Seems there’s something about coffee recipes in the air this week – and not just for new varieties of your favourite drink …

• Coffee marinade for grass-fed beef, from Daily Shot of Coffee
• A BBQ rub for steak, from INeedCoffee
• and an article about a new recipe search engine, from Brewed Coffee

Thoughts that arise:

• I really only like Starbucks espresso in milk; latte (grande extra shot) is fine, flat white is fine, cappuccino is fine (although not something I drink much). Anything else? Nah …
• Given which, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to try some of their ‘drip’ stuff. I think I’ve tried it exactly, erm … once. Don’t know what they’re like in the US, but here in the UK there tend to be two drips going on any given day; one is always a “house” blend (the name of which I completely forget – don’t think it’s Pikes Peak) and the other changes regularly. Could be an opportunity to cut the cost a little (they’re slightly cheaper), cut down on the calories (dash of milk) and – frankly – try out something new.
• Those two points aside, a bugbear to raise. Why the HELL do Starbucks – and Costa, come to that – have these little stores which don’t take their loyalty cards? In fact Costa are worse than Starbucks, because the place where they practically never take cards – motorway services – also tend to charge about £3.50 for a drink that’d be under £3 in a normal store. Charge a stupid amount of money for a coffee because of the captive audience, and no loyalty card. Makes me want to spit …

Honorable mention goes to the new services on the M40 – oh, you know the one – which has a huge Costa, and does take the club card. And also to Caffe Nero, which (as far as I know) will stamp you card at any store or kiosk.

I have a bag of Peets House Blend in the freezer (oh the heresy) but don’t particularly want to keep grabbing it out – probably wait until I’m next going to be home for a few days, then take it out and finish it off.

And, being the weekend, I didn’t have the option of popping to Monmouth on the way home and picking up some of their beans.

Instead, on the spur of the moment, I grabbed a tin of Illy beans from my local Waitrose (the black tin, denoting darker roast). Normally I avoid buying any beans from the supermarket, because I’ve not had good results in the past, but I needed something and I certainly wasn’t picking up anything that was pre-ground …

To my amazement, the Illy is pretty damn good. I suppose I shouldn’t be that surprised – Illy’s a widely available brand for a reason, and I like a cup of Illy-based latte from Manon – but I was never all that fussed before when using Illy pre-ground. It wasn’t bad by any stretch, but nor was it anything to write home about.

I guess it just underlines the difference between freshly ground and pre-ground coffee … a lesson for us all?

*ahem*

Easing back into things, I wanted to note that my preferences for different coffee shops – and even (slightly) for my favourite tipple – have changed a little over this time.

When last we spoke, my favourite “chain” coffee shop was Costa Coffee, followed (probably) by Caffe Nero then Starbucks; and my favourite drink, a medio latte with extra shot (or grande at Nero / Starbucks). The monumental (not really) changes came about for two reasons; a new shop opening, and my deciding that I was drinking too much milk.

The last 18 months have been quite eventful; I decided to get a hold of my health, lost nearly 2 stone (roughly 28 lbs or 15 kilos for our American cousins and those who work in metric) and ran a couple of half-marathons. As part of this process I decided I was drinking too much milk in my coffee, but having been corrupted by lattes didn’t want to go back to an americano as my day-in-day-out drink … so (ingeniously) I decided instead to go low-fat and have skinny lattes instead. Like I said, genius.

Only problem with this is that – oddly – Costa’s skinny latte isn’t actually all that good. Following the opening of a Nero opposite my office – pretty much equidistant to the Costa – whilst I was convalescing me knee after a skiing accident (don’t ask), I discovered that Nero’s skinny latte is actually very good. Better than their ‘regular’ latte, in fact. And because they make their coffee a little stronger, there’s no need for an extra shot – so it’s actually a little cheaper than Costa. And they have a better loyalty scheme than Costa (see here). So my go-to drink nowadays is a grande skinny latte from Caffe Nero. So there.

Anyway, that’s not actually what I wanted to talk about. No, the actual point of this post was simply to give a shout-out to Manon Cafe on Fleet Street (that’s the store at the top of the page, shame that their photographer was so half-arsed that the picture of the shop isn’t level, but hey ho …). Selling Illy coffee, and giving away a free belgian chocolate with each drink – if it was a little closer (or had a loyalty card) it’d be my coffee shop of choice.

So there we go; back in the saddle and (hopefully) back for the long haul. We shall see …

Having been spoilt by these riches (or at least being certain of having a drinkable coffee around the corner) I ‘unfortunately’ had to spend most of this week at the head-office. From a coffee viewpoint this is bad. There’s a Costa and Starbucks which are both at least ten minutes on foot – but I simply don’t have time to spend 20+ minutes on the round trip. There’s coffee machines in the office, but as I’ve explained elsewhere it’s pretty much undrinkable muck that makes me ill. And there’s an espresso machine in the “Oasis” (the in-house canteen) but frankly how good is that likely to be?

To get things off to a bad start, on Tuesday I actually saw one of the automatic coffee machines being cleaned. Turns out that behind the panel there are three dispensers containing a powdered chocolate, powdered milk and – yes, you guessed it – powdered coffee. Not that I would have been drinking it anyway, but that really put me off the thought!

Not trusting that anyone in the canteen would have a clue how to use their espresso machine, I decided to make do without and just pick up a “decent” coffee on the way to and from home by stopping off at a garage which has a Costa bar (since I’ve been driving this week). That worked until Thursday when the craving during the day just got too much and I absolutely had to have a coffee. Having seen the ingredients in the automatic coffee machines – and knowing that in any event it would make me sick – I was going to have to risk the canteen’s espresso machine …

I was concerned about both the skill of the staff and the freshness of the beans (with free coffee from a machine in the corner, there’s not much uptake for the paid-for espresso-based drinks) but as it turned out the resulting drink was pretty good. I took it in a latte which is a little more forgiving – and just as well because even so it tasted a little over-extracted and ‘coarse’ – but overall I was quite impressed.

And the irony? Having dreaded being in the head office for the week, and “knowing” that I would struggle to get a decent coffee, it turns out that there’s a ‘good enough’ coffee readily available. And it’s cheap!

There has however been a tiny crumb of comfort in the fact that they have now published their newsletter on line – here in fact.

Not perfect, but much better …

• 6 reasons for brewing your own coffee – Daily Shot of Coffee
• What do you get if you aerate coffee – JimSeven
• More health benefits from coffee – Daily Shot of Coffee

Enjoy!

Not something that I’ve ever really stopped to think about. As posted elsewhere I’ve only returned to coffee (and in particular started to drink “real” coffee) in the last six months or so. In that time I’ve not really been ill (tired, migraine and so on – yes, cold – no) and frankly I can’t think back to whether I drank coffee when I had a cold before.

What I’ve found is that the coffee seems to taste totally different!

First noticed this when I got home on Friday and made myself an Americano with the last of my Fazenda Rainha beans from Monmouth. This bag was two weeks old and I’d already found that the rich smell had gone from the beans – but was still present in the ground coffee. Once I’d made the coffee I found that the taste was totally different to what I’d expected – none of the chocolate tones I had over the last two weeks, instead a slightly sour taste with some fruit in the finish.

My first thought was that the beans were past their best, so time to throw out what was left (enough for one more cup, probably) and move onto the Monmouth Espresso blend that was keeping fresh in the freezer. I did exactly that, made myself another Americano, and … very similar results. The Espresso blend contains a whole lot of the Fazenda Rainha so I was anticipating a similar chocolate tone, but instead I was getting a strong bite with fruit notes. Wha ..?

Since the home-espresso surprise, I’ve also tried a Starbucks latte-extra-shot and discovered that it too had a different taste – fairly certain that the shot was over-extracted in that particular case, leading to some bitterness, but again it just didn’t taste the way that I expected.

I’ve had this bug for a little over a week now and it does seem to finally be shifting, so hopefully my taste buds (including sense of smell, which as we all know is also a vital part of taste as well as adding to the coffee experience) will be back to normal in the next few days. Be interesting then to see whether my “fresh” Monmouth Espresso (stored in a freezer for 2 weeks) still has the same taste that it did on Friday night.

Anyone else had a similar experience?

What is the difference between a flat white and a latte?!

In terms of the actual drink as offered in-store, the answer appears to be “not a whole lot”. But there must be something – this surely isn’t just a marketing ploy … is it? So after a little research, my findings are as follows:

The flat white is a little shorter than the latte – by which I mean that there’s not quite so much milk. Hence it’s a touch stronger taste, closer to a latte-extra-shot.

Costa’s bumf states that they stop the extraction a little quicker, which leads to a different taste in the base shot – I guess the idea being that it’s closer to a ristretto? I’ve not come across this distinction elsewhere and to be honest haven’t noticed the Costa baristas pulling their shots any differently, regardless of what the advertising states.

Costa’s bumf also suggests that the milk is textured differently and is ‘folded’; again can’t say that I’ve noticed the baristas doing anything different in practice.

Lastly there’s not supposed to be any froth in a flat white – hence the “flat” part of the name. Here I think there has been a mild difference; my home-made latte tends to end up with a very small layer of micro-foam on top (together with my attempts at a rosetta, which tend to be laughable), whereas a lot of the chain-bought lattes seem to have thicker foam.

Oh – and don’t forget, it’s served in a cup rather than a glass …

So in essence we seem to have come down to:

• it’s a little stronger
• possibly the shot is pulled differently
• possibly the milk is textured differently
• there’s less foam on top
• served differerntly

All of which – in my mind at least – comes down to … not much difference at all …