I have been asked by SCASA to do a demonstration at the SA Barista Champs finals on the 30 and the 31 Jan. John and I decided that it should be a Coffee Mini-Olympics. I want to make up two teams, of four in each, to do battle against each other onstage using the two LM competition machines. The idea is to make coffee drinks and then hand them out to audience members. The audience will judge which team should win the Mini-Olympics. It will be a fun part of the show, not to be seen as a real competition. We will talk and chirp while making coffee and hopefully the audience can learn and be entertained from the event.  It would be a great way to get the audience involved at the champs. They will also finally get a chance to experience the beverages and learn what good coffee should taste like.

So I need eight members. So far it's John, Renier, Louis and myself. We still need four more. Who is game to join? Just post in the forums section. I will further discuss the structure I have in mind. I need to know asap so that I can confirm everything with SCASA.

Arstechnica Article

By Yun Xie | Published: November 25, 2008 - 01:36PM CT

Used coffee grounds may be garbage to most of us but, to chemical engineers at University of Nevada, they are a versatile source of green energy. Narasimharao Kondamudi, Susanta Mohapatra, and Mano Misra proposed that the solid waste from coffee brewing can do a lot more than act as compost for gardens. They set out to see if they could extract oils from old coffee grounds and chemically convert those oils to biodiesel.

Image Credit: Ragesoss. 

Spent coffee grounds are about 15 percent oil, which is only slightly less than many of the other biodiesel feedstocks. Since the world produces over 16 billion pounds of coffee per year, there is a constant and cheap supply of solid coffee waste. Kondamudi, Mohapatra, and Misra also predict that biodiesel from coffee grounds would be more stable than those from other sources because coffee contains antioxidants that would slow down degradation.

The researchers extracted oils from Starbuck's spent coffee grounds, and went on to perform a standard transesterification process to convert the oil to biodiesel using methanol (a type of alcohol) and potassium hydroxide (a base for catalyzing the reaction). They were able to convert 100 percent of the oil in the grounds into biodiesel; both the extracted oil and biodiesel were stable for more than a month, which is sufficient for industrial applications.

Ground Coffee. 

After the oil is extracted, the grounds can still be used for compost or fuel pellets. The authors estimated that, if spent grounds were converted into biodiesel and fuel pellets in the U.S., it’s possible to make about $8 million in profit per year. On a worldwide scale, based on the amount of coffee that is used, 340 million gallons of biodiesel can be produced from spent grounds.

The authors showed that used coffee grounds are much more than a waste product and can be a source of green energy. Of course, to know if this process is truly green, every step of the conversion would need to be analyzed in detail, but the initial results are promising, especially given that the waste products from the process can be used further as compost or fuel pellets.

Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, 2008. DOI: 10.1021/jf802487s

The National Barista Championship 2008 will be held on the 30 & 31 January 2009 at the School of Tourism and Hospitality, University of Johannesburg. The eighteen finalists of the three Regional Barista Championships held in Durban, Cape Town and Johannesburg (top 6 from each) will compete during this event and the winner will compete at the World Barista Championship in Atlanta in April 2009. SCASA will also be holding their Annual General Meeting, the SCASA Gala Dinner, many educational talks about coffee and a coffee breakfast morning as well as a number of other coffee related events so please book this date to attend, as you will be greatly inspired.

Bookings is essential for the events so please book at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it Coffee Breakfast Morning: 30 January 2008: R100 per person
SCASA Gala Dinner: 31 January 2008: R200 per person
Lunch packages (buffet) will also be available to pre-book.

If you are interested in going along to Atlanata to support our representative , please email the guys at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it know and they will organise and invitation to the event for you. 

We are organising our last barista jam before everyone goes on their holiday to faraway places. Being a jam with a  Christmas theme, BU members are to invent their own Signature Coffee Drinks, which have  to contain alcohol. That should help us get into the spirit of the festive season. 

Date: Friday  28 November 2008
Time: 7:00pm till we drop from drinking our signature drinks (okay, so make  it 12:00am)
Place: Malcolm and Lindy have been kind enough to let us bombard their place at
340a Spur Rd, Beaulieu, Kyalami

Please RSVP JohnB or TrevO
or on the forum, so that we know how many to cater for. We'll work out the costs of the food (shouldn't be more than R60 per person). Hope to see you all there.