Thanks again to Renier and  Frances for volunteering the use of your shop for our get together. I had a blast and I am pretty sure that everyone else did. The coffee was fantastic (thanks to Tribeca) and the food was awesome :-)

There were also a lot of new faces present, it is great to see the Barista Underground family growing. Charlene and Petrus were there with their new Brewtus, it is great to see people so enthusiastic about coffee, we did some adjustments to the boiler pressure on their Brewtus and along with a bit of advice from the other undergrounders I am sure that their coffee will go from strength to strength. It is somehow a lot easier to work out what to change when there is someone there to hold your hand and point out the small mistakes.

 We also had some press there from the Sunday Times, it will be interesting to hear what they have to say about the caffeine addicts in the Barista Undergroun.

Louis managed to kick all our butts in the latte art competition (for a change) and I think that I may have even spotted Annette making a few drinks. I think that Trev and I are going to have to have some serious extra lessons if we want to keep up with them.

I brought along my Hario VacPot and Aerobie Aeropress coffee brewer's to try out. Johan seemed to be havinbg a ball experimenting and the coffee from them was particularly different to what you normally get from a bodum or drip coffee brewer, 

More pics can be found on the Pure Web site at LINK

We have decided to try something new and will be having our next coffee jam at the Pure Cafe in Pretoria.

Renier very kindly offered to host the event for us and if it is a success we are planning to tour around other coffee shops in Johannesburg for some jammin!! Please confirm your bookings as per the details below with Renier Directly so that he can cater appropriately.

Time : 2nd August 2008 16:00 - late

To make this GREAT Coffee Jam even GREATER, is it possible to ask all those that want to attend, to RSVP and pay beforehand for the food, milk and cleaning staff?
 
PURE staff will be available to assist with all the needs, e.g. setting up, clean afterwards, washing cups during the jam and attending to the baristas need for cold milk from the fridges etc.
 
PURE’s own homemade Chicken pie with a nice Green Salad and obviously “drink-as-much-coffee-as-you-can” will cost R60.00 per person. We will also organize a car guard that will keep watch until you go home.
 
The invite will exclusively be available to the Barista Underground Website until the 18 July – where the Barista Underground followers will have to RSVP and pay before the 18 July. After this, and if there is still available space, invitations will go out to some PURE Clients that would like to join and become home Baristas themselves. I also know some of us want to bring some family members along. Excluding myself and all the Pure staff we should be able to accommodate about 35 people.
 
It is important to secure a place by buying a "ticket" in advance, for food will only be prepared for those who paid and only limited space is available. 
 
We will make provision for 20 litres milk but if we run out, a 24hour shop is just around the corner.

General Soft drinks can also be purchased on the night.

Please let me know if this is in order with you.
Hope to here from you soon.

Pure Cafe's Banking Details:
Bank: Absa
Branch: Brooklyn
Cheque Account: 4068554099

Download your map HERE

Kind Regards
Renier
Tel: 083 758 5338 Fax:0866381228

I found this awesome article on the coffeegeek web site that I thought a lot of people would be interested in.

Author: Mark Prince
Posted: May 21, 2008

You may have never heard of siphon coffee making. Then again, you may have read about it in the New York Times and thought it was some $20,000 gizmo used by crazy coffee nerds in San Francisco. You may have heard of it under a plethora of other names - vacpots, vacuum brewed coffee, siphon brewer, siphon vacuum coffee, and all sorts of word combinations.

This brewing method fell out of favour in the US and Canada by the 1960s, and with only a few holdovers making devices for the next few decades. Most of the major brands that used to make siphon coffee makers eased them out of production during that time, including General Electric, Silex, Sunbeam, Cory and others. Still, the brewing method maintained a hard core set of fans, maybe just in the hundreds, or dozens, and a few manufacturers continued to produce them: Bodum has continuously made a siphon coffee maker since the 1970s. Cona, out of the UK, has been making them since before World War II. Nicro, a commercial small appliances maker, was manufacturing them right up through the 1970s when demand finally disappeared, at least for cafes and restaurants.

In the late 1990s, a bunch of coffee nerds started talking up the joys of siphon coffee makers, or "vacpots", in places like alt.coffee and with the aid of rudimentary photos and pretty basic short video clips, a new (albeit small) generation of people cottoned on to this brewing method, if not for anything else than the show it provided.

And now, well into the first decade of the 21rst century, and some 160 years after the siphon coffee maker was first invented in France and Germany, the technique is set to explode (figuratively, not literally) with almost everyone in the specialty industry taking interest. Peter Guiliano, the famed green bean buyer for Counter Culture Coffee and acknowledged as one of the best cuppers in the business today, lists the siphon coffee method as one of his favourite ways to make coffee.

Back in 1998, I saw my first ever siphon coffee maker in action. I make no joke about this - it was a seminal moment for me in coffee. I was very much into all things espresso at the time, and I still recall the first time I brewed a cup. I'd been reading about vacpots for a few years - mostly in the newsgroup alt.coffee, but also in books like Ken Davids' Joy of Coffee - but it wasn't until I stumbled upon a used Bodum Santos in a flea market that I bought one, took it home and set it up for the first brew.

Almost everything about using a vacuum coffee maker is sensory involved: aromas, fragrance, motion, touch, action. Grind the coffee, add it to the top vessel. Add cold (or hot) water to the bottom. Put the bottom on a heat source. Add the top vessel with its attached siphon. Watch. Liquids defy gravity. The brew gurgles, but it's not boiling. Remove from heat source. Watch the coffee move back down, or "south". Watch the bottom vessel's brewed coffee gurgle as air is drawn through the spent grounds to release the built up vacuum. Remove top vessel. Smell. Ahhh. Pour. Taste. More ahhhh.

So much science. So much sensory involvement. So much fun. And the taste... Do it right, and you'll wonder not at the fact that so many specialty industry leaders consider this "the best".

The World Barista Championships starts tomorrrow in Copenhagen so I thought that I would phone Origin Roasting in Cape Town to see how our own national barista champ, Jose Vilandy was doing in the preperations. I was very sad to hear that Jose was not able to get his passport organised in time to make the trip and that South Africa is not represented at the WBC