London Coffee Festival

As a coffee lover I was very excited for the London Coffee Festival event. I learned about it last year, on my way to school, back then i used to walk to school, I stopped by in pavilion coffee shop to get a good cup of coffee. London Coffee Festival had an add on the coffee cups and i deiced i would go this event. I couldn't make it last year, and this year i booked my ticket and went there wandered two and a half hours  in old truman brewery. Unfortunately it turned out to be not what i expected.  I was expecting to enter a space with full of coffee smell and loads of free coffee samples after all there is 800 different kinds of coffee flavors in the world now.  

There was a queue in front of the festival entrance at 10:30 am and we waited around 10 mins to go in which was very unpleasant since it was raining and very cold. Then i was a bit disappointed since there was Thai food  stands in the downstairs (the festival turned out to be in upstairs) so you can imagine the smell it was nothing like the coffee smell that i expected. And the second very upsetting thing was the people on the stands are usually way to cool to speak with or just way to mean to offer a free sample from their products. So i am not going back to London coffee festival next year if i will be in London because it is way too expensive for what it offers. The single standard ticket costs £9.50 and plus £1.25 booking fee then if you buy it on the door it is more expensive around £12. And one more annoying thing about the ticketing is you can not really go there whenever you want so there is a time slot that you can go in and you can not go back in again. So it is very annoying in that sense. I think it wouldn't worth to pay more than £5 for this event and i am very dissatisfied with it. Thankfully i managed to get something out from the workshops and i stopped by at the  make decent coffee lounge where they showed how to make a filtered coffee. 

Certainly in an event on coffee you get to see loads of equipment used  for making coffee both filters, espresso machines,  coffee cups, french presses. I didn't take loads of pictures it was crowded in front of the stands. The first workshop i attended was on tea, apparently tea tastes different depending on the altitude that it grows in. And the size of the tea is very important, just like in coffee, if the tea is very fine dust like that means it is going to infuse to water very quickly. So the instant tea that is on the most of the English pocket teas are dust like that is why it gives color very quickly. The smell of the tea also significant when choosing. The tea that has grown in low altitude doesn't have an intense flavor and the flavor fades away very quickly. If it has a high percentage blend of high altitude grown tea the strength of the flavor is intense and then again fades away quickly. if it is composed of mid altitude grown tea than the flavor is intense and it lasts long time this type of tea is coming probably to England from Rwanda. We had some tea with milk since it was a sensory lab but didn't tastes much different. Personally my favorite is large cut teas, i do not like the dust like teas i think they usually don't have much flavor into them probably low altitude ones that is been sold on the supermarket shelves. 

My next stop was the make decent coffee lounge, where i learned the art of filter coffee making, they actually have a  video on youtube on how to make filtered coffee at home (above).  There was a hario V60 coffee maker also featured in the video above, also chemex coffee maker, and a french press. For Chemex and hario V60 you need a paper filter. You have to place the paper filter into the upper part and wet the paper to not to let the taste of the paper affect the taste of the coffee. Then you have to grind the coffee beans , i had a very strong Tanzanian blend in the lounge, and pour 15 grams for each cup into the wet cone.  Then pour the boiled water into the hario v60 coffee drip buono kettle and fist pour some on the coffee and wait a while this will allow the CO2 to be released from the coffee. Then add the remaining water and wait for it to be filtered. The v60 kettle has a long thin and curved opening which will allow the water cool down while pouring on to the grinned coffee. It is pretty straightforward but unfortunately a chemex coffee maker costs $38, a v60 coffee maker costs $31, and the hario kettle costs $56. So the equipment is quite expensive. But i think it is worth if you are a coffee lover. I will continue on writing on the sessions in the next blog post, hope you had some useful information on coffee. Tune in for the rest of the post.