The La Cimbali team enjoy another great London Coffee Festival
The world’s largest celebration of coffee – the fabulous London Coffee Festival has sadly closed its doors once again until Spring 2016. La Cimbali’s Coffee Specialist Rob Ward, who ran the Espresso bar at the festival reflects on this year’s event, and particularly the success of the Sensory Science sessions.
“We started off by testing people’s ability to taste primary flavours through the solutions of sweet, salt, bitter and sour, with the added complexity of introducing two sour elements of Malic (Apple/Pear) -acidity and Citric (Lemon/Orange) – acidity. Overall, less than 40% of people who tried it got it all correct, but amazingly in one session we had a 100% success rate! We also demonstrated the effect that aroma has on taste and showed in a simple way how flavour is a combination of taste, and mouthfeel, but most importantly that it’s the aroma that gives us around 1,000 identifiable flavour characteristics in coffee.
When our budding tasters moved onto the Coffee Flight Sensory Experience, we demonstrated how using technology and different approaches to coffee extraction, we could take one coffee and produce four distinctly different drinks. The Ethiopian Limu coffee that we used changed from a Molasses sweetness with Grapefruit notes in the flat 9 bar espresso, to a more white sugar sweetness soft Grapefruit and Peach pressure profiled espresso. Then we pulled a 300g coffee shot at 8 bar of pressure and chilled it down in an ice bath to create Peach Iced Tea flavour notes. We then finished off with a Syphon Brew with warm Caramel sweetness, which produced a real journey of flavours.
It really was a great four days and on behalf of the La Cimbali team I would like to say thank you to everyone who visited our Espresso bar, and for all of the compliments we received on both our Mumac museum inspired bar design, and of course our great Espresso coffee creations! Plus, a big thank you to the four independent roasters/baristas who were the winners of our recent competition – Dark Woods, Climpson & Sons, Hope & Glory and Celeste Wong #thegirlinthecafe who all did a fantastic job operating our M100 HD coffee machines, both at the main stand and on our Espresso Pit Stop Cart.
Next stop is Caffe Culture where we will be sponsoring and supporting the Coffee in Good Spirits competition with our M100 coffee machines and Magnum On-Demand grinders. These will test and showcase the joining of Barista and Bar Tender to create an alcohol inspired signature drink…. But more on that next time.”
For more details visit: www.caffecultureshow.com
