The provocatively named “naked portafilter” is also appropriately named, because it reveals so much about your espresso shot . To those who are unfamiliar with this device, it is essentially a standard portafilter that has had its bottom cut away to reveal the portafilter basket.   As a result, the espresso extraction is not routed through or concealed by a pour spout. Instead, the pour can be viewed in all its dynamics and richness, as it develops, presses through and pulls away from the basket’s micro-screen.Recently, Jason Prefontaine and myself have been brewing & watching shots using a naked portafilter we jerry-rigged from a standard issue piece.  I think Jason may have made ours using a hacksaw or other tool, although you can buy these pre-cut and nicely finished, at least for LM machines. Anyway, this rough little device is a total arbiter of truth. It reveals for example how evenly we have tamped. If the tamp is uneven, even fractionally, you can see it. The coffee pour will tend to start and concentrate on one side of the basket, before spreading out. Brewing with a naked portafilter also reveals other truths like how hard the tamp was, when the extraction is TRULY complete, and if you are over-extracting from any point inside the basket. (Read the rest of this post)

For the last 17 years we have been asking our customers questions like, “What is the single greatest challenge about running your coffee house”, and time and time again people say it is “STAFF”! They comment on how there is high turn over and then training their staff to be highly skilled at pulling shots and general coffee expertise is hard to keep up with. I know we offer our “Coffee Knowledge Seminars” and “Advanced Espresso” classes, but what if we did something like we saw when we went to Korea? Late one night we were taken to one of our customers, the “Coffee Acadamy” which exists simply to train professional barristas on espresso preparation! I was so impressed that they had this relatively large facility dedicated to educating professional barristas! Just today I was thinking of how we could serve customers here in town by organizing a ‘coffee university’ that churned-out hard-core coffee enthusiasts into our city so that our customers had a greater pool of trained barristas to draw on. It still bugs me how few good places there are to go for a good cappo in this city. But I certainly do understand the challange. Just a thought. What do you think? Just a thought. What do you think?Here is the “Coffee Acadamy” in Korea: (Read the rest of this post)

No Darrek - I am NOT talking about you.

This was a cool little coffee stand. Why don’t we have these in Calgaray