Conversations on Coffee

I was in Victoria the past couple of days, and managed to check out a fairly new addition to the Victoria cafe scene: Habit.

Located on Pandora, just down from Government, this is probably one of the most spacious cafes I’ve seen. They’ve kept a lot of the original brick and floors, and personally, I’m a fan of this style. They’ve also added a couple of unique touches, such as the stools made from old tractor seats.

They have a fairly short menu with the regular espresso-based offerings, but I was also excited to see a menu of single origin coffees available via french press. The espresso being used is roasted by John Sanders, and incidentally, Habit is currently using the five group Linea from the old Hines location.

My capp was prepared by a former schoolmate of mine, Zack, and was as good as any capp you’d find in Vancouver. I also tried a press of the Brazil I believe, and found it very lovely and creamy. This is definitely one cafe that I will be frequenting whenever I’m in Victoria.

Matthew

I’m always amazed at how good coffee tastes first thing in the morning. My equipment isn’t top of the line (Virtuoso grinder, french press, pot on the stove) and yet, somehow, every cup still seems to taste amazing. Lindsay and I discussed this, and her opinion was that since your palate is fresh, and non fatigued, sure, the coffee would taste great. This makes sense - if I have a second cup, it’s usually not quite as good as the first.  However, I can’t believe that my technique is so flawless that pretty much every press produces a great cup. When I’ve tried to make presses at the cafe, with far better equipment and control, I’ve had a hard time reproducing my level of success at home. I’ve read a couple of papers that found links between the environment and taste, and my guess is that environment is probably at least partially responsible for the differences. In the cafe, you’re constantly on the alert for customers, or things that need to be done. It’s not exactly conducive to completely focusing on tasting coffees, whereas at home, I can give the coffee that level of focus.

Or perhaps I’m the only one who has experienced this phenomenon.

Matthew

Some interesting happenings over on coffeed…

Jim Schulman and Andy Schecter have been doing some experiments with dose in a standard (LM) double basket. One of the interesting results was their finding that certain espressos taste better when downdosed to between 13-14 grams. This is in stark contrast to the majority of shops in Vancouver, who are probably dosing in the range of 18+ grams for a double basket. I decided to give this idea a try at the cafe, but was slightly hindered by the fact that dosing 13 grams in a double basket makes distribution darn near impossible (at least if dosing just 13 grams). My dose ended up being about 14-15 grams, but this still made for some interesting results. The espresso became very smooth, and had a somewhat less intense taste. However, it wasn’t weaker per say, just much smoother, in the same way aging smooths out alcohol. The body on this particular blend, when downdosed, was really thick, compared to a medium body at the standard dose of about 17-18 grams. Several local coffee people had a chance to taste the shots, and the general consensus was that they were definitely smoother and lighter than shots pulled with the standard dose. The one negative aspect I found with downdosing was that you seemed to lose a lot of the character of the shot - I was having a hard time picking out distinct flavours. Still, the concept of downdosing is really interesting, and hopefully I’ll get a chance to experiment with it some more, and maybe get a better understanding of why the taste changes in the manner it does.

Matthew