Mecca, Rio, Single Origin and Seven Seeds are very much appreciated.  I think on the evening the favourites were once again spread across the coffees with the surprisingly fruity coffee from Mecca and the Seven Seeds espresso blend vying for top spot.

You can watch the little video Seven Seeds made for us here.  There is a write up from one attendee, food blogger Anthony Silverbrow. Lots of people were taking pictures – hopefully we’ll get hold of some and get them uploaded!

Here is a little timelapse I set up.  For some reason the cups on the machine amuse me!

Taste of Australia from James Hoffmann on Vimeo.

You can also read up about the Taste of West Coast from the Irish guys who came to visit from The Other Black Stuff.

We’ll get a date sorted for Taste of Sweden as soon as we can – we can’t wait for that one!  Hope to see you there.

We’re really sorry for the late notice on this one – but we didn’t want to confirm until we knew we had coffee for it.  (Postmen world wide are our enemy!)

Taste of Australia is happening this Wednesday – the 19th November, from around 6.30ish til people stagger wide-eyed and caffeinated out into the night.

Check the webshop for links to the roasters, we’re really looking forward to this one!

We accidentally oversold the event last night, but it was still a bit of surprise to see around 45 people take the time, put their hands in their pockets for charity, and turn up and to drink coffee (even if that did mean I had to pull around 160 shots in under hour on my own – a rare work out these days).  The event was a real mix of people – consumers, baristas, roasters and general coffee types – some travelling a really long way to come down (Though I think we caffeinated Dale enough for his 100ish mile drive back to Bristol!)

As usual we served the coffees blind, people were offered repulls if they weren’t happy with how their shot was made, and people were invited to leave any cupping notes on our whiteboard anonymously (because few of us like standing in front of a crowd and nervously suggesting “redcurrants”.)

Again some of the blends fell victim to our postal service, despite being posted ahead of others that arrived, and we’d like to thank all the roasters who took part.

Each one of the 4 blends we tasted were very different, and each had a portion of the crowd nominating it their favourite.  One thing that did seem to run through most of the blends was a presence of PNG – though I guess that is probably the closest growing origin to New Zealand (despite the hard work of Mountain Top and others I am not going to count Australia in that!).  However, other than that one vague commonality, the shots produced were a range of espresso styles which was very interesting.

The event was a lot of fun – thank you to everyone who came out and kept us busy, and an extra thank you to Andrew Tolley for manning the camera and the guys from Bullet Coffee Roasters for the exceptionally delicious brownies!

Here is a short video:

Taste of New Zealand from James Hoffmann on Vimeo.

Our hair was torn out.

Two roasters did manage to break the postal deadlock and get their espresso to us, and we were very excited to recieve their coffee! Tim Wendelboe sent us his espresso, as well as a bag of his new Kenya and a bag of his Aricha. Supreme Roastworks (the new kids on the block) sent us their new espresso.

Lots of people turned up to taste the offerings, and it was a real mixture of coffee people from London. We started by cupping Tim’s two coffees, and I think his Aricha was the favourite of the two by the group – though my favourite was the Kenya which we almost didn’t have enough of because I kept drinking it through the week.

Then we moved onto the espresso.  Supreme’s espresso was great – tonnes of fruit, acidity and sweetness.  They had “juiced” up the blend by adding a little of their Aricha lot and it really gave the shots some great top notes .  We pulled it at 92C as requested, but then also took the temp up a little more.  It seemed to split the group with about 60% prefering the cooler brew.

As we only had two espressos to taste we were very pleased to see Per Nordby from De Matteo who was in town.  Whilst Da Matteo are Swedish and not Norwegian it still seemed ok to brew his coffee too.  Per was a little unhappy that the coffee was too fresh, but it stilled pulled well and the shots were very tasty.  A lot of people really enjoyed the heavier, more nutty and cocoa-y shots it produced, and it was good to have a very contrasting style of Nordic espresso as I think we sometimes get into the bad habit of talking in a general way about the style of Nordic espresso, the way we used to have the bad habit of talking generally about an origin’s flavour profile.  There were a few smiles when Per revealed the contents of the blend – despite being developed very independently the components were very similar to our WBC blend.  Great minds…..

To finish off was Tim Wendelboe’s espresso.  Instead of having people talk about how the shots taste – which is often intimidating in a large group – we asked people to write up any notes on our whiteboard when they tasted the coffees.  This worked really well and people threw down some great descriptions.  Tim’s espresso was very clean and sweet, though I have to admit that I didn’t do as good a job as I wanted to pulling the shots and I had to repull a few espressos for people.  Sorry Tim – I suck!

There was no clear favourite on the night – opinions split across the three espressos – though I think Supreme’s was the most unusual and divisive (in a good way!).  We are really looking forward to the Taste of New Zealand, and we’ll be posting the date up on here in the next few days.  It will be a ticketed event, with all of the small fee going to Bikes to Rwanda.

Thanks to everyone who attended and made it a lot of fun – we hope to see you and more soon!

A few more flickr photos here.

We’ll try and do one each month and hope to run in this order:

August: Norway
September: New Zealand
October: West Coast US
November: Sweden
December: Australia
January: East Coast US
February: Denmark
March: Canada
April: Japan

We’ll post up some pictures and reviews of the event on Wednesday – the first couple of coffees are already here and we are looking at the bags and drooling!