Transcend Coffee is looking for more people to add to its dynamic team. We are looking for one part-time person who would like to join the cafe staff. This position would have you working along side of the existing team of baristas, and interacting with our customers. If you love coffee and enjoy working with people and have 20 - 30 hours a week to offer us, please contact us or send a resume to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

The second position is for a full-time (35 hours per week) warehouse manager. We are ideally looking for someone with some experience handling shipping and receiving, ordering, and generally keeping a hopping roastery organized. You should love coffee, and want to join Transcend in helping us get our coffee out the door either to the fine folk who order it online, or to our growing number of wholesale customers. If you are interested in this position, please forward a resume to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Transcend Coffee is a little coffee company with lots of heart and a dynamic and growing team of people committed to providing Edmonton, and Canada with the best coffee it can find.

From Neyeri Kenya, our newest coffee offers bright citrus acidity balanced by intricate sweetness.

We're thrilled to have one of our favourite coffees from Terrazu, Costa Rica back again this season.

While this episode of the podcast does actually have a lot to do with the environment, 'getting green' here doesn't refer specifically to water conservation or carbon footprints (we'll save that for another podcast) but rather the challenges and complexities of acquiring exceptional green coffee.

We found two excellent items that really drive home the points made in the podcast and are worth checking out. First is a news video, from Al Jazeera (English) of all places that reports on the devastation in Guatemala specifically in relation to coffee farming. The second is the fact that the Bolivia Cup of Excellence has been cancelled due to bad weather and politics. Part of the email announcing the cancellation is copied below.

"Dear Cup of Excellence supporters-

You have signed up for either the 2010 Bolivia samples and/or its auction. Regrettably, the Bolivia competition has been canceled for 2010. This is certainly heartbreaking news for ACE and for the farmers since Bolivia has advanced so much due to the Cup of Excellence program and its recognition of exemplary farmers.

In the past our partner organization FECAFEB has received donor funding for almost 100% of the costs. This year not even partial funding was made available for Cup of Excellence by any donor or governmental agency. ACE has been advising FECAFEB on plans for a scaled down program which could be mostly funded from the auction commissions from the last 2 years. However given last weeks severe weather there is now a fear that the harvest will also be too small. In a letter received yesterday the Board of FECAFEB asked that ACE and its members understand and support Bolivia's return in 2011.

Those of you that travel to producing countries and work with coffee farmers are aware of how fragile some of the supporting organizations are and how political and economic situations can change on a yearly and sometimes even on a monthly basis. A severe weather event can completely disrupt the coffee sector, politics and security can change overnight and monies coming from outside of a country or from internal sponsors can dry up just as fast. ACE has been working with a project of The United States Agency for International Development to bring Cup of Excellence to the Bolivian farmers. The program, now ending, has been hugely successful at creating a more stable and financially rewarding specialty coffee sector. However, recent politics have often been tense. In Bolivia coffee is now managed under the vice ministry of coca and the priority for its development has changed.

We know this cancellation will cause disappointment and hope that you can contact Bolivian farmers directly for the wonderful coffees that have been discovered."

A quick introduction to my classroom environment.

This is the classroom. It’s got a chemistry lab feel about it doesn’t it? Guess what? That’s exactly what it is.

This is my Texas Instruments scientific calculator. We call it a Nuova Simonelli Aurelia.

This is my protractor (a.k.a. Mazzer Robur grinder).

Ruler (kitchen scale with 0.1 gram resolution)

And pencil (tamper).

And this is Mr. Hockin (I call him Professor Hawking when he’s not paying attention). He’s a mysterious espresso scientist. Some say he’s some kind of coffee vigilante or ninja or something by night. Look at that photo. All I know is it makes me nervous that he can move a portafilter that fast.

My first tamp

We covered the very basics today: grind, dose, distribute and tamp.

Grind

To pull a quality shot you need to grind your coffee right before you brew. Subtle changes courser or finer can have a huge impact on the way the shot pulls (to be covered in a future lesson).

Dose

Dosing basically means using the right amount of coffee. At Transcend we typically use around 20 grams in a double portafilter basket. With the Mazzer Robur grinder you need to be careful to first purge any old stale coffee that’s in the chute between the burrs and the dosing chamber. The Robur is a manual dose grinder that means you need to grind then pull a lever to deliver ground coffee into the portafilter. Technique is important. I’m told to pull three times, then tap the portafilter (to settle the grounds) twice, then pull twice more, tap three times, then pull as many times as it takes to fill the basket. I think it will be on the test.

Distribute

It’s important to distribute the coffee evenly around the portafilter. There are some tricks to this. Prof. Hawk showed me how to move my right index finger from the left side of the portafilter down to the ‘six o’clock’ position. Then use my index and middle finger in a V (the european foreign exchange kids will loove this one) to move from six o’clock to twelve o’clock, then back down to six and up to twelve making ’24 hours’ of coffee distribution. Then pat any remaining mound of coffee gently down using a horizontal index finger down and back up again ‘sun set and sun rise’. I know, teachers can be such dorks, but I actually think this will help me remember.

Tamp

Tamping compacts the coffee so that the hot pressurized water will have a more difficult time moving through the grounds and will extract more oils and espresso-ey goodness. The technique is to rest the portafilter on the little rubber mat thing (or counter) hold the tamper like you’re shaking its hand (it’s a friendly tamper) keep your forearm as vertical as possible, with close to a 90? elbow and press evenly with about 30 lbs of pressure. Release the pressure, and give the tamper a 90? spin. Remove the tamper, gently place the tamper above the lip of the portafilter at twelve o’clock and push down very gently just to move any grounds that may have stuck on the sides of the portafilter wall down to the level of the coffee. Repeat at three, six and nine o'clock. Then go back for one more full tamp at 30 lbs of pressure, release pressure and gently spin. The result should be a nice level, smooth surface of coffee. My first attempt was not very level at all. In fact it took me several attempts to get a tamp that satisfied both Prof. Hawk and me.

We tasted a number of shots that were deliberately wrong. We tried under-dosed (too little coffee) which results in over extracted, bitter espresso, over dosed which turned the shot sour, and unevenly distributed, which pours poorly and is just generally unpredictable. It’s a good idea to spit when tasting and training on espresso—not only so you won’t be up all night nervously rearranging your transformers collection by size, colour and appearance in the original animated movie (not that Michael Bay abomination)—but because the vast majority of shots, especially when experimenting, will taste just... nasty.

First off, a note about the title for these posts (yes it will be a series of sorts). The intention here is caffeine high rather than caffeine high. I considered titles like Espresso University or Extraction 101, but here’s the problem: I’m a marketing director... that loves drinking coffee, not a barista.

I consider myself, by a narrow margin, competent in brewing coffee on a drip machine or a french press, or even a chemex. But I know nothing. Repeat. No-thing about preparing espresso. I’ve watched our talented baristas pull shots and make drinks for over a year now. I’ve watched several barista competitions. I’ve marveled at the techniques and asked many questions along the way. But I haven’t actually got my hands on the espresso machine.

Until now. I’m finally getting trained on how to pull a quality shot of espresso, steam milk and prepare the basic espresso drinks (espresso, americano, macchiato, cappuccino, latte). Hence the title. I am certainly not ready for university-level espresso training. This is introduction to espresso. Coffee 10. Remedial caffeducation if you will.

It’s about time. I need to fully understand all of our products in order to effectively market them, and I’ve been woefully unqualified to explain the art and science of espresso. But that’s all going to change.

With these posts I simply want to give you a glimpse into the beginning stages of our training program here at transcend and my perspective as I journey from average joe that likes his joe to (hopefully) an adequate puller of quality espresso.

That’s enough for the basic intro of what I’m on about. Tomorrow the bell rings and it's off to class.