Ch-ch-ch-chaaaanges….

This was very nearly an extremely sad post. But it isn’t!

I was genuinely a few days away from having to close up Dr. Coffee’s Cafe for good, which was heartbreaking. As always, it came down to money, and I hate that. Money always spoils everything!!! In simple terms, the cafe wasn’t making enough of it. It was deathly quiet over the winter (but probably would have been fatal then if we’d had a “normal” Saskatchewan winter actually), but I tried to stay confident, and it did eventually start to pick up again. But not fast enough for me.

Baby Theia turned one year old last week. That in itself is incredible, but most significantly for the cafe, it spells the end of my very generous maternity leave. Right now, my fellow Mums are all facing the horrible prospect of having to go back to work, and all scrabbling around frantically trying to find childcare for one-year-old infants. This is no easy feat. It is also incredibly expensive. If I “went back to work” properly in the cafe, I would not only have to pay myself a living wage, my salary would have to be enough to cover childcare costs as well – and the business just couldn’t afford it. It only just covered the low wage I pay the part-time baristas (though I prided myself on paying above minimum wage, it wasn’t much above!). Without affordable daycare, I couldn’t work any more. Theia is now walking and it wouldn’t be fair or practical for anyone if I took her to work with me. Her coming with me was fine when she was a newborn because she just slept through most of it, but nowadays she’d be climbing the walls quite literally. So, me returning to full time cafe work was not an option. Neither did I seriously consider the idea of finding another high-paying job elsewhere to support the cafe – even if I found one (unlikely), it would mean I had no time to run the business which is entirely self-defeating. All was looking very, very gloomy indeed and it feels SO UNFAIR.

I tried to sell the business, but that was nearly impossible with so little profits. I did have several meetings with a guy who initially sounded really positive. He put in a reasonable offer thhat I would have accepted, and it got to the point where he was 3 days away from taking the keys and opening up by himself – but then he just stopped talking to me. No response to emails or phone calls,didn’t show up for a meeting, nothing. Then I got a random message from him, asking about my dog…? Obviously sent to the wrong person, but interestingly, it said “Sent from my iphone, Brandon MB” on the bottom of the email. So he wasn’t even in the province any more. Terry Gillespie, you are a timewasting arsehole.

I think I was fairly close to a nervous breakdown by that point, but mercifully my parents were here to look after me and we had a mini holiday in Calgary and I got to ignore it all for a few days. And when I got back…
Don’t you just love those random late night conversations with strangers? A while back we hosted a wedding reception in the cafe for one of our regulars, and afterwards while rather tipsy she declared that she and new husband wanted to get into business and *obviously* I should be their business mentor…. I didn’t think anything of it at the time but when I sent out the sad little “We’re closing” email, she jumped on it and said she could help. They aren’t in a position to buy the business unfortunately, but we managed to figure out an arrangement whereby they are taking over running the place for 6 months with the option to buy in the new year. So I am still the owner and I’m effectively training the others, but it’s way less demanding time-wise and emotionally! She’s renamed it Noni’s after her daughter (and really, Dr. Coffee’s doesn’t make much sense without me!), and the place has a bit of a new look – that I love because if anything, it is even MORE colourful now. There’s also an expanded menu, and even a bike rack in there! I think we share a vision for the place which (so far) we’ve been able to communicate to each other very well indeed, and that is incredibly reassuring given how crushing the idea of closing was to me. I really am incredibly lucky sometimes.

So, thanks to an amazing saviour at the final hour, all is wonderful again. Go visit Noni’s!!

 

Cafe (owners) Culture

No doubt the most fun part of my Phd to me was the ethnography. I may have graduated from the Geography department, but I was, and still am an anthropologist at heart. People fascinate me, and investigating my imagined/constructed “coffee cultures” around the little brown beans was amazingly interesting. Much has been written about ‘cafe culture’, particularly European cafe culture, and also the atmosphere and environments which coffee shops attempt to create for their customers. There are also the stereotypes: the hipster barista in various guises, the underemployed arts graduates in green aprons or the old men on ‘coffee row’ in Saskatchewan for instance. I concentrated on producer ethnographies and the cultures that grew up around the less visible parts of the coffee production process – the farmers, cuppers and roasters.

What I neglected during my fieldwork was Cafe Owners Culture – what sort of people open coffee shops? What motivates them? Now I have joined the ranks of Coffee Shop Owners properly, I hope I am more qualified to answer that. In my experience so far, coffee shop owners seem to fall into four rough categories:

1. Corporate investors who acquire coffee shops as little piggy banks and let someone else do the hard graft in the actual cafes,
2. Passionate coffee connoisseurs and geeks who want a place to showcase their knowledge and skills and maybe educate the consumers,
3. Fired up entrepreneurs who think that coffee shops represent a low risk, easy start up opportunity, or
4. Lifestylers who want an idyllic, fun little business that gives them freedom and a more healthy work-life balance

For the record, since this post is now getting rather judgemental, I think I fall somewhere between the second and fourth types. I am rapidly learning the hard way that none of these types seem to really succeed. Just because I know a lot about coffee and how to make it, doesn’t mean I necessarily know how to make it make money. Conversely, in such a crowded market, passion, personality and knowledge are essential to make your coffee shop stand out. Coffee shops are not ‘easy money’ for the investors either because although profit margins on lattes are eye-wateringly high, so too are the overheads on the perfect location and the wage bill for passionate, talented staff.

As for the Lifestylers… well, if I am honest, the yearning for something that’s *mine*, that I am free to try out my own ideas in, being my own boss, and wanting a business that I can fit around my family are my main motivations. Since the PhD I have swapped tedious Theories of Human Geography journals for insipid entrepreneurial books and How To guides about setting up coffee shops. A worrying number of them are written by people who haven’t actually done it themselves. Of those who have – and there are some great, inspirational examples out there amongst the tripe – all warn against doing it for ‘the lifestyle’. I wholeheartedly agree. I am my own boss, and I wouldn’t want it any other way but it comes at a huge price. I have been able to engineer my business around my family to some extent, but that just involves bringing my kids to work, not lessening my work load to spend time with my kids. The old and now internet-famous quote about entrepreneurship is very true; that entrepreneurs work 80 hours a week to avoid working 40 hours for someone else. Making a living from a start-up coffee shop business is a hugely difficult, exhausting and stressful challenge, mistakes are inevitable and incredibly easy to make, and the failure rate is frighteningly high. Far from giving you a comfortable life, it takes over your life entirely!

Every single coffee entrepreneur book that I’ve come across so far has been written by someone who has succeeded. My cafe owning journey is not over yet, and I may still succeed, but I am writing my own entrepreneurs’ book already. It’s called “It seemed a good idea at the time” and it is “inspirational” only in that I am still standing and for the most part, still sane and smiling. It is what *not* to do when starting a coffee business, and those stories need to be told, from every part of the cafe owners culture.

 

Slinging the shots – babies, beans and business

I am officially on maternity leave from the cafe. So far, this hasn’t really made much of a difference!

I ‘gracefully’ retired from actually being a barista a few weeks before New Daughter was born, mainly because I physically couldn’t stand behind the bar for long any more, and suddenly realised that everything useful was on the bottom shelf in there! I have a renewed appreciation for how physically demanding the workload of a barista is.

This is how I expected my perfect, peaceful, instagrammable maternity leave to look:

NB: That is not my child, and those are not my legs.

This is the reality:
Aah… the joys of entrepreneurship. Even if I am not actually pulling espresso shots, there are always at least a dozen emails waiting for me, or the website needs updating, or Facebook needs to take its daily slice of my soul, or its time for pay roll…Daughterling will gradually learn to fall asleep to the sound of me typing over her head, I’m sure.

I am not really complaining; I honestly wouldn’t have it any other way. We opened Doctor Coffee’s Cafe #1 when our first daughter was just 5 months old; she grew up in a coffee shop, and if anything, it has only served to make her exceedingly sociable and confident. No one can ever accuse her of being the shy, clingy type of child and I do think being in a cafe environment with lots of strangers admiring her when she was tiny may have had a lot to do with it. Being self-employed like this and having the freedom to take my baby to work with me allows me all sorts of benefits which few parents with conventional jobs can afford.

Recently, Marissa Mayer (CEO of Yahoo) announced that she would be taking just two weeks off to give birth to her twin girls. (see the article, here) Of course this caused uproar – that’s a terrible role-model for other women etc, it gives out the message that work is more important than her family.. yada yada yada. Mayer is a multimillionaire, so of course she can afford to pay someone to look after newborns for her. And the very fact that she is, and remains a millionaire CEO is because presumably she works her arse off and probably can’t engineer a way to take any longer away from work anyway. Going back to work in an office – sitting behind a desk in fact, is not too strenuous on a post-partum body either. She is in a position to make that work, but she is NOT in the same position most women find themselves in and therefore shouldn’t be treated as a role model.

In some ways, I consider myself luckier than Marissa Mayer.  In my own way, I am a COO of a company too – chief operations officer rather than chief executive officer, (though I’d never use that title at the moment and expect to be taken seriously!) and I’m a proud Mum to an adorable newborn baby girl. Whereas I am envious of Mayer’s success and certainly of her millions, I NEVER have to sit in an office any more, never have to wear a power suit, I have caffeine on tap to cope with 4am feeds, and most importantly I get to run my business AND take care of my wonderful girls at the same time, and really, I can’t ask for any more than that.

BabyCoffee comes to work with me in her sling (which I actually bought while at the coffee conference in Guatemala). Slings are so useful – I can carry her hands free and make lattes at the same time!

 

In love with the Pour Over

Time for an actual COFFEE post!

I started playing around with pour over coffee when we were setting up my Wheelie Good Coffee cart – it is simple, it makes one cup at a time, and it’s about the freshest way to make a great coffee outside without much in the way of equipment. It proved extremely popular on the market, and so we introduced the pour over stand to Dr. Coffee’s Cafe as well. As far as we know, we are currently the only cafe in Regina to offer this brew style!

Pour Over coffee on the Wheelie Good Coffee cart.

Pour over in our funky mugs at Dr. Coffee’s Cafe

But what is all the fuss about, really? This is not new technology. Several customers have commented that they/their Mums/Nans used to make coffee like this, usually with Melitta drippers. I found very similar pour over stands in Costa Rica, where that is the “traditional” brew method. Someone else told me it was an Indian custom. The appeal comes from its simplicity: If you have a kettle and some sort of filter, you can make it. Nowadays I use Hario drippers and paper filters, and we even have a very fancy goose neck kettle to ensure a slow, even pour, but in principle, you can use any boiling water receptacle and any filter – even a sock! (for the record, the Costa Rican one below isn’t actually a sock, it’s a tube of cheese cloth fabric!). These filters are a lot finer and more robust than the equivalent in a French press/cafetiere, and so you end up with a very smooth, clean cup with no sludge at the bottom.

Costa Rican pour over stand and grinder.

I like to use distinctive, single origin coffees in the pour over, because the brew method can highlight subtleties in the coffee that other methods tend to hide. it is also particularly good for lighter roasts. My favourites are Indian Monsooned Malabar, or fruity Nicaraguan roasts. Due to the longer brewing time, pour over coffee does tend to come out much stronger than standard drip coffee or even French press, so very dark roasts or espresso blends tend to be ‘over kill!’

How to brew with a Pour Over or Chemex

The Pour Over Brewer is quick, simple, cheap and effective – perfect for home use. They are usually ceramic drippers that look like a little cup with holes in the bottom, with a saucer attached. This sits on top of your mug, and you pour the coffee straight through it. A Chemex (pronounced “Kemex”) is a glass pot with a neck allowing you to pour hot water through coffee in a filter paper held in the neck. Chemex pots are usually handblown glass and are very attractive, artistic objects, but the principle is the same.

Chemex and Pour Over brewers make very smooth, mild coffee, in between a percolator and a French Press. Besides the brewer itself, you will also need the correct size filter papers (usually conical or wedge-shaped ones, rather than round ones – Chemex even make their own) – and a kettle. You can buy specialist goose-neck kettles that are designed for pour over coffee – the long, thin neck gives you excellent control over how you pour it.

First, boil the kettle. The water needs to be just off the boil so it doesn’t scorch the coffee.

Grind up your coffee to a medium-fine level – coarser than for an Aeropress but finer than for normal drip. You need around a heaped tablespoon per 12oz cup (the Chemex holds about 6 cups, so you would need 6-7tbsp to fill it.)

Put the filter paper in the dripper, and dampen the paper with a splash of hot water (this allows coffee to pass through the paper more easily). Spoon in the coffee grounds, and make a small dent in the mound of coffee. If using a Chemex, stand it on a heat proof mat. It is not hot enough to damage your tabletop if you don’t, but marble or granite surfaces can cool the pot too quickly you end up with cold coffee! Pour over drippers either have their own stand, or can sit on top of your mug.

Gently pour the boiled water into the centre of the coffee grounds in a circular motion, very slowly, little and often. The trick is to get the water on to the coffee without spreading it up the sides of the filter paper, so the coffee shouldn’t float. The water then drips through the paper into either the glass dome of the Chemex, or straight into your mug if you’re using a standard Pour Over brewer.

The coffee should “bloom” – as in, the mound of grounds should swell up and bubble nicely into a thick “slurry”when water is poured on it. If the coffee isn’t fresh, you will get less of a bloom effect. Let it dribble through over the space of about 3 minutes, and voila! The smoothest, freshest coffee you can produce!

Our fancy goose neck kettle and glass Hario dripper.

 

Doctor Coffee’s Cafe, Darlington

Posting these old ones, because a few Canadian coffee folk have been asking!

My first cafe, Darlington, UK, 2009-2011

 

Happy Baristas

Or,

What makes a coffee shop, part 2.

 

In the last ten years, I’ve worked in seven different cafe/bar/restaurant/coffee shop type places, both independent and at branches of the big chains – everything from Caffe Nero, to my own coffee shop and previously, my little coffee van in the UK, to the most recent move to this vegetarian restaurant/coffee house here in Saskatchewan. I’ve also spent a lot of time, and an eye-watering amount of money, hanging around in coffee shops all over the world. I think this has given me a fairly good idea of what makes a good one!

I posted previously asking my loyal follower(s) to say what makes a place worth visiting to them. After good coffee, most answers seemed to revolve around the idea of “comfort” – ie: “no metal chairs!!” “big squashy sofas” and “free wifi”. I agree. To me, what makes a good coffee shop is as much about atmosphere and environment, as it is about the coffee. I’ve worked in, and spent time in places where the coffee is not that great. but everyone in there were so friendly and fun that attendance was habit forming. Conversely, I’ve visited places (typically, in the posh parts of London but also significantly in Darlington and one here in Regina) where the coffee itself was exceptional and expertly crafted, but the places themselves felt at best sterile and at worst, pretentious and actively hostile.

Coffee can be sold by image. Some places are just Fashionable: if you can make the coffee look pretty, and if you are in the right location (for example, in the city centre where people with a lot of money reside or work) and build up a popular brand image, then people will pay for it regardless of whether or not the coffee itself is any good. The same is true of ethical branding – serve fair trade/organic/bird friendly/rainforest alliance/ 30% raw/gluten-free/anti-oxident-packed GRIT in recycled cups with 10% going to charity in a ‘social enterprise’ café and position yourself in the midst of the hipster part of town, and that burnt grit could make your fortune.

I am not trying to say that all coffee shop customers are gullible fools – they are not, and consumers are getting more and more demanding of higher quality coffee, hence the increasing preference for independent places over the chains in the UK. Happily, people are starting to appreciate what they are drinking more, and becoming more discerning. My point is really that it is not just the coffee that makes a good coffee shop. People visit for other reasons.

In my experience, creating the right atmosphere is heavily based on personality – that of the staff and of the business owners/designers. Friendly, chatty, informal people who don’t treat customers like they are just walking ATMs. The chain coffee shops attempt to artificially create this atmosphere by effectively scripting their staff, and designing the branches so that baristas can never actually sit down visibly, so that we constantly looked busy and active but never relaxed! Unsurprisingly, this approach usually failed, and gave rise to the chain store baristas being called “robots” “button monkeys” or “drones in green aprons”! (all real quotes from my customer focus groups).

Baristas have to enjoy what they are doing to be good at their job, and should be given the opportunity to showcase their creativity and individuality – coffee and creativity always go hand in hand! A huge amount of Coffee Shop Success is based on personality; particularly in small businesses, it is as much about selling your personality as it is selling coffee. Community is also important, as an article in our local paper showed the other day:

Fully 71 per cent like to support owners who live in their community, and 68 per cent like the personalized service from small businesses.

That’s no surprise to Craigen, who said people note her firm’s visibility in community events and tell her, “we’re going to support you because you support us.”

“People like businesses that participate in the community, their ‘nearness’ and the fact that they get to know the owners,” agrees RBC’s Mike Michell

Read more: http://www.leaderpost.com/business/Consumers+loyal+local+businesses/7041277/story.html#ixzz22v6Ya4kn”

So there you have it: good coffee shops need good coffee, great, personable, happy staff, a sense of community and big squashy sofas. You heard it here first!

 

Plans for 2011

First of all, I hope my dear reader(s) had a good Christmas and happy new year to all!
Second, apologies for the state of this post. I am trying to type it on my phone, that is, my brand new nokia E90. I know that this phone is at least 3 years old now, but it is still the best phone Nokia have ever made and I love it, and darling hubby has bought me a new one for christmas to replace the one that died a nasty death last summer. We are currently driving back from Shrewsbury to Darlington, Miranda is wailing, i am bored but it is dark and I can barely see the keyboard to type, and WordPress Mobile in all its infinite wisdom has rendered the New Post screen a whole 4cm wide for no fathomable reason.
But i digress.

I had a nice message from Simon at Pollards coffee roasters, saying “2011 will be the year of Afternoon Tease”. It kinda has to be really, but also it should be the year I really become an actual doctor of coffee. This means finishing the thesis, which in turn, means a helluva lot of work over the next few months. Intense planning is required.

One possible plan for the thesis is to build up a reputation in Afternoon Tease for good coffee to the extent the Coffee Geeks or glitterati or whatever they should be named; the barista champions, and gourmets and so on start visiting from afar. I could run off a few copies of the thesis with a vanity publisher and try and flog them in the cafe – I’d just need some major geeks and/or academics to come in because I’m sure no one else would be remotely interested!

In this spirit of all good research, I have adapted Gwilym Davies’  (Flat-cap-wearing 2009 World Barista champion, part of the aforementioned coffee glitteratti) idea of the ‘Disloyalty card’ – encouraging people to try out other *good* coffee venues in London on his list, just to get people experiencing excellent coffee. Darlington, in my opinion, does not have enough good coffee venues for this to work here, so instead I am introducing a Coffee Adventurer card – to get people to try drinks they wouldn’t normally have. I am going to do a Tea one too. After the customer tries all the different drinks, they get their favourite free. A bit like Bingo!

I feel pretty strongly that the thesis should not be the be-all and end-all of this PhD. I have absorbed so much, often trivial, information about coffee that it seems a waste (geddit?) not to use this knowledge. Some is being employed in the day to day running of the cafe (embodied knowledge) but I want to expand on that. I think, with a bit more practice, I could do barista training in the cafe. (knowledge sharing?) I know a few people (who I’ve met through my research) who do very well out of teaching people how to make coffee… May need to improve my latte art though.

A long term project is also to roast my own in there. Despite all my efforts, roasting is still the area of coffee I know least about. Off the top of my head, I’ve met and interviewed at least ten roasters, and I’ve seen it done all over the world. However, it is the sort of thing that can go wrong very easily and expensively, and no amount of sweet-talking “helpless-student” begging has resulted in me being let loose to play on the machines. This I see as a distinct deficiency; I need to learn. I was offered a very, very small shiny coffee roasting machine to borrow when we opened the cafe, just enough to fill the place with that fantastic aroma in the mornings. I had to turn it down at the time because we had no air vents to let smoke out of the back! But with a bit of forethought and the potential use of the empty rooms above the cafe, and some ducting, I reckon I could set it all up there eventually and roast my own Miranda blend!

Speaking of Miranda, the final plan, which is both long time and on-going is to set up her own little Penny University within Afternoon Tease. If all this goes well, Miri will effectively grow up in the place, and we were planning on home-schooling her for at least a year. In the cafe, she has Aunty Jo to teach her singing and writing, Aunty Tattoo.Jo to teach her to dance, me to teach her barista skills (needing a basic level of physics and chemistry to understand how the espresso machine works), cooking and baking, we can do coffee origin trips for geography and learning Spanish, she can learn IT through updating our website, her Daddy can teach her enough maths to do my accounts(!) and maybe even some physics and technology if we get the roasting machine up and running! Sorted. she’ll be fine. obviously.

Now all I’ve got to is get going with it all! Oh, and make some money in the process.

Happy 2011 peoples!

 

A Career in Coffee

I have never had a sensible answer to the inevitable question that has plagued me for the last three years: what exactly do you do with a PhD in coffee?

Since my maternity leave runs out frighteningly soon, and a few short months after that, the thesis should be submitted, I thought I’d better try and find an answer.

I tried to somehow develop a career in academia, applied for 5 lectureships, only two of which I was actually interested in doing, and didn’t even get shortlisted for any of them, such is the hopelessness of the academic jobs market at the moment. One job had 92 applicants.

So I began to scheme and fantasize a little, and then accidently came across My Most Perfect Job Ever, working as a coffee hunter for Mercanta, the importing company. The role involved learning cupping and then travelling all over the world, sampling coffees for export. Amazing opportunity! Of course I applied immediately, but the closing date for applications was so far away, and I also thought there would be loads of applicants and I probably didn’t stand a chance anyway, so I promptly forgot about it. That was until two weeks ago, when I got a call asking if I could do a phone interview. Aaaargh. This was more than a little nerve-racking, not helped by my phone dying in the middle of it, and Miranda wailing in the background. Still, it went very well, sounded very positive and on paper at least I haveall the skills, experience, qualifications and passion for coffee they were looking for. They explained, however, that the job was very much London-based. I did say I’d be willing to relocate and also that I was happy to come down for a further interview if needs be. My Wonderful Friends and Wonderful Husband took this to mean the job was a dead cert, I was sure to get it and I even got the Wonderful Friends sending me links to houses for sale Down South (most at a mere four times the price of our current home.)

This threw me into an agony of indecision though because, as I hadn’t taken seriously the possibility that I would get the Mercanta job, we had begun to work on an even more exciting, daunting, exhilerating, stressful, creative and expensive project, that is, AFTERNOON TEASE!
Afternoon Tease is our new café. I have been on about opening my own place since time immemorial and at the moment, with the safety and comfort of the PhD drawing to an end, Miranda to worry about and the need to find some sort of employment in Darlington (laughs bitterly), I decided that now is the time I should take the plunge and actually do it. Ideas that are never acted on are a waste of brainspace, and I do believe that if I wait “for the right time” I’ll never do it. There’s never a *right* time.

The idea was simple enough – I want a cafe, but I do not have anything like the resources to do it by myself. My Wonderful Friend Jo wants a sort of “office” space to devote herself to her writing and music and set herself up as a freelance writer and performer. My Wonderful Friend Tattoo-Jo (it is very difficult going in to business with two partners both called Joanne) is a Burlesque artist and teaches Burlesque classes locally, and could really do with some rehearsal space. So, what happens if we share the rent on a unit and combine the lot? A burlesque cafe and writers workshop, sort of thing. And the name became obvious after our first serious discussion. The other plan is to create a baby corner; Miranda is going to have to come to work with Mummy everyday (which I still reckon is a far better option than putting her in childcare at 5 months old) so we have all sorts of things, including a knitted tea pot, for the people too small for caffeine to play with.

Actually getting it set up has taken an enormous amount of time – far longer than I had naively hoped. We found one unit which would have done, but the landlord was more than a little unhelpful and it all fell through. We looked at more, and nothing was suitable for what we wanted or could afford. Then my driving instructor pointed out that a unit on Parkgate was free. Even after finding it, we then had the epic tasks of getting hold of the estate agent and then getting hold of the solicitors and then getting them to actually do what we want them to, and then scraping together, begging and borrowing to get the deposit together, then waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting to get the lease… aaaaaaaaaargh.

Just as we were about to settle the lease, I got a call from Mercanta and did the phone interview. So I had an INCREDIBLY tense ten days where the lease could have appeared at any point, and I was simultaneously awaiting the outcome of the Mercanta interview to see whether I’d go to London. I honestly couldn’t decide, and both Jo’s were incredibly supportive and understanding, especially since one option basically meant screwing them over in the middle of all our hard work. But, on Saturday, I FINALLY got the lease. (with spelling mistakes in it?! £350 for solicitors fees and two weeks late, wtf?). And then next time I checked my email, I also got an email rejecting me from the Mercanta job. Which I can’t help feeling was mainly because I don’t live in London, and possibly because I have Miranda. This pissed me off. However, Afternoon Tease was obviously meant to be!

The next two weeks are going to be insanely busy turning the unit – which used to be a model railway shop – into a cafe, including building the kitchen from scratch and making the toilets inhabitable by normal people. The espresso machine has got to be pulled from my beloved Ape van and replumbed into the kitchen, but *of course* everything shall be ready by our opening do! We’re having a big party for our opening night on 4th December, and open to the public on 6th December. Do come visit us!

You can also visit our website at www.afternoon-tease.co.uk

 

Cafe en tu Carro?

Por Annabel y Carl Townsend, Universidad de Sheffield, Reinos Unidos.

Nuevas investigaciones en la Universidad de Sheffield, Reinos Unidos, muestran que pueden extraer aceite de los granos de café perdidos para ser usados como biodiesel para automóviles y otras maquinarias.

La investigación está basada en una práctica en Nicaragua, y sigue la investigación científica de la Universidad de Nevada-Reno, quien anuncio en el 2008 que habían descubierto que el aceite extraído de granos de café antes usados o restos del mismo (chingaste) pueden ser reusados para hacer una nueva forma de biodiesel. La investigación de Sheffield muestra que el aceite de café puede ser directamente extraído en grandes cantidades a partir del grano de café fallado que crece en Latino América cada año.
Esta investigación podría tener futuras implicaciones y consecuencias para la industria, y también podría ser potencialmente mejorada las vidas de cafetaleros y pequeños productores de café en Centro América. Cada año, una significante proporción de la cosecha del café no puede ser exportada porque no tiene la calidad estándar demandada por los mercados internacionales. Este café defectivo y de tercero calidad posee mas aceite que el café de alta calidad, por lo tanto es ideal para la producción de aceite como biodiesel.
Vendiendo este café que se convierte en combustible y no en bebida (lo que demanda bajos precios para los productores) tendría mejor uso como aceite, de otra manera este café de baja calidad estaría en la basura, y a la vez proveería un potencial recurso sostenible de biodiesel. También, seria un proveedor barato de recursos de energía natural para los mismos productores de café.
Adicionalmente, separando una parte de este café de la cosecha requeriría menos tierra, ya que aceite de café proviene del granos no util, entonces no necesitas plantar mas café por este aceite, (como la soya, que necesita de diferentes plantaciones para sus diversos usos) evitando algunas de las mas controversiales dificultades alrededor de la industria del biodiesel.
Si esa nueva energía potencial puede ser producida comercialmente, podríamos muy pronto llenar los tanques de los carros así como nosotros mismos con una taza de café por la mañana.

(¡¡Muchisimos gracias a Diana y Jasmina por sus ayudar con mi gramatica!!)

 

How to make whole afternoons just disappear…

“We are reading the paper. It is Sunday and we are curious about our world.”

This is the closing line of the preface to a wonderful book – ‘Glass, Paper, Beans’ by Leah Hager Cohen. She is describing a typical scene in her favourite café; almost dreamlike and nostalgic. Calm and very human somehow. I like the sound of the place after just three pages.

This book was lent to me by the lovely Nissa. Nissa is the sort of person others would describe as ‘bubbly’. I prefer to think of her as ‘sunny’, she is so cheerful and smiling that she lights up our office. I don’t know her that well yet, and as such I have eternally linked her to the author of this book. In my mind at least, she is the one sitting in that cafe, watching other people read the paper.

Idly, I wonder if anyone will ever describe an afternoon sitting in my cafe. I doubt mine will ever have such a calming atmosphere.

Instead, I am sitting in Gusto Italiano in Sheffield. I like this place a great deal. This is what will hopefully come to be my sixth ‘fieldwork’ site, and i quietly relish the fact that I am at liberty to wile away whole afternoons guzzling espresso in here all under the guise of research. Gusto Italiano is run by a slim, slightly harassed looking woman named Esterina. She runs the place with her partner, and between them they serve coffee, forcefully organise the other waitresses, manage all the unseen parts of cafe life, and do all the cooking, and all the while, maintain impeccably neat and impossibly stylish Italian attire and demeanor. As my cousin Ol points out frequently (and often quite loudly) “All the waitresses are so fit!” He is right, too. It seems good looks are a prerequisite to employment there.

It was Ol who first introduced me to the place. Initially he praised the coffee, before admitting he actually went to waitress-watch. I shall not judge him, the coffee is very good indeed. I am skeptical of places who advertise ‘genuine Italian coffee’ – possibly a result of too long spent at Caffe Nero, but this place converted me. The coffee is Mokarabia; roasted by Langdon’s of London who also, coincidently, roast the secret blend for Caffe Nero. Mokarabia is a beautiful blend, very sweet and rich, and surprisingly their espresso blend is 100% arabica. There is no Italian tradition of using baked robusta as filler for the espressos. That alone has me hooked. It’s a bit pricey in here, but you are paying for the ambiance, the Italianess and the people-watching as well as the coffee.

This morning I came in here with Anna and Ol. As per usual Anna and I were late meeting him, but it is the sort of place anyone can lounge around in for hours, starting at the very pretty lattes and trying not to draw attention to the fact that you’re not spending any money. I bought Ol an americano, just to be on the safe side. He looked appreciative.

Anna, being her typical, inimitable self, really likes the place. The first time I brought her in, she immediately adopted the manageress and yabbered away in fluent Italian about the merits of Italian wine. Although amusing to watch, this was not particularly useful to my own research, which was the reason I came in! Today though, given the company, she just poked us with her umbrella, giggled a lot and invited us to help devour a huge chunk of genuine Italian chocolate cake. The woman is a marvel.

Aside from our rather noisy party, the cafe was quiet today. I returned later in the day by myself, sipped my latte and read ‘Glass, Paper, Beans’ contently, and absent-mindedly watched my fellow coffee drinkers. Given none of the staff in Gusto Italiano can be much over 30, the place attracts an unnerving amount of old ladies. The site of traditional and highly uncontinental pots of tea being brought over ceremoniously by suave waiters in bow ties to eager pensioners just doesn’t quite fit with the rest of the cafe’s image. Apart from the old dears, there are a few balding and be-suited businessmen sprawled in the leather arm chairs, with pens in pockets, laptops and one even has a blackberry. I glare at them from my hard wooden seat at the back, there are only a few comfy sprawling seats, the rest of the place is filled with black wooden chairs and very neat tables.

Gusto Italiano is situated almost equidistant from both universities in Sheffield,and given the caffeine intake of the average student, you would expect the place to be crawling with them. But I’ve never seen more than a few studenty types in here at once. When they are, they tend to be solo and sit up at the stools near the window, gazing out at the real world.

This is perhaps why I like it here. Chain coffee shops invite a sort of fashion-conscious elite, be it students or yuppies (if I am still allowed to use that term), who go because they like the image of themselves clutching an oversized branded mug, and because it is the place to be, and the place to be seen. Gusto Italiano is far posher, more up market, and perhaps even more formal in terms of general atmosphere than Starbucks or Nero. The music is piped and nondescript, pleasant enough if you are listening, easily ignored if you’re not and it doesn’t try to be cool. The service is polite but not scripted, and never falsely friendly. To my mind, by being relatively formal, neat, polite and offering straightforward and excellent coffee, Gusto Italiano manages not only to be genuinely Italian but so much less pretentious than any other coffee shop I’ve been to in a while.

I may not be here on important business, I may not be surrounded by fellow students and I may drink americanos instead of fancy large cappuccinos, but in here I can still amuse myself for hours without feeling remotely out of place. For me, that’s all I really want at a cafe.