Espresso Machines-the best thing since sliced bread

Although coffee and bread may not have much to do with one another, the invention of espresso has revolutionized the ability of beer espresso at home for coffee lovers around the world. The very first espresso machines were used in homes at the beginning of the 20th century. The first espresso machines patented by Luigi Bezzera of Milan, in 1901, were the variety of piston lever, which was powered solely by the vapour pressure.

These simple espresso machines have no moving parts.Sit on your stovetop and water at the bottom of the machine where the steam forces the water up in the middle section of the machine where the espresso is actually produced. Although there have been advances in technology since the invention of espresso machine of Luigi Bezzera stovetop, these varieties are still very popular today and can be found in the kitchens of the calibre of Italy, France, Portugal and Spain.

Most modern machines delivered since then have been developed and are used throughout North America, from House to House coffee. There are two kinds of espresso machines, automatic and semi-automatic, the main difference is that with the semi-automatic machine expressed the operator can control the amount of water used. Where, as the automatic espresso machines have a system of a single button.

If you're new to the world of espresso may have recognized the classic shot to your home local coffee.The typical espresso is served in a small bowl, and although the amount may seem lower than average Cup of coffee, espresso contains about two or three times the amount of caffeine. For this reason alone, the espresso is the basis for other beverages, such as lattes and Cappuccinos. Note that espresso beans not specific or roast level, but rather is simply the method of how to BREW coffee.So, in other words, any kind of coffee, whether light or dark roast roasted, can be used to make an espresso.

If you want to do a expressed precisely should be aware that you cannot use the regular coffeepot. the only way to ferment properly is an espresso with espresso coffee machines, both with the variety stovetop espresso machines or automatic or semi-automatic more elaborate.The reason being is that an espresso requires a process of fermentation pressurized, allowing a very concentrated coffee cup.

Different than the amount of concentrate of coffee that is produced by this method of brewing, one of the other main characteristics of an espresso done properly is the cream that is produced. Cream is reddish-brown foam that floats on top of the surface of the drink and is the signature of all cast.

Since the creators of espresso time of Luigi Bezzera, espresso House have increased in popularity. Today, finds a wide range of machines for espresso House, from version stovetop to versions, everywhere, from cooking and appliance stores, online merchants and even department stores.

If you want to enjoy your espresso at home, start looking and compare espresso makers that are available for you to choose from. it is important to choose the right version for your coffee drink requirements.

With a great selection of espresso, check out Morning Coffee Shop site, morningcoffeeshop.com.

How to Open a Financially Successful Coffee, Espresso & Tea Shop: With Companion CD-ROM

The explosive growth of the coffee shops across the country has been phenomenal. Few people realize coffee is now the largest food import to the United States. There is money to be made on those beans. Here is the manual you need to cash in on this highly profitable segment of the food service industry. This new book is a comprehensive and detailed study of the business side of the specialty coffee and beverage shop. This superb manual should be studied by anyone investigating the opportunities of opening a coffee cafe, tea shop or coffee kiosk. If you enjoy meeting people and love coffee, this may be the perfect business for you, but keep in mind Specialty coffee retail looks easy, but as with any business, looks can be deceiving. This complete manual will arm you with everything you need including sample business forms, leases, and contracts; worksheets and checklists for planning, opening, and running day-to-day operations; sample menus; coffee drink recipes; inventory lists; plans and layouts; and dozens of other valuable, time-saving tools of the trade that no coffee entrepreneur should be without.

While providing detailed instruction and examples, the author leads you through finding a location that will bring success, learn how to draw up a winning business plan (The Companion CD-ROM has the actual business plan you can use in MS Word TM), how to buy and sell a coffee shop, basic cost control systems, profitable menu planning, sample floor plans & diagrams, successful kitchen management, equipment layout and planning, food safety & HACCP, successful beverage management, legal concerns, sales and marketing techniques, pricing formulas, learn how to set up computer systems to save time and money, learn how to hire & keep a qualified professional staff, brand new IRS tip reporting requirements, managing and training employees, generate high profile public relations and publicity, learn low cost internal marketing ideas, low and no cost ways to satisfy customers and build sales, learn how to keep bringing customers back, accounting & bookkeeping procedures, auditing, successful budgeting and profit planning development, as well as thousands of great tips and useful guidelines.

The manual delivers literally hundreds of innovative ways demonstrated to streamline your business. Learn new ways to make your operation run smoother and increase performance. Shut down waste, reduce costs, and increase profits. In addition operators will appreciate this valuable resource and reference in their daily activities and as a source of ready-to-use forms, web sites, operating and cost cutting ideas, and mathematical formulas that can be easily applied to their operations. The Companion CD-ROM contains all the forms in the book as well as a sample business plan you can adapt for your own use.

Price: $39.95

Click here to buy from Amazon

Photos - Latte Art How To: Part 2 - Rosetta

Ah, the Rosetta. That beautiful, balanced, delicate and complex design that you often see on the top of your Latte. We call it a Rosetta, not a Christmas tree or fern, and it is done with just a flick of the wrist. There are no tools, stamps, or tricks involved. Just a learned method and lots of practice. Now that you have mastered perfect milk, I'll show you how to pour it.

Photos By Gimme! Staff

Start with your textured (and polished) milk and a shot of espresso. The first part of of pouring is getting your milk to go under the crema of the shot without disturbing it too much. I tilt the cup slightly towards my pitcher to create a deeper pool to pour into.

Then get your pitcher as close to the rim of your cup as you can without dumping the milk all over the place.

Once you are ready to pour into your shot, do so with force! I think of punching it trough, or aiming for the bottom of cup. The goal is to get under the top layer of your shot. By lifting up the back of your pitcher, therefore having a steep angle you are pouring from, you will achieve enough force.

After the initial punch of milk you want to slow things way down so that you preserve the top layer, and therefore the color, of your espresso. Nice latte art is all about contrast, so preserving the color is very important. Too much mixing and your entire drink will be a dull brown. You slow things down by lowering the back of your pitcher, and decreasing the rate your milk is flowing out.

Once you are nearing the lip of your cup, bring the tip of your pitcher as close to the rising surface of your drink as you can. Also, now is the time to move the point of your pitcher to the far side of your cup to start laying down art.

Really get the point of your pitcher down into the cup. I've been known to even clink the pitcher on the rim! Once you are close to the surface and at the far side of your cup start a gentle wiggling motion with your wrist. Keep this motion very gentile, just using your fingers. The force of your wrist of arm is not necessary.

You will start to see ribbons of white floating on the surface of your drink. This is the start of your rosetta! Keep wiggling very gently and slowly start to move back towards the neer side of your cup.

Keep your wiggle constant and your pull back slow. You should not be letting out very much milk at this point and you have plenty of time to create many layers in your design.

Keep pulling back to the edge of the cup. The further back you can go without overflowing, the more full and layered your design will be. Then you pull you steam of milk back trough your design towards the opposite side of the cup with a very gentle stream of milk. This pulls all the layers of the leaves together.

There you have it: one rosetta. A true classic, they are always beautiful and never perfect. Don't loose hope if you overflow or your design is flawed. Just keep practicing and enjoying all the delicious mistakes.

View the original article here

Espresso in Cape Town, South Africa

Quick!: name a city that’s surrounded by the exquisite natural beauty of mountains and seas, with brightly painted houses that decorate quaint neighborhoods, with great food everywhere you turn, with a nearby wine country consisting of hundreds of vineyards and many nationally renowned restaurants, with hipsters who frequent farmers’ markets in transitional neighborhoods, with a diverse racial mix from black to white to Indian to Southeast Asian, with the nation’s most vibrant gay population, with a touristy waterfront featuring seals on piers and a ferry that takes you to a famous prison island, and with a whole lot of really good coffee.
Why, it could only be Cape Town, South Africa.
Alright, that was a trick question: San Francisco’s Pier 39 has sea lions, not seals per se. But the point being that for anyone from our fair city, many aspects of Cape Town will seem very familiar. But there are also significant differences.


If you’re talking liberal laws, it’s probably not a major surprise that gay marriage is legal in South Africa. What may be more of a surprise is that, for the 2010 FIFA World Cup, the South African constitution had to be temporarily suspended around the soccer stadiums for FIFA security purposes. (We can’t say enough good things for how festive the South Africans were as hosts to the World Cup, btw.) Years of abuses under Apartheid made many personal searches — ones we’re quite accustomed to in the U.S. — illegal. The 14-year-old South African constitution is one of the most liberal in the world.
On the other hand, there’s the old local joke that rock and roll never dies, it just tours South Africa. (“Hey, was that really Bryan Adams I just saw in town the other day?”) And given the nation’s history of economic disparity and its 25% unemployment rate, there are the major issues of poverty and security.


Some expected us to witness crushing poverty and aggressive homelessness in Cape Town, but it’s hard to say that it is any worse than SF. In the month we spent around Cape Town’s central business district (CBD) — a.k.a. the City Bowl — we were approached by all of one person for money. Yet security is a big concern among the locals and it’s an even bigger industry.
Even with all the truly great options in town to satisfy any SF food snob, food is handled a bit differently here. Some of the best sushi in town can be found in Italian restaurants — sushi being a decidedly California thing in Cape Town, and less of a Japanese thing. Which also explains why the grocery stores sell flour tortillas under the name “California wraps”. (To make matters worse, in turn, one of the more famous Italian restaurants in town has a German name.) This theme of playing a bit fast and loose with labels and names will again come up with coffee later in this post.


Speaking of coffee, like Italy or Australia or New Zealand, the baseline quality standards in South Africa are clearly better than in the U.S. You can walk into just about any random store and trust that you’ll get a rather acceptable espresso, whereas this practice is still ill-advised even in San Francisco. But, as in places such as Italy, examples of very good espresso are a rarer find — even in the biggest cosmopolitan cities. But with a little research and a few contacts, we were able to identify some of the best places in Cape Town.
A few things come to mind specifically about the espresso here. WEGA machines are ubiquitous. The coffees tend to emphasize more rich-bodied flavor than the wilder, bright coffees you may come to expect from Africa, but there are exceptions. And the cappuccino here almost always comes with a very Portuguese dusting of cocoa powder; you quite literally ask to have for one without it.
And somewhat contrary to an earlier post of ours, you can find the cappuccino quite often on café menus — even perhaps moreso than flat whites, and especially at the cafés that are a little less obsessed about their coffee. However, most places do treat the cappuccino and flat white interchangeably. Which leads us to our next topic of discussion…


After spending a month in South Africa, it made sense that this is the nation that gave us “red espresso” — or Roobios tea. Even if you like the tea, as we do, the term “red espresso” comes off as unnecessarily deceptive and has never sat well with us. Just because you can stick something into an espresso machine does not make it espresso. Which reminds us a little of eggspresso — or should that be “yellow espresso”? And yet “Red Cappuccino” is also a registered trademark.
Now if you thought coffee’s wine analogy was a bit over the top, over the past several years South Africa has developed something of a niche market for coffee-flavored wine. They’ve been growing wine grapes around Cape Town since 1655, but it wasn’t until 1925 that a Stellenbosch professor crossed the fragile pinot noir grape with the heartier cinsault (known locally as hermitage) to create a local cultivar called pinotage.
In 2001, noted pinotage maker Diemersfontein Wines came out with the original “coffee chocolate pinotage”, and they’ve popularly released one every year since. Meanwhile, imitators came to the fore in the form of Cappupinoccinotage from Boland Cellars, Café Culture from KWV, the Vrede en Lust Mocholate (a malbec), etc. The original Diemersfontein coffee pinotage wine maker, Bertus Fourie — literally nicknamed “Starbucks” for that reason — has moved on to Café Culture and now Barista Wine (we are not making this up), where he holds the title of “Head Barista” and their Web site offers a Nespresso Le Cube D180 sweepstakes.

Coffee pinotage is sometimes called the red wine for coffee addicts, and it certainly doesn’t come without some controversy from the purists, but it’s really more the red wine for coffee drinkers who don’t like red wine. That said, there’s room for everybody’s tastes. We’ve long stated that Starbucks’ stroke of genius was in convincing millions of customers who don’t like the taste of coffee that they actually do. While coffee pinotage doesn’t use any actual coffee for flavoring, the taste aims for the consumer are the same.
Now despite all the wine-growing activity around Cape Town and a number of its very good wines, many South African wines are still (IMO) global underachievers and/or acquired tastes. Having tried a 2007 Diemersfontein coffee pinotage and a 2009 Barista pinotage, we were reminded of all the beer + coffee combinations that have failed over the years … the “coffee stouts” where the results were second-rate as a beer and second-rate as coffee, rather than something better than the sum of its parts.
Of course, we live in a diverse, global culture that sometimes wants their wine (or beer) to taste like coffee, their coffee to taste like chocolate and hazelnuts, and their chocolate to taste like bacon. So why not skip the middleman and market bacon wine? Sure, it might be a curious novelty to hear Céline Dion perform an album of songs by fellow Canadians Death from Above 1979, but it’s no stretch to presume that it will optimally satisfy neither fans of Céline nor Death from Above 1979.
As Oscar Wilde famously once said, “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” This South African dimension to the coffee-wine analogy largely fails coming from a different angle.
A little more towards the authentic in the African continent, in the category of “now why don’t we do that in America?”, we did enjoy the occasional Ethiopian coffee ceremony — even if it originates on the continent’s opposite side of the equator. At a restaurant such as Cape Town’s Addis in Cape, we enjoyed an odd mix of Frankincense, popcorn (?!), and coffee served from a Jabena pot.
While the coffee undergoes some of the oldest and crudest handling and brewing known to man, the resulting cup is quite flavorful. Perhaps more importantly, the ceremony uniquely resonates with coffee culture, capturing much of the wonder that’s truly native to coffee without the creatively lazy marketing contortionists who squeeze coffee’s square peg into wine tasting’s round hole through the mutant coffee cupping fad in America. But alas, Californication applies to coffee cupping here just as it does to sushi and flour tortillas in South Africa.
At the coffee chain level, Vida e Caffè serves as an example of how Starbucks and even Peet’s fall short. Even Woolworths W Café serves both espresso and cappuccino in a paper cup that run circles around Starbucks.
While at the “artisan” end, there are places like TRUTH. that seem to go through the Third Wave motions, but with much success. And then there are places like Origin Coffee Roasting, who not only broke quality coffee ground in Africa in 2006, but they established a roasting and training operation that most American coffee entrepreneurs have only talked about. And then there’s Espresso Lab Microroasters, who show some of the most cohesive and comprehensive vision for what a quality coffee operation could be — while making espresso as good as anything in SF.
The wine may have room for improvement compared to what San Franciscans are used to, but everything else about Cape Town makes it a fantastic and compelling place to be — including the coffee.



Shop 10a, Gardens Shopping Centre, Mill St. Shop 11, Gardens Shopping Centre, Mill St. Shop 5, Buitenkloof Studios, 8 Kloof St. Shop number F&B1, Cape Town International Airport Shop No. 6160, Lower Level, Victoria Wharf Shop 6195, Lower Level, Victoria Wharf Shop 1, Perspectives Building, 37 Roeland St. Shop 4, Quay 5, Victoria Wharf, V&A Waterfront Shop 1, Mooikloof, 34 Kloof St.
Tags: cafe_reviews, cape_town_cafes, cappuccino, coffee_cupping, ethiopian_coffee, flat_white, flavored_coffees, origin_coffee_roasting, peets_coffee, quality_standards, south_africa_coffee, Starbucks, WEGA, wine_analogy, world_cup
2 Comments »
View the original article here

Espresso 101 Barista Training DVD

Espresso 101 is a complete training course in espresso and brewed coffee. This award-winning professional video training tool is the industry standard for training you and your employees. This DVD will cut the normal 20-hour employee-training cycle down to three or four hours. This tool pays for itself with the first employee trained. Each package includes a study guide, multiple-choice test with answer key, barista diploma and a durable library case.

This informative DVD covers: A Brief History of Coffee, Coffee Bean Roasting and Blending, Espresso Equipment, Extracting Perfect Espresso, The Art of Steaming and Foaming Milk, How to Prepare Espresso Bar Drinks, Fundamentals of Brewed Coffee Preparation, Cleaning, Safety and Maintenance.

What industry experts say about Espresso 101: An excellent training resource designed to provide solid background information on coffee as well as practical demonstrations on correct preparation of espresso-based beverages. This entertaining video should become part of the training program for every new barista entering the coffee industry. - Ted Lingle, Executive Director, Specialty Coffee Association of America

Price: $89.95

Click here to buy from Amazon

Lavazza Super Crema Espresso Whole Bean Coffee, 2.2-Pound Bag

The Lavazza super crema, whole bean, 2.2 pound bag are a premium blend of 80% sweet arabicas and 20% robustas producing a rich, intense flavor with a thick espresso crema that holds up well in cappuccinos and lattes. Super crema can also be used with all other brewing methods for an extremely rich, flavorful coffee.

Price: $24.82

Click here to buy from Amazon

Click Espresso Protein Drink Powder 16 oz (448 g)

Espresso Protein Drink™
Double Shot Espresso Coffee
15 Grams of Lasti
Price:

Click here to buy from Amazon