This weekend, and for a couple of days next week, you can get your fix of Esmeralda Special.  Seriously, it is one of the most amazing coffees on the planet.  A 12oz Clover will cost you a mere $5 bucks and you can take home a half pound for only $42.50 to brew in your Yama or Chemex.  I am taking some with me to Panama, so we roasted it fresh (as always).

Went to buy a hat today, ironically, was told that the best hat for me would be a Panama Straw.  I need a light weight hat that will keep the sun off my head in the mountains of Costa Rica, Panama, and El Salvador.  Thankfully headcase told me to wait and buy the hat in Central America, as it will be more affordable, and likely better quality.  Having said that, Chad and I leave for Costa Rica on Sunday morning, bright and early and will be gone until the 14th.  I am hoping to do video blogs, if I can figure the bloody camera out, so that I can upload video that isn't all interlaced.  I have four days to figure it out, and if any of you out there have any info or advice for me (currently using a PC) feel free to pass it on.  Regardless there will be plenty of pictures and info flowing from origin.  On the flip side, I am leaning more towards not going to Ethiopia this year, for a number of reasons, all of which Josh disagrees with.  Nonetheless, there will be plenty of opportunities to visit the birth place of coffee.

Thought I would give the services of Survey Monkey a go.  This is a simple one question survey.  Provide your answer so that I can see how this service works.  Thanks.

Click Here to take survey

Yesterday we stopped into Alistair & Robert's new shop on Ash and Broadway.  The new Elysian room is still a work in progress, and will only get better.  Having said that, the coffee was great as always, and Robert and Alistair were their usual welcoming selves.  It was great to see their new space and reconnect in the rainy city, although it wasn't raining yesterday.  The 1200 square foot space is fully equipped with a kitchen, and of course the 3 group Synesso and two shinny Clovers sitting side by side, nice and low on the front bar.  We sipped some of their Ethiopia Bedane and a nice Costa, before pouring some of the El Salvador Gladys that I had brought along.  The location is right along a fairly busy street, and is urban to say the least, in comparison to the original Elysian Room.  When finished, the new cafe will feature a tasting bar at the rear of the cafe, and will have better signage outside, so it will be easier to find the place.  They are also licensed, so at some point, you will be able to wet your whistle with more than just finely pulled espresso.  It is exciting to see the coffee culture mature in Vancouver, and I am looking forward to the day, hopefully not to long from now, where Transcend can announce the opening of its second cafe.  Until then, all you Vancouverites should venture down to the new Elysian Room and saddle up to the bar.  Tell them Poul sent you.

Oh by the way, I also shot some video on my new HD Sanyo 1010 Xacti, but the video on my computer was all jerky.  I think it has something to do with the way I uploaded it.  Hopefully we can even get a little video up on our site in the near future.  I will be taking lots of video footage in Costa Rica, Panama and El Salvador, so brace yourselves for video content on the Transcend blog probably sometime in March.

I have been thinking a lot about one of James' recent posts on why he thinks the wine model doesn't work as a cross-over into the world of specialty coffee.  As many of you know, I am also a wine guy, who is currently working on his level 3 WSET certification, so I am pretty passionate about the grape as well as the bean.  I have been thinking for a long time on how to blend the world of coffee and wine, and only recently did I give up the notion of opening a cafe / wine bar, as I am concerned with the issue of identity and brand confusion.  Having said all of that, the worlds of wine and coffee are constantly colliding both in my brain and in my world.

James was writing about how he thinks that the model that the wine industry used to gain success in the market place will not work for the specialty coffee industry, and I am inclined to agree with him.  The hanging question at the end of his article (which I encourage you to read) was what the model would look like for the coffee industry.

Since then, I have been thinking about how the wine world increased its market exposure and reach by taking what was mostly a highend product and making it accessible to a broader and less "sophisticated" customer.  In thinking about the current coffee market and culture in Edmonton, and largely throughout my nation of Canada, I am struck with the reality that we have the exact opposite problem as the wine world had.  Canadians drink a lot of coffee, but they drink a lot of really bad coffee.  Drive past any Tim Hortons and you will see a 12 car line-up in the drive thru no matter what time of day.  As I have given thought to the issue of the coffee / wine cross-over, I am inclined to think that we need to employ, in some fashion, an anti-wine model.  The wine industry needed to increase its market share by making its product more accessible.  Our problem in the coffee world is that our product is too accessible.  While those of us in the specialty industry know that there is a difference between what we do compared to Tim Hortons, in terms of quality and service, most of the market place is unaware of the difference.  The average Joe, assumes that coffee is coffee.  This is not a problem that the wine industry ever faced.  In the wine world, the average Joe thought that wine was something high brow, which was beyond his ability to enjoy.  It wasn't until Yellow Tail came along and produced a product which made wine more appealing to the average Joe, that North Americans starting giving up the beer can for the bottle of vino.  So the real question for me is how do we communicate effectively and efficiently, and in a way which isn't off-putting to our potential market that coffee is not just coffee.  How do we convince a broader audience that there is a benefit to giving up what they perceive to be a quality product, for something more expensive and less accessible?

This has been a constant issue for us at Transcend.  How do we market our product?  We can't send someone a coffee in the mail.  Advertising that we have a superior product is a message which everyone screams into the void.  The only thing which has proven effective for us is actual exposure of our product to the customer, and this happens largely by word of mouth.  It is the one sure way of convincing potential customers that there is a difference in both how coffee is roasted, prepared, served, etc.  For us, the difference in quality is only communicated through personal experience.  The problem with this, is that it is a very slow process.  You can't mass market a quality coffee experience.  So after all of my rambling, the question still remains, how do we effectively and efficiently communicate to a broader audience that what they perceive as quality, as actaully not.  That there is a tangible difference in the quality of green, and in how that green is roasted.  That proper coffee brewing is not a matter of opinion, and that skill is a pre-requisite of great espresso.  We keep chipping away, one by one, ten people at a time with our coffee tastings each month.  But apart from that, I am still at a loss at how to accellerate the process.

Visited Strait Coffee in Wilson Creek. Had a double made on the Nova Yatch Club, who knew? Truth be told, the espresso wasn't terrible and it was kind of funky. Always trying new things.