Here we go!

I think I am ready to announce my new job, officially. It’s still a work in progress, but then again so is everything, right?

I have founded TampTamp Inc., a company dedicated to making the lives of coffee professionals easier. Sorry the website is ugly, we haven’t had time to design it yet, really. We have three branches:

TempTamp - a temporary agency for baristas. We have great baristas that will fill holes in schedules in NYC coffee shops.

TampCamp - a training center for baristas who want to learn more, owners who need a space to train, and anyone who wants to learn how to make and taste great coffee.

Coffee Planners - helping owners find solutions for their cafes, in whatever form it takes.

I’ve been working on the project for a little over a month, and it’s going very well so far. We’ve currently worked temp shifts at two Joe locations, at Everyman Espresso, at the Alessi store in SoHo and at a new Cafe in Williamsburg called Variety. We’ve also met with several owners who are thinking of opening shops, thinking of adding coffees to their menus, or want to work to improve their shops. It’s definitely been exciting so far, and I can’t wait to get 100% operational!

Neil & I have been working on this almost non-stop for a month, and Dan Griffin has been integral in the project as well. We’re a rag-tag team, but we seriously love coffee, so we’ve decided to take a plunge and see what happens. Wish us luck!

NYCS at New Amsterdam Market

New York Coffee Society’s biggest event yet went off yesterday without a hitch! Neil put together an awesome team of volunteers and together we raised over $700, which will be split between the New Amsterdam Market, our great hosts, and Bikes to Rwanda, a great coffee cause!

Prepping my secret recipe, cold-brewed ice coffee.

We sold several hundred cups of ice coffee from Ecco Caffe, Gimme! Coffee, Cafe Grumpy, and Jack’s Stir Brew. Our focus was on locally roasted coffee, as well as soon-to-be local roasteries Grumpy and Ecco. Thanks again to everyone who donated their coffee, time, supplies and space (especially the staff at Jack’s Front Street!), we could not have put on this event without you.

The crew rocks the booth.

We also introduced many local foodies to the New York Coffee Society organization, which was great! I’m sure one day our blogs will be coveted by the massses, but until that happens, it’s great to expose people who don’t always think about coffee to our whole crazy coffee world.

Finally, we had a small coffee gathering at The Mercury Dime, a new cafe on 5th Street in Manhattan. We tasted coffees from Colombia, Ethiopia and Kenya and talked a little bit about each, and about coffee in general. Finally, the weary team stumbled home, happy to have spread the coffee gospel that much farther.

Thanks for having us!

New Amsterdam Public Market

[From the website:]
New Amsterdam Public is a non-profit organization whose mission is to establish a year-round, indoor public market where butchers, grocers, fish and cheese mongers, and other purveyors [ed. - coffee!!!] will help create and foster a sustainable food system in the City of New York.

In an effort to create support for the market, they will be hosting a market meeting on Sunday, June 29th, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. outside the New Market Building, under the FDR and adjacent to the South St. Seaport. In attendance will be table with as many as 50 farmers, food producers, purveyors, distributors, bread bakers, caterers, and chefs, as well as photographers, filmmakers, food systems advocates and other pioneers of a regional, sustainable food economy.

It just so happens that the New York Coffee Society is one of those advocates, and will be hosting a coffee table at the market meeting for the New Amsterdam Public Market. We’ve invited several current or soon-to-arrive New York area coffee roasters to join us by donating coffee and selling it for charity. We’ll be cold-brewing some of it, french pressing some of it, and selling all of it, with proceeds to benefit both the market and Bikes to Rwanda.

I met Robert LaValva, the director of the market project, and Cerise Mayo, the program director, at Brooklyn Uncorked a few weeks ago, and we began to talk about the project. I was impressed by the project and thought it would be a good opportunity to introduce some of the current and soon-to-be area coffee roasters. So here we are.

Immediately following the market, Daniel Humphries will be hosting a coffee cupping, though I left the details of that cupping to Daniel, so it may be the coffees we’re selling at the market, or it may be something completely different! Who knows!

Anyway, I hope everyone who can come will. I’m hoping this will be a lot of fun, and will generate a lot of interest in the exploding New York coffee scene, as well as generate a bit of money for good causes.

New York Coffee Society Cupping Report

Yeah, so we had a cupping last Thursday and haven’t yet written about it. We’re busy, okay? Lots of things happening really quickly and such. Anyway, here’s the report from the lot/micro-lot cupping at Southside Coffee:

What was most exciting about last week’s cupping was the new people. We had, I believe, 19 people show up at Southside, and at least half of them had never cupped before, and all were excited to do it, which makes us really happy.

We were also excited by the coffees, of course. We had 5 offerings from 3 different roasters.

Counter Culture Coffee provided some of their La Golondrina from Colombia, both their microlot and their ’superlot’. The major cupping notes from these coffees are, according to the website, caramel and chocolate and dark fruit. We found the microlot to be a bit lighter and brighter, with more fruit that caramel. Both coffees are from Counter Culture’s newly minted Direct Trade Certification program.

Ecco Caffe provided 2 Brazilian coffees from Fazenda Cahoeira. The first was the “taste of the harvest” (not on the website), the second being the Screen Dried Yellow Bourbon (does screen-drying make it a natural?). Both were roasted for espresso, and so had a bit of a roasty taste, but the second one was a bit fruitier and more nuanced. I’d love to try shots of both.

The fifth coffee we tried was the El Machete from Panama. We had hoped to try the Finca Matalapa lot/micro-lot from El Salvador, but they ran out of it before we could grab some. I guess that’s what you get when someone uses it to win the US Barista Championship. But the El Machete’s official cupping notes include berry and maple, with a caramel finish. I understand this well. In cupping it, I found lots of fruit, and it really sweetened as it cooled. Like Counter Culture, El Machete is Direct Trade Certified.

New York Coffee Society Cupping - Thursday, June 12th 2008

Dear New York Coffee Society, Members Old and New!

As promised, I’ve put organized another informal cupping. My friend
Ramin has graciously offered up his cafe - Southside Coffee - as the
venue for this cupping. Southside is located at 652 6th Ave (between
17th St & 18th St) in Brooklyn. It will be on Thursday, June 12 at
6:30 pm. If it’s your first time cupping, try to be there by 6 so I
can give you a run-down on how it works.

For this cupping I thought it would be fun to taste lots and microlots
of coffee. By that I mean we’ll taste parts of specific farms that
owners or farmers have determined to have a distinct or otherwise
special flavor from that of the whole farm. We’ll taste these from at
least two different countries and roasters, so that even new cuppers
should be able to distinguish differences among the coffees.

For those of you who have been asking for a cupping with scoring, I’m
leaving that for Daniel’s next NYCS event (he’s clearly the superior
scorekeeper), but I will bring a few different score sheets if you’d
like to try using them.

The New York Coffee Society is a completely non-commercial group
dedicated to appreciating great coffees. We’re open to all comers, so
please forward this and feel free to invite anyone you’d like to
attend.

If you are coming, please RSVP to newyorkcoffeesociety@gmail.com so I can get an idea of how many to expect!

Also, you’ll probably be hearing extra from Daniel and myself this
month, as we’ve both been working on a bunch of exciting coffee
events!

One last thing - for those of you that can’t make it to our cuppings,
but still want to check them out, here are some other places that do
them:
Cafe Grumpy - the next one will be on Wedneday the 11th at Chelsea
Grumpy. Check out the calendar at the website
Ninth Street - I know they will be starting regular cuppings soon, but
there’s no info on the website. Worth a phone call? 212-358-9225
Counter Culture Coffee holds cuppings every Friday at 10am, but the
location varies. You can email me, I usually know where they are.
Our friend Donny also holds the Connecticut Coffee Society, if that’s
closer to where you’re located. Email him at donny_raus@hotmail.com to
sign up for that.

Happy cupping everyone, hope to see you Thursday!

Rosettas for Relief

Last night we went to Erin Meister’s smashingly successful Rosettas for Relief (hosted by the Amateur Gourmet), a latte art throwdown to benefit the recent victims in Malaysia and China. The event ended up raising $700! Go Meister!

It was a lot of fun, and there were tons of people there! It was kind of overwhelming. There were lots of people there I really like to see, so that was exciting. But what we really wanted to see were some of those lattes!

Anne competes while newly brunetted Katie towers overhead, and Brian Jackson pauses mid-latte for some refreshment

Did I mention there was free beer? We drank a lot of beer last night. Last night we learned that Bud Light tastes like freezer burn, it was very enlightening. This is Ally from Gimme showcasing her beer:

Anne’s working on a 270 degree (not temperature) latte, but this one here ended up winning

Dan Griffin wins! For winning, Dan received a $300 gift certificate for Eleven Madison Park, which he is going to use to take us out to dinner. Go Dan! Dan may have won, but look at Amber Sather, who is positively adorable in this picture:

Need coffee today? Come visit us at Brooklyn Flea!

We’ll be working the Crop to Cup booth for our friend Taylor.

Crop to Cup is a great company with sustainable business goals that also happens to produce delicious coffee. So it’s a no brainer, really. We’re happy to help get the coffee out there! Especially on a beautiful day like today…

Brooklyn Flea
178 Layfayette Ave (at Vanderbilt)
Brooklyn, NY 11238

Now I’ll go back to actually helping Neil load the car.

New York Coffee, Full Throttle

So we just flew back from Las Vegas, and boy are our arms tired!!

Now it’s back to full swing city life in New York, starting with competing in Erin Meister’s charity event, Rosettas for Relief! Hopefully I will win the exciting prize, but if you are a barista in the city you should definitely come challenge me for it! If you are a coffee (or beer - did we mention free beer?) fan in the city, you should come watch your baristas. Barista antics will be provided, free of charge.

Once that’s done I’ll be hosting another Coffee Society cupping, and I’ll be sure to keep the internet informed of its happening!

When: Thursday June 5 @ 8pm
Where: Joe, 9 E 13th Street (between Fifth Ave & University Pl)
Cost: However much you can plunk down in the donation jar
What: Free beer, awesome raffle prizes, music, cute baristas (it’s true!) and coffee, coffee, coffee!

Come watch your favorite bean-slingers compete for bragging rights, enjoy your other favorite brew and win tons of great stuff—all while supporting a wonderful cause! Donations will be tax-deductible and, thanks to cooperation by the Red Cross, all proceeds will go directly to aid affected areas of Myanmar and China in the wake of recent natural disasters.

Can’t join us on Thursday? Donations are also being accepted at three locations of Joe—checks made out to the American Red Cross can be dropped off with a barista there or mailed to: Joe, 9 E 13th St, New York, NY 10002. Include your name and address to ensure tax credit!

For more information and to R.S.V.P., e-mail meister@biynyc.com

Brooklyn Uncorked!

What makes a wine and beer tasting better than a coffee cupping? (ed. - Anne may not agree with the following statement.) If you swallow too much coffee, you get over-caffeinated, which isn’t a wonderful feeling. If you swallow too much beer and wine, you get drunk. That’s a much better experience.

Anne and I were able to test this theory on Wednesday night as we were invited to Brookyln Uncorked by Cerise Mayo, Edible Brooklyn contributor and Event Director. We met Cerise the other day at Daniel Humphrey’s Ethiopian cupping, which was sponsored by, coincidentally, Edible Brooklyn. When Cerise offered to add us to the guest list, we jumped at the chance.

Brooklyn Uncorked is a showcase for NYC/Long Island wineries, breweries and local specialty foods purveyors spread across two floors at BAM. So much is interesting to me that I want to separate them into multiple sectons:

Beer

You may know that I love good beer. In attendance here were some of my favorite breweries: Southhampton, Kelso, Heartland Brewery (warning: annoying website), Brooklyn Brewery, and my two favorites of all time, Blue Point Brewing Co. and Sixpoint Craft Ales. In fact, as you can see above, they were right next to each other, so I spent much of my time standing between them, tasting among the combined 7 different beers they were sampling. (One thing I learned about beer guys, they don’t do tastings the same way wineries do. A taste of a beer is a full glass, whereas a winery is just enough for a swish and spit. Yay beer!)

Wine

The second level was dedicated almost entirely to wineries. Unlike downstairs, which had a more casual atmosphere, it seemed that the second level was much more focused. Perhaps wine people are more serious about their wines than beer and food people, but we were able to find some stand-outs, for us, at least. Among our favorites were Channing Daughters Winery and Osprey’s Dominion (whose winemaker we met downstairs sampling bar-b-cue). I’m sure we would have liked all of them, but there were far too many to try them all and still be standing.

Food and Cheese

Oh the food. The previously mentioned bar-b-cue (The Smoke Joint) was outstanding, as were the mole plantains offered by Bonita and the Flatbush Farm’s speck(?) and parmesan on toast.

Cheese was being offered by the New York State Cheese Maker’s Guild and by Stinky Brooklyn. Both offered some great cheeses, but I think my personal favorite was Crane Mountain Chevre.

Whew. That was a whole lot of stuff. Needless to say, we had a lot of fun and were just a little bit inebriated by the end of it. But thanks to Cerise, and Edible Brooklyn for putting this on. It was great, and reminded us that we need to stop putting it off and go out to the wineries on Long Island to see what’s out there. If anyone wants to drive, let us know!

Wow Coffee

So we have yet to post anything about Minneapolis, which I mean to do, I swear, but first I wanted to mention the two incredible events I attended this week in New York.

Wednesday night, Cafe Grumpy hosted a presentation by Andrew Barnett of Ecco Caffe and Luis Norberto Pascoal of Daterra, the coffee plantation in Brazil that supplies Ecco with their espresso. They spoke about their coffees and attempted to explain how Daterra makes some of the best coffee in the world.

As I understand it, Daterra has segmented their farm into hundreds of small plots and they keep the coffees from each plot separate to both maintain the genetic line of each tree, and to help sort out the absolute best coffees. (For more information, Sweet Maria’s has a good explanation here.)

This process is what helped them to create what was, for me, the best coffee of the evening. The Opus 1 Exotic, which is being released by Ecco Caffe, is a naturally low-caffeinated coffee, containing just 0.8% caffeine, about 30% less than an average arabica-variety coffee (robusta actually has more caffeine than arabica).

In addition to the Opus, the fine folks at Grumpy pulled shots of the Daterra Reserve and made Ecco’s new Magnum (which, in looking at the website, does not seem to be available) on the Clover and in a Chemex. All three coffees were beautiful, and I have some at home that I can’t wait to try.

If that wasn’t enough, Thursday night brought even more exceptional coffee. Daniel Humphries held a cupping at Bodum’s new 11th Ave headquarters, and showed up with not only 11 of the best coffees from this year’s Ethiopia Limited auction, which is Ethiopia’s version of the Cup of Excellence, but with Daniel Mulu, one of the best coffee cuppers in Ethiopia (which puts him in good standing to be best in the world). We tried 6 washed, 1 semi-washed, and 4 naturally processed coffees.

Everything we tried was wonderful, and finding a favorite is next to impossible, but the stand-outs for me were three (in no particular order, not even the one I give, necessarily): in the natural category, the Biloya (which came in third with a score of 90.5) was exceptional, and if this is the year of the Biloya, then we’re looking at Biloya 2.0 for next year. The Koke (which scored an 85.7 and placed 17th overall) was subtle and smooth, which is unexpected in a naturally-processed coffee. Anne described it as a morning coffee, while the Biloya is for the afternoon. The third was a washed from Aleta Wondo (which came in second overall with a 91.3). I told Daniel that it tastes like happiness, and I still stand by that assertion.

you set ‘em up, and knock ‘em down!

After the cupping, Anne, Mary (from Jack’s coffee and under-appreciated NYCS cupper), Andrew Barnett, Daniel Humphries, Daniel Mulu, and I went for some truly righteous bar-b-que at Rub on 23rd St. We stuffed ourselves and stayed out way too late, but it was a lot of fun.

These two events were so wonderful, I am honored to be able to attend them, and I’m thankful to everyone who put them on.