Note: Serious Eats contributor Allison Hemler is a NYC-based barista who recently traveled to Seattle to check out the internal coffee college at Starbucks HQ. This week, she'll be educating us on tidbits she picked up in class, with today's focus on the espresso. A latte poured by a barista at Stumptown Coffee in Portland, Oregon. Any seasoned barista will tell you what the time before being cleared on an espresso machine is like. You're stuck at the cash register, acting as the interpreter between the customer and the artist behind the La Marzocco who pulls shots, steams milk, and applies a delicate touch to a porcelain cup as it makes its way to a caffeine-starved owner. The barista does...
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Note: Serious Eats contributor Allison Hemler is a NYC-based barista who recently traveled to Seattle to check out the internal coffee college at Starbucks HQ. This week, she'll be educating us on tidbits she picked up in class, today's focus being on the improving relationships between coffee bean farmers and roasters. Coffee farmers in Chiapas, Mexico. Photograph from tonx on Flickr As the second most traded commodity in the world after oil, coffee has acquired more frequent flier miles than any of your produce could hope for. In fact, more coffee enters the United States than any other food product. There's a clear reason why we don't have coffee trees in our backyards and why we rely on shipments from...
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Note: Serious Eats contributor Allison Hemler is an NYC-based barista who recently traveled to Seattle to check out the internal coffee college at Starbucks HQ. This week, she'll be educating us on tidbits she picked up in class, continuing today with the roasting of beans. When I want coffee made with love, I immediately think of Small World Coffee in Princeton, New Jersey—the location of my first-ever barista position. We had our own roasting plant five miles down the road in a huge warehouse. You'd walk in for a staff meeting after slaving away at the espresso machine all day and the intense aroma would conjure up images of swimming in coffee beans alongside toasting marshmallows for s'mores, stirring a...
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Note: Serious Eats contributor Allison Hemler is a NYC-based barista who recently traveled to Seattle to check out the internal coffee college at Starbucks HQ. This week, she'll be educating us on tidbits she picked up in class, starting with bean origins today. Clockwise from top left: Coffee cherries, washed green coffee, roasted coffee beans. A few weeks ago, I was at the local bar for trivia night when the ultimate question was asked: "Where is the majority of the world's coffee beans grown?" Simple, I thought. I work in coffee and look at names of Latin American and African countries every day. While hesitant, I chose Colombia from my brainstormed list—the popularity of Juan Valdez has got to count...
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