I want to write a great deal about making good coffee at home, about methods and apparatus worth investing time and money into in order to enrich our everyday experience. About local roasters bringing exotic origins and unprecidented traceability and freshness literally to our own postcode. About how it has never been a better time to delve into the world behind our everyday drink, how with just a few simple changes to our routine and a little extra expense, the mundane can become the exceptional and the exceptional can become the norm. But what I absolutely do not want to do is diminish in any way the role of proper independent coffee shops. Aside from the intangible value that comes from the act of going for a cofffee, it's straight-up wrong to suggest that there somehow exists a £50 bit of kit or a 5 minute shortcut that can replicate or surpass a skilled barista operating a multiple-thousand pound espresso machine with all of the deftness that comes from it being their actual job. And to boot, a job that they most likely adores and are tremendously passionate about. That kit, it doesn't exist, there is no shortcut.
We can and should improve our home coffee game, it's just too easy now to do so, we've no excuse. But what we drink at home and what we drink out are two different things.
I spent years working in professional kitchens, developing recipes and menus, peeling mountains of potatoes and bellowing at waiters while running the pass. I've also been lucky enough to experience the restaurant scene from the opposite viewpoint: that of a food writer and critic. Throughout all of these times I have been a home cook too, a family cook trying my best. I never cooked professionally for a critic, but I would stack the pressure of preparing dinner day by day, week by week for any normal family with their incumbent peccadilloes against the exacting standards of a service shift in any high-end kitchen. Honestly though, a comparison between the two is ultimately pointless; we're dealing with the same raw ingredients, both are equally valid, but the goals and outcomes are entirely different. And so it is with the independent coffee shop and the home brewer, they cannot, they must not be mutually exclusive.
Phew, now that's off my chest, on to what I was inspired to write about today, something that I think neatly encompasses the validity, the neccesity of the professional within the context of this blog.
I was finishing off what will likely be my next article, a piece about improving our home-game when I dropped in to Upshot to settle down and get some work done. Asking my usual question of "whats good?" yielded the Ethiopian Kochore from Round Hill Roastery in Bath. Piquing my interest was the choice of having it prepared on either Aeropress or V60. There was dissention between the baristas as to which method was best (I'm sorry guys, I neglected to ask your names, if I knew this would turn into an article I would have, otherwise it's a bit weird) but I opted for the first barista's choice of the Aeropress.
Hot Damn, I wasn't disappointed! the Kochore is a beautiful and complex thing, delivering a faceted flavour headlined by it's sheer difference from what I was expecting, so much so that I resolved to look into it more deeply and try the V60 as well to get a fuller picture.
The tasting notes for this coffee tempt us with notes of lavender and stoned fruit, topped with a hit of hazelnutty tiffin. I have to say I wasn't feeling the lavender, maybe because it's a flavour I'm not keen on and I'm a bit resistant to, maybe there are notes to be had of the more pleasant aspects of it but it wasn't there for me. What I did get a huge hit of was the fruit, specifically peach, more specifically a peach you really, really wanted. A peach that had gone a touch overripe, but is scandelous with a voluptuous sweetness that you'd never admit to craving. Just as we were trying to come to terms with how we felt about this, the hazelnut flavour made it's appearance, a toasty familiarity that tells us it's ok, it's new, it's decadent but it's a fine thing to enjoy. It's a journey.
This applies to both the Aeropress and the V60, with the V60 boasting an admirable space between flavour notes and experiences, each one calling strongly then receding to allow the next to shine.
It was an exacting, clean expression of a really great flavour profile...
But what hit me the most, what prompted me to pen this was the Aeropress expression. If you will allow another previous existence of mine to surface, it's that of a wine writer. A writer struggling to honestly pin down indefinable terms such as terroir and minerality. In my time in this role, the best I could conjour was that a good wine tastes like someone who cares had made it with no preconceptions or constraints, that they haad used a wealth of knowledge to give great flavours a chance to realise themselves. I think that idea stands up as an expression of artisanal qualities and I think that it applies today to the Kochore. Running through the Aeropress expression was a gorgeous impression of earthiness that underpinned all of the other flavours. Not a stamp of what the makers at any stage intended, more an indefatigable sense of what the product had to give, being allowed to sing as strongly as it can. A sense that, in the best possible way, this has been made by experts treating the ingredients they have with care and love, and that the ingredients they have were seriously f*%&ing good in the first place.
That. At home? Forget it.
