andytown Ethiopian Natural Misty Valley bag that we tried. The flavor was full of fruit and floral notes, without the bitterness that we usually associated with coffee. To be honest, that bag of coffee was game changing for us. However, @ nearly $25/lb, it was a bit pricey as an option. 

Here’s a picture of that bag:

These green beans were a little over $6/lb shipped, which was a much more agreeable price point. The beans we received were definitely not the highest quality they could be, displaying a lot of irregularity in size as well as exhibiting a few defects. While Lekempti beans are not as hyped as Yirgacheffe or Sidamo, these beans exhibited many of the same floral and fruity characteristics. However, the natural process flavors of this coffee were really strong. While it didn’t taste super fermented after roasting, it did have flavor and aftertaste that was oddly herbal and reminiscent of black tea. I kind of liked it, but I think it could be off putting for people who were expecting a cleaner flavor. The acidity of the bean was mild, the floral flavors were high, everything that you’d expect from a good Ethiopian bean. It also had a super astringent quality in the first roast that we did - this was probably due to our roasting technique (under-roasted a bit with too much air is my guess, but we’ll have to see!)

Here’s a picture of an example roast (Roasted just into first crack to try to retain that fruitiness that comes with natural Ethiopians)

As you can see in the picture, these beans tended to roast up irregularly, partly due to their difference in size. In addition, these beans released a lot of chaff (and set off the smoke alarm in the process :o )

On a scale from 1 to tasty, this was a tasty.

I was in Melbourne for a few days last week, and took the opportunity to go around and try some coffee places! 

Industry Beans is based in Fitzroy, which is a very hip/bohemian/rapidly gentrifying neighborhood north of Melbourne’s CBD. The cafe has its own in-house roaster right there whom you can watch working! It’s pretty cool, although they seemed to be too busy to answer questions while I was there. I went an hour before closing on a weekday, and the place was still pretty full! They also serve food so that may explain the popularity. I can imagine it being the kind of place that has a line out the door in the weekend.

^ These are the beans that they roast!! The cafe is situated in what used to be a warehouse, so there is exposed brick and a very industrial feel, and they have a pallet wall above the counter too. The bags of beans add to the vibe! I’m not really sure how anyone gets to that top rack though...

I ordered a flat white with their Fitzroy Street blend.