It’s almost New Year’s Eve, and I’m pretty sure that the next day will see many suffering from too much partying; and by extension, looking for the perfect hangover cure.

There are so many hangover cures that have been debunked by science over the years, but coffee remains to be one of the most widely accepted hangover cures. Sure there has been studies explaining why coffee doesn’t really help anyone with a hangover. Some even say that it can make a hangover worse. Two of the main reasons cited for this is that it can make a person more tired after the caffeine boost wears off, and can make a person even more dehydrated since it is a diuretic.

Well the ever fickle science community (or at least researchers of this particular study) finally agree to what we coffee lovers have known all along, the combination of coffee and aspirin is really perfect as a hangover cure…at least if you are a rat. According to Professor Michael Oshinsky, of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, rats who were given doses of caffeine and anti-inflammatories responded well to the treatment and were relieved of the headaches. The headaches, which were induced by making the rats drink ethanol (a pure form of alcohol), is similar to the migraines we experience after having a drink too many.

So while the scientists get stuck debating on whether they coffee will cure a hangover or not, I will just have my coffee maker and a bottle of aspirin on hand day after New Year.

Photo via Fooyoh

As the merry season is upon us, we’ve gathered a few gift ideas for the coffee interested.

Both stores have the gift box with 3 Weeks From Kieni at just 250,-

You can also buy 6 small cappuccino cups + a bag of Espresso for 250,- (save 54,-)

We also have the Hario Skerton hand grinder. If you don’t know it, it’s an awesome little manual grinder with ceramic burrs. At 325,- it’s an amazing product and great for travelleing too.

If you want to try more coffees we have our Taster Pakke for 260,with 4 different Direct Trade coffees.

In Torvehallerne we’re now selling the Hario V60 and filters. You can get it as a package with a bag of coffee for just 175,- The perfect hostess gift. Includes our little V60 brew guide.

At Jægersborggade we’ve stocked up on Aeropress and they are only 238,- also including a brew guide.

We hope that leaves you with some options to put under the Christmas tree!

To showcase the subtle nuances in coffee, that we as cuppers get to experience and come to love, this month we’ll be roasting three different lots from Kieni and sell as a package.

The three lots are from three consecutive weeks, harvested the first three weeks of December last year. The lots are called Lot 15, 16 and 17 as that are the week numbers from beginning of the harvest in Nyeri, which is what the coffee millers in Kenya work with.

Kieni is a cooperative wet mill, or Factory as they prefer to call it in Kenya. There’s around 300 members of the mill, where each member is usually a family, growing coffee as one of many crops on their land. The families grow and pick the coffee cherries and bring them to the wet mill. So a wet mill is usually the most defined “producer” of coffee you can find in Kenya beside the (usually very large) privately owned farms.

At Kieni the lots are separated by weeks. So for each week lots you will have different families bringing in cherries and the climate and conditions for the fermentation will change week from week. This leave subtle differences in the week lots, but overall the Kieni mill delivers a very high standard. For us some of the absolutely best coffees we’ve ever tasted from Kenya.

Our goal with this little package is to allow you as a consumer to taste those differences that all too often is limited to the cupper’s table. It’s essential that you brew this coffee using accurately filtered or bottled mineral water. Copenhagen tab water will ruin the nuances.

You can read the report from our visit to Kieni earlier this year by clicking here.

The Kieni Week Lots will be available only in our two coffee shops from Wednesday at 17.00, where Casper will be hosting an open cupping of the three lots at Torvehallerne.

Barista i DM Infoaften

Kom og hør lidt om hvad Barista mesterskaberne egentlig går ud på, og hvordan du kan forberede dig på at stille op.

Barista Verdensmester 2006 Klaus Thomsen vil fortælle om konkurrencen og give tips og tricks til hvordan man kan skrue en præsentation sammen. Der vil være rig mulighed for at få besvare spørgsmål og få hjælpe til at finde på signature drink osv.

Arrangementet er åbent for alle baristaer, der kunne ha interesse i DM, og du er også meget velkommen selvom du ikke tænker på at stille op i år.

Det foregår nu på onsdag, d. 23. November 2011 kl. 19.00

The Coffee Collective
Jægersborggade 10
DK-2200 København N
T +45 60 15 15 25
www.coffeecollective.dk

Throwdown at Torvehallerne November 10th

It’s time for the first Latte Art Throwdown in Torvehallerne. Come and challenge your colleagues on the infamous Spirit espresso machine. You don’t need to be a master of the milk or a barista champion to be in on the fun.

Bring 10 Danish Kroner to enter and the winner takes the pot. Of course anyone is welcome to just come by and look on and cheer for your favourite barista. It’s gonna be a cozy evening in any case.

Thursday November 10th 2011 at 20:00
The Coffee Collective Torvehallerne
Vendersgade 6D
1363 København K
Rasmus@coffeecollective.dk

On top of the new store opening we’ve also changed to new bags. White stand-up pouches with a zip lock.

As a little gimmick we’ve made the bottom of the bag transparent. We’ve always thought it’s a pity that you can’t see the product it self – the coffee – when you buy a bag. But since light destroy the flavour of the coffee, completely clear bags should be avoided. So we’ve had this idea for a long time to just make the bottom transparent, so you can see the coffee but without light getting into it.

But more importantly we wanted to get more environmentally friendly bags. In Denmark most of the trash is burned and any metal becomes a waste product that can’t be re-used. So we wanted to get rid of the metal (foil) in the bags completely. Metal in coffee bags are used as a barrier for air, primarily developed for ground coffee with an expiration 2 years after the roast date (where the flavour will be gone anyway). With fresh roasted coffee and shorter shelf life there’s an overpressure in the bag for the first many weeks, so the extra barrier from the metal doesn’t even matter.

We have also been able to add some text about our roastery and green coffee sourcing on the back. The label has also gotten a little bigger and more reader-friendly and all in all we think the bag looks more simple and presentable.

We’re seeking baristas!
Following is the job description in Danish:
 Update: Thanks for all the applications we’ve recieved. We have now filled all positions!


Baristaer søges

Arbejdet vil primært bestå af betjening af kunder og brygning af kaffe. Men der er også en del arbejde i forbindelse med vores risteri som vore baristaer hjælper med. Det er ikke en forudsætning, at du allerede har vundet verdensmesterskaberne i baristakunst, så længe du er interesseret i at lære mere om kaffe. Vi har et omfangsrigt oplæringsprogram, hvor du både vil lære om kaffens smag og hvordan man kan brygge en exceptionelt god kaffe og arbejde effektivt i baren.

Barista erfaring er selvfølgelig en fordel, men ikke en nødvendig forudsætning.

Hvis det har din interesse, så send din ansøgning med CV til os hurtigst muligt på mail@coffeecollective.dk. Mærk ansøgningen med “deltid” eller “fuldtid” samt kontaktinfo inkl. Email-adresse.

So. We had sort of promised to write a lot of blog posts about the progress of opening our new store. We intended to. However, once things started really rolling our focus shifted toward just getting the place ready and not so much on sharing what we were doing.

And now it’s open.

But we would like to share a few of the thing we have had going on.

We’re extremely proud to have the world premier of the new Kees Van De Westen espresso machine Spirit in a coffee shop. Some of you might have seen this machine at some specialty coffee trade shows.

Kees is widely known in the specialty coffee circles for designing and producing awesome espresso machines. He designed the widely known Mistral espresso machine from mainly La Marzocco parts. A design that La Marzocco later bought and put into their own production. The original Kees machines are still a collectors item and I remember vividly working on those awesome machines back in 2005 at Stumptown.

The Spirit is his newest invention and features a lot of cool ideas. And overall it’s such a well made machine that just feels awesome to work at. Personally I love how much work Kees has put into the detailing on this machine and I think it looks amazing.

These pictures are from the WBC show in London last summer, but this same machine is now the one you’ll find in our new shop. We definitely put it to the test over this opening weekend with over 1000 cups a day going through it. And it held up beautifully. The temperature, which you can set and read for each group, was extremely stable. In typical Kees-style he also send us teflon-coated portafilters and VST baskets as standard. On top of that he sent three extra steam tips, so we could choose which hole size we liked best. What a guy!

There’s some interesting stuff going on ‘under the hood’. When looking into the group heads you’ll notice that there’s no screw, but the shower screen covers the whole area. Theoretically this should give a more even dispersion of the water over the coffee bed. There’s also a build in mechanical pre-infusion plus a nice slow flow that secures an even wetting of the coffee before the full pressure is applied.

All in all there’s a great number of things going on, and Kees is working on even more for the final production models. What we can already say is that it’s capable of making some amazingly great tasting espressos. And that’s what matters in the end.

(We’ll try to upload some pictures to Flickr from our own shop when ever we remember to bring the camera…)