Goodbye Conti. Hello La Marzocco.

Though I wouldn't put the art of espresso on quite the same level as that of music performance, there are some similarities. One is in the area of equipment. I can be an accomplished pianist, but if I'm playing on an out of tune spinet piano, there's only so much I can do. I'd like to think that after close to a decade of experience I'm a fairly accomplished barista. The old Conti espresso machine I've been playing on for the last six years (never a Steinway in the first place) has gone very out of tune lately. It was loosing steaming pressure big time and my drinks were coming out flat no matter what I did...

Enough with the musical puns. This week Amore acquired the real Steinway of the espresso machines: a La Marzocco. Ours is a refurbished 3 grouphead Linea, which was the flagship machine of just a few years ago.
Here are Blair and I the day it arrived. We carried it across Grand Ave. with the help of a few regular customers. Waiting for the installation was grueling.
Here's our old Conti about to be carted away.
A look under the hood.
Here are the Roastery 7 guys finishing the installation.
The Amore employees decided that I should get to make the first drink.
I guess it was also my job to drink the first drink.
Here's the first shot served to a customer. He's gotten an American double espresso practically every day since I've been around. I'm glad he was served the first shot.

Amore in the Media

I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed for a review of Amore Coffee by the local online Magazine The Heavy Table. It's great to have our coffee shop reviewed by someone who actually knows a lot about coffee.

On the other hand, Amore tied with Kopplin's for third in Minnesota Monthly's Readers Choice Awards... just after Caribou and Dunn Brothers.

Funny, no?

Racy D'lene's Coffee Lounge

Last weekend I went on a trip with my best friend Pat who is getting married a week from today. It was a "just the two of us" kind of get away before he becomes one with Angela. On the way back from his cabin we stopped at Racy D'lene's Coffee Lounge in Eau Claire. I've blogged about Racy's previously, but it's worth another mention.

I used to go to Racy's when I was in high school and home from college. This was before I knew much about coffee (which is good, because their coffee wasn't that great back then!) Racy's has been a kind of formative ideal for me of what coffee shop atmosphere can be. It's cozy yet industrial, and a little dark. It has an adequate sound system, which is a detail many other good coffee shops lack.

As I mentioned before, the coffee quality at Racy's has been elevated in the last few years. It might be the only shop with a Synesso in western Wisconsin. We had a good time talking with Kyle, the barista pictured below. Baristas have many common experiences: the gripes and joys of the job. He humored us and poured some latte art.
Thanks Kyle.

Barista Boy

Gibbie really knows his way around coffee shops. He has his favorites and list off most of the independents in St. Paul. He has his own regular drink (foam, aka a cappuccino minus the espresso). He does a better job of busing his own dishes than a lot of regulars I know. Sometimes he plays coffee shop at home and serves up pretend drinks. He can recognize a latte on sight.

Today he got some behind-the-bar with my best buddy and pro barista Pat. I was impressed that Pat could pour a good rosetta with Gibbie on his shoulders. I don't know if I could do that!

Snow Day Latte Art

Yesterday was our first sizable snow of the winter. I was scheduled to work in the afternoon at Amore, and was prepared to have a slow day. More people made it out for coffee than I expected, but my coworker Blair and I still had plenty of time on our hands. I've been working on latte hearts a bit lately and decided it was time to do a video of one. The result is pictured above. We also did a video of Blair doing a rosetta. Thanks for going there with me, Blair!

Until yesterday I'd never tried to do a rosetta on a macchiato. These are my first attempts. It's kind of challenging and a lot of fun to pour art this small!




I know this is real coffee geek stuff, but what better way to pass a snowy afternoon than honing our skills?

Goat Milk Latte!

This is something I've allways wanted to try. Coffee shops are known for having too many choices (size, flavor, drink type, etc.). Milk is one of those choices. "Would you like that latte with whole, skim, 2%, soy, rice ...?" Why not goat milk? I've joked about it in the past, but now thanks to a free sample from a local dary company, I got to try it!

I'd never had goat milk before, so I tasted a bit of the cold stuff before starting the latte. It didn't taste like cow's milk, but it wasn't that weird either. It felt thinner than whole milk.
Steaming it went pretty well. The microfoam was nice and tight. It poured really well, though I ended up making a little more foam than I'd expected. That makes sense if it's not as fatty as whole cow's milk. The foam seemed to break down a little quicker than cow's which lead to a somewhat embossed looking rosetta after a couple of sips (pictured above).

How did it taste? Good! At first I couldn't really tell that it was an unusual latte. After getting past the initial crema and cooling a bit, there was a little more "goaty" taste, but certainly not as much as the straight cold goat's milk.

I'd say it was a great success. In my mind it tasted way better than soy or rice. The steaming characteristics were much more favorable than these milk substitutes. I think the hardest part is selling it to the customers - getting past the weirdness factor.

I had two takers this morning.

ps - Sorry about the crummy image quality. I only had my phone with me to document this event!

Published Latte Art

The current issue of Lavender Magazine has an article on Amore Coffee (containing some correct and some incorrect information!) I was working when the photographer was shooting for the article, and made this latte. It's on page 85 of the July 20 - Aug2 2007 issue.

Too Much Coffee?

While Libby and I were sitting in Black Sheep Coffee Cafe on Monday, and I was taking a picture, she said "Our blog's getting pretty coffee-centric, don't you think?" She's probably right, but I do work with coffee five days a week, and then we go to a coffee shop first thing on our days off. It was bound to happen.

It's not all about the coffee. Ok, this sounds cheesy, but Libby and I are best friends (awwwwwww). There aren't many places we can go to hang out casually anymore, but we have figured out how to still go to coffee shops with the boys. That means that we can have some time out to kick back, share our ideas and thoughts from the last few days, and try to plan what to do in the coming week. Since we tend to read a lot to each other at home, we always have things to share about our current book. We just finished The Princess and Curdie by George MacDonald. It's a wonderful young person's story with so many layers of Christian truth. I wonder how much it influenced Lewis' Narnia.Gibbie played with Legos for the first time at Black Sheep (though he thought of them as strangely small Duplos). For now they're too much of an Ezra choking hazard to keep around the house, but it was great to find them at a coffee shop. By the discretely placed toy area a sign read, "Unattended Children will be given a Shot of Espresso and a Puppy."
It was also good to see Andrea at Black Sheep. I'm proud of her learning latte art (though I don't think I can take any credit!) As for me, I had one of the best latte pours ever today. Want to see it?

So I don't think there's too much coffee on this blog. Do you?

Latte Narcissism

What's more obsessive than taking pictures of your lattes?
Filming them.
Cathy (owner of my coffee shop) took a little video of a rosetta pour I did today. What makes this a little less prideful is the fact that it didn't turn out the best. Note the blob-like top to the design.
Anyway, here it is. (click)

The Rosetta Quest

I first started drinking coffee in the summer of 1999 when I worked at the Acoustic Cafe in Eau Claire, WI. At that point I drank flavored brews ("highlander grog" being one of my favorites, partly for the name's sake). My introduction to the espresso machine for that job lasted less than five minutes and consisted mostly of, "warm the milk here and press this button for the shots." I cringe when I think of the hideous drinks I served people back then simply because, like so many baristas, I didn't know any better.

That summer I visited Libby in St. Paul. (We were decidedly "just friends" then!). She took me to a small, dark, somewhat pretentious coffee shop called Amore. I remember I ordered a short vanilla latte. After just a couple of sips, I realized that the drink I had in my hand was far more delicious than anything I knew how to make. I had encountered a whole new level, and it was exciting.

Three years later, after graduating from college and moving to St. Paul, I started working at Amore Coffee. Chip, who owned Amore at that time, took a much more studied approach to barista training. He spoke of quality, consistency, and hinted of his own past studying with some guru in Seattle. I learned how to make drinks as good as the latte that amazed me a few years ago.

Things stayed the same for a long time after that. I thought we had the best coffee in town, and we very well might have. I knew other good baristas, but nobody that knocked my socks off. Then one day we hired a cocky post-modern preppy kid named Billy. I made him a latte. He wasn't impressed. He made me one. I was impressed. He could steam milk finer than I could. He could free-pour perfect, pretty lattes with just the right amount of milk and no spoon. He left town within a few weeks, but he'd made his mark. Again, I'd encountered a new level.

After that, I started running into others whom I thought of as "rock star" baristas. On a return trip to Eau Clarie I had an amazingly beautiful latte at my old favorite place, Racy D' Lenes Very Coffee Lounge. It turns out that while I'd been living in St. Paul the business had been bought by someone who'd spent time in Seattle.

The biggest encounter for me, though, came at Kopplin's Coffee, where I got to know two guys named Andrew who could pour the prettiest lattes I'd ever seen. I got particularly hooked on a video my buddy Pat took of one of the Andrews pouring a leafy design called a rosetta. I watched it over and over again. I wanted to be able to do that! I looked at instructions online and chatted with both Andrews. Within a couple of weeks and a lot of reworking of my espresso machine techniques I started pouring a few sickly little rosettas and serving them to costumers. They were impressed because they'd never seen anything like it before, but I just wanted to make them look more like the amazing ones I'd seen examples of!

So here I am, just barely stepping up into my latte art adventure. The picture on top of this post I took yesterday. It's currently got four stars on ratemyrosetta.com. I want to get better. Maybe I'll even compete some day. Does it really matter? I'm not sure, but I'm having a lot of fun.