Moka

Hello, coffee lovers! We are back with our home brewing coffee tips! Today we are going to tell you a bit more about the moka pot! It is a low pressure method invented by Alfonso Bialetti in 1933. Its enormous success is due to the price and the compact and resistant design, two elements that have made the Moka one of the most used home methods to extract a coffee. Due to its operation, the water in the kettle heats up to temperatures that sometimes exceed 100 degrees, extracting bitter compounds in the coffee, that is why it is important to know a few tricks how to brew it properly!

Home Barista – basics

Where coffee comes from and its quality is very important, these aspect could be of vital importance to generate a more sustainable economy around coffee. But it is also a great way to enjoy a better tasting coffee! It is not enough to just buy good coffee, you have to enjoy all its goodness with a good preparation process, that's why we will give you some basic notions and tips that will help you in to prepare a better coffee at home. We really hope that this small coffee buying manual helps you choose your next coffee! Cheers!

The coffee can and coffee freshness

Coffee freshness in specialty coffee is defined as the coffee flavour being as close as possible to the freshly roasted version. There is no rule or precise measurement to define a universal coffee freshness, because lighter roasts will last longer than dark roasts, fast roasts will last less than slower roasts, whole coffee beans will last longer than ground coffee beans, there are many variables. That is why each roaster can define a different “best before” on their coffee. We really hope that this small coffee buying manual helps you choose your next coffee! Cheers!

How to read a coffee label?

How to read a coffee label? Common issue...because: have you ever looked at a coffee label and thought “Wow, this is really really confusing!”? Well, we are here to help you with a two important points that might ease your next coffee purchase: origin (a very good indicator of what kind of aromatic profile you can expect from the coffee) and processing (how the producers get the bean out of the coffee cherry ready to be exported and roasted). Are you ready? Great: read more, and we really hope that this small coffee buying manual helps you choose your next coffee! Cheers!

EQUIPMENT CLEANING AND MAINTENANCE

Our barista trainer Jazmin has some excellent advice on how to clean your machinery. Take this in consideration as this will give your machines a longer life and your coffee to taste better! In view of the latest events that are shaking the entire world, we are in a position to underline the importante of hygiene and cleanliness of your espresso machine (especially our working sector) not only for exclusively quality reasons but also for health reasons.

LA PLATA AND NAZARETH

Hello, everyone! We are once more back with new coffees! We will be sad to say goodbye to our Gran Galope and Bossa Nova, both fantastic coffees, but we are welcoming Nazareth’s Formula II and La Plata!For those of you who have known us already for some time will all ready be familiar with Nazareth Pereira and her fantastic natural Yellow Bourbon from Carmo de Minas. We had this coffee a few years ago, but we loved it so much that we were thrilled to be able to include it on our menu once again this season.Milk chocolate, almonds, sweet and round, it really is the perfect coffee for espresso. This is one of our Women Producer coffees, Nazareth Pereira has been managing her family plantations since her husband passed away and she has been doing an incredible job, the coffees are spectacular, I hope you try it and let’s sustain more Women Producers!

SIX TEA TYPES

Anete just had the opportunity to go to the UK Tea Academy, thanks to Canton Tea, our tea partners, to do the Level 1 Tea Champion course. Two days of intensive tea training, and we are absolutely stunned. The tea world is so rich, so full of culture and flavour! What I learned that I can share with you now? Quite a lot about tea history, culture, different sensory characteristics of different teas from different terroirs and cultivars, but mostly about the six different tea types.

Vella Terra 2020

One more year has gone by and again we are happy to be part of the natural wine fair Vellaterra. A spectacular atmosphere full of smiles, exchanging knowledge and wine, lots of wine! Although our speciality is coffee, we keep on insisting on how much similar these two worlds are - wine and coffee. From the plant characteristics and terroir influence to the sensory aspects (can you tell which is the wine and which is the coffee flavour wheel?).

Our new packaging cans

Have you noticed our new packaging cans? So, this wasn’t only a choice of image although we do agree that the tin cans really look good. We switched to aluminum cans because of sustainability. Surprised? Well, let us explain a bit. It is a beautiful and practical way of packaging coffee, it is more rigid so it doesn’t get mushed up like bags do and it is reusable for more coffee, or for anything that you could imagine, like a container for cookies for your kitchen.

New flavors to start the year

Hello 2020 and welcome to our two new star coffees from Rwanda and Ethiopia! We hope one of your resolutions for this year has been to drink more filter coffee, because we have some incredible stuff for you! We are so glad to be able to once more support a women’s coffee project such as the Cafe des Mamas from Rwanda, from the Nova coffee washing station. Managed by Agnès Mukamushinja, the terroir around the NOVA coffee station is rich in volcanic soil and at the perfect altitude (1800-2000 masl) to produce the finest arabica specialty coffees. The women collaborating with the NOVA coffee station are very diligent and sort all the coffee by hand to obtain only the perfect quality beans.

SUPPORTING A GOOD CAUSE: JAN VERGÉS TOURNAMENT

Exactly one week ago together with Galera Group we were supporting a charity event, the tournament of Jan Vergés Blanch that was held in the school of Els Arcs. Jan Vergés Blanch was born in 2004 with a congenital heart disease. Although his life was difficult and with many limitations, Jan always lived it with intensity, joy and, above all, normally. On September 14, 2016, Jan passed away suddenly due to a heart attack, leaving an immense void to all who loved him: family, friends, school, the football team where he played as a goalkeeper...

HI, GOLD MOUNTAIN!

It’s the perfect coffee for this season as it reminds you of a nice cup of hot chocolate, spices and warm and fuzzy feelings. This is one of our direct trade coffees that we feel very proud of. Gold Mountain Growers take coffee very seriously, they monitor every step of the growing process and are on the farm when ripening and harvest begins, only the perfect ripe cherries are picked, so we are looking at excellent quality coffee here. Gold Mountain Growers have their own farm and they connect other partner farmers directly to the end buyer and roaster for direct trade, which makes the relationship so much more intimate.

WELCOME COFFEE KIDS

The new season of the fresh Brazilian coffees has arrived and so we have a little surprise for you! We introduce to your our new product - Coffee Kids. The name of the coffee comes from a wonderful sustainability project for young farmers - “Coffee Kids empowers young coffee farmers to create thriving businesses and a sustainable livelihood for themselves and their families.” Coffee Kids is a beautiful project from Hanns R. Neumann Stiftung for sustaining and helping young coffee farmers to stay in business, give them all the necessary knowledge to grow better coffee and live a better life. It is a way of giving the necessary skills to the young people for becoming entrepreneurs in the coffee community.

STUDYING WITH CANTON TEA

Yesterday we had a pleasure to welcome In our lab Alice, tea expert from Canton, who offered us a fantastic tea degustation. We learned a lot, exploring different origins and producers with whom Canton is working. Did you know, that alike arabica & robusta in coffee, tea also has two different families?

WE PRESENT TO YOU CANTON TEA

We are incredibly proud and happy to announce that we have started distributing products from Canton tea. These are some incredible people working directly with small tea farmers provinding excellent quality and sustainable products and we feel that our brands have very similar goals and quality concept. It’s not only about specialty coffee, our goal is to collaborate with various brands of excellent quality products with special sensory characteristics and who really care about eco sustainability.

INTRODUCING OUR NITRO COFFEE

It’s summer time and everyone is looking for a way to cool down. It’s been some time to find the perfect partner with whom to produce our cold coffee, but we finally did. We present to you our Beriti Ethiopian natural processed cold coffee with nitro, brewed and canned together with Motel Mini bar from Berlin. They have already done some fantastic collaborations with well known specialty coffee roasters and the product is just amazing!

CREATIVE MORNINGS

If you are thinking of a creative community, what comes to your mind first? We go for this word - "share". Share experience, knowledge, passion... This is what happens when  once a month Creative Mornings invites everyone to ImaginCafé in Barcelona. Such a worldwide initiative is built to join people who are curious and openminded. Each time a global theme is chosen to be represented by local speakers, who can be professionals in any industry. This is why it is always so exiting to see what will be next. So we decided to put a bit of our own input in the movement and greet the sleepy you with a cup of decent coffee. Every time something new for you to discover. 

80PLUS MEETS MAS GELI WINERY

Coffeea arabica and Coffea canephora, Vitis vinifera and Vitis rupestris - talking about the coffee families and some of the vine families, they both have some characteristics in common. Vitis vinifera just like Coffea arabica are more noble fruit producing families with many fantastic sensory outcomes, on the other hand canephora (robusta) and rupestris (the American vine) are more robust and resistant plants to various diseases or pests but have less desirable flavor characteristics or other productive difficulties. The height at which these plants are cultivated, both coffee and wine, will change their sensory characteristics, just like the soil, the fermentation time or style. In the coffee world, for example, the carbonic maceration has become so fashionable, this sort of method has been used for so many years to make the young wine vin nouveau in Beaujolais.

World Of Coffee Berlin 2019

Dear 80+ fans, we just got back from Berlin from World of Coffee. Another great year of serving our coffee at this huge event, meeting friends and new people, tasting fantastic coffees and getting familiar with innovative products, it has been a pleasure! We hope you were there and you got to try our Beriti at our friends’ stands at Compak and at Dalla Corte, if not, you can still find it at our webshop packed in our 100% compostable bags.

Zero Waste Latte Art Throwdown

Zero Waste Latte Art Throwdown for us was one of those collaborations that really matters because there is a great idea behind. We thank very much Oatly for preparing such a sustainable event. We are also very proud to deliver such an important message side by side with Dalla Corte, Mare Terra and Keep Cup.

Lisbon Coffee Festival

Lisbon. The city of light and coffee boom. The market is growing all together with the interest for new flavors.

So the very first Coffee Festival took place this March, highlighting the new era in Portugal.

We were so exited to get behind the scenes and see what was happening there.

New year, new coffees

Here we are with our three new coffees, we were very excited to finally find some different, juicy, sweet ones that we could use both for filter and espresso extractions.

How can you choose the best one for you?

Do you prefer easy or funky? Do you like brightness or creaminess? What extraction do you like best?

Coffee and wine

“Variety”, “terroir", “micro-climate”, “the producer’s hand”, all of these concepts sound pretty familiar if you know something about wine, right? Well, believe it or not but they are just as important in the production of coffee, especially when we talk about the sensory characteristics that we find in the final cup. It is quite common that people ask us coffee professionals about the coffee of Central America or Africa, about its taste and production but the truth is if I ask you “What does the wine of France taste like?”, wouldn’t you be a bit confused? Which wine region are we talking about, Bordeaux, Rhone Valley, but what about the producer, they’re all different!