I LOVE coffee! I also love the cafe culture and scene that has ever growing popularity in our towns and cities. I consider myself a bit of a coffee snob, looking down on the national and global chains, preferring the superior coffee taste and ambience offered by the independent coffee shops. However, I met some serious hard core coffee lovers today (I can’t tell you what they thought of my admission to owning a Nespresso machine) and I learned an enormous amount about the ritual of brewing a proper cup of coffee.
I booked a place on Food Sorcery’s Barista Workshop as I wanted to learn how to make a latte that would look great on my food photography shots (more on this later). The workshop took place at their cookery school in Didsbury and was led by Gavin aka @brewxtillxdeath on Instagram. Gavin has been making and serving coffee for almost twenty years and has opened his own coffee shops, the latest being in Lloyds Bank in Manchester.
He started us off with a cold brew, served with ice and tonic water. Bizarre but I’m told very refreshing and increasingly popular (I have had an aversion to cold coffee ever since a childhood rough sea trip mixed with strong cold coffee ended badly).
Luckily for me we quickly moved on to various ways of brewing hot coffee. Well, when I say ‘quickly’ it was a lot more involved than chucking a Nespresso capsule into the machine and frothing some milk!
Making the perfect cup of coffee involves weighing, grinding, timing and lots of equipment I’ve never seen before. It was a new world of coffee jargon and techie gadgets that my husband would have loved!
Who knew that you needed special scales (“the sort drug dealers use to precision weigh their product” quipped an innocent-looking Australian lady…) to weigh out 18g per cup?
We were also introduced to a V60 and a specialist kettle with a gooseneck spout for targeted pouring. My Christmas list grew longer as the workshop went on.
