Source:http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/18/ristretto-a-new-twist-on-espresso/

By OLIVER STRAND

In Ristretto, Oliver Strand, the curator of the Times Topics coffee page, explores the world of coffee gadgets, coffee beans and why it’s never been easier to get a perfect shot of espresso.

The Twist from Mypressi doesn’t look anything like an espresso machine. In fact, it doesn’t look like a machine (there’s no cord, no ON button) so much as the newest massage gadget at Hammacher Schlemmer. And yet the Twist makes such impressive shots of espresso that it’s being taken seriously by some of the most esteemed — and geekiest — figures in coffee. Some have tested the little gadget, which sells for $160 at Intelligentsia Coffee and Tea, against La Marzocco’s GS/3, a $7,500 state-of-the-art home machine, or even La Marzocco’s FB/80, a professional machine with a base list price of $13,000.

Did the Twist outperform the big cats? No. But it held its own.

First, how the Twist works: You put coffee grounds into a filter basket and pour hot water into the small domed chamber on top. So far, so straightforward. Then you pull the trigger, forcing hot water through the coffee at nine bars of pressure. In about 30 seconds you have a lush shot of espresso. All the technology is hidden in the handle, where the pressure from an N2O cartridge is stepped down by a sophisticated mechanism that looks like it belongs in an Airbus A380. You get about eight shots out of one cartridge ($15.99 for 24), which are fully recyclable when spent.

I encountered the Twist last April, when I took a prototype for a test drive at Zibetto Espresso Bar with Stephen O’Brien, who started the company with his wife, Najma Khan. I walked in skeptical, then left so impressed that I blogged about it for the Diner’s Journal. The Twist went on the market in November 2009.

Recently, I was even more blown away when I pulled some shots on a production model with David Latourell at the New York City Lab of Intelligentsia Coffee and Tea. (Intelligentsia was one of the first companies to carry the Twist.) We were using Ecco Caffé beans to make espresso so plush and citrusy it was dumbfounding. And so it went, shot after shot. It was like a magic trick that didn’t get old.

To be sure, the Twist has limitations. The water temperature is up to you, which means preheating the chamber with near-boiling water. It doesn’t steam milk, so you’re out of luck if you want a macchiato. (You could always try a noisette.) And as with all coffee, you need a good burr grinder, which means spending a minimum of $100 — though most experts would point you to the $660 range — and finding an electric outlet.

In other words, this isn’t the answer to your espresso dreams when you go camping.

But it’s terrific in a home, at an office or maybe on a road trip. I spoke to Abe Carmeli, a judge for the United States Barista Championship and a moderator for Home-Barista.com (where he posted an exhaustive analysis of the Twist — there are videos, some in super-slo-mo). “What I love about this machine is that it takes the complexity and intimidation out of making real espresso,” he said. “It does it in a fun way. You’re holding it in your hand and pull a trigger and coffee comes out the other side. It’s like a game. One of the problems of prosumers [professional-grade machines for the home consumer] is that they take a lot of training: there’s descaling and cleaning, and it heats up the house. But this machine produces great espresso, it does it easily, and it does it with a very low learning curve.”
James Hoffmann James Hoffman

Recently I came across a posting on the Twist by James Hoffmann of Square Mile Coffee Roasters in London, in which he recounted how he went off-piste and put liquids other than water in the chamber: he made espresso out of milk, he made espresso out of whiskey, he made espresso out of espresso.

How did they taste? Terrible, it seems. But there’s some mad-scientist potential. We talked about it over the phone. (The conversation has been edited and condensed):
Q.

You tested the Twist against a professional machine. How did they match up?
A.

It’s difficult to reach for a Twist when you have it sitting next to a Synesso. If you want an espresso, you’re going to default to the serious piece of equipment. Put it side by side with a machine and you get better shots from [the Synesso], but it would be worrying if you didn’t. But the fun part is watching people’s reactions to it. It looks like a hand toy, but everybody is gobsmacked by how good the espresso is.

What do the pros think?

Those who have been most surprised by it are the ones who work with commercial equipment and understand how difficult espresso is. If you never got into brewing espresso, you might think, Oh, this is kind of fun — why do they need such big machines in cafes?

Could you see a professional-grade Twist with an industrial tank?

I once had a scuba tank hooked up to my espresso machine and a pressure profiler. It terrified me. A scuba tank holds 230 bars of pressure, which if it blew would kill me and everybody around me. It gives you a healthy respect for a scuba tank.

You’ll stick with your Italian espresso machines.

I buy American, actually. I set my expectations appropriately. I’m never going to open a cafe with 20 Mypressi twists. But I can’t help but to be impressed by something that small, that cheap, that makes coffee that good. Ultimately, the point of the machine is to translate the crop to cup. It doesn’t really matter if it’s a $20 French press or a $14,000 espresso machine.

So where does the Twist fit in?

As a piece of a travel kit, I can see the appeal. It’s quick, it’s easy, it’s clean. It’s ludicrously cheap, a terrific bang for the buck. Though it still requires a grinder. All espresso is grinder-dependent. If you don’t have the budget and space for a espresso machine, you still need the budget and space for a good grinder. And people who like espresso often like milk-based drinks, and the Twist won’t help with that. It’s still a gadget.

What about the gadget appeal? It seems coffee geeks pay close attention to how they interact with the gear, how it feels.

It looks from a distance a little cheaper than it feels. There’s something slightly obscene about its bulbousness. But it’s rather nicely made. When you have it in your hand, it feels like a well-thought-out piece of kit.

Beyond espresso made with milk or whiskey, what else could you do with the Twist?

When I picked up the Twist from the U.K. distributor, he said they wanted to give it to chefs because they think there’s potential there. It didn’t really sink in until I started playing with it. Until now you always had to use water as your base liquid. Now you don’t. You don’t even need to push it through coffee. You can push it through anything. To infuse and brew and percolate stuff is very exciting. I’m sure if you gave one to Wylie Dufresne for an hour you’d see some in interesting things coming out of the other side of it.

Source:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8522663.stm

Lavazza became a global brand under Emilio Lavazza’s leadership

Emilio Lavazza, the man who made his family name synonymous with coffee, has died at the age of 78.

Mr Lavazza presided over the international expansion at the Italian coffee giant, where he spent close to 40 years at the helm.

He also expanded the firm in coffee-obsessed Italy, where Lavazza now has almost half of the retail market.

Founded by Emilio Lavazza’a grandfather, it is also the world’s sixth biggest coffee roaster.

A private personality

“He had two sides. He was not a public person – [people from Turin] are quite private people. But it was Mr Emilio that took this company to international markets,” a Lavazza spokesperson told the BBC.

A very private man, Mr Lavazza gave only one interview during his time at the helm – to an Italian newspaper some 15 years ago – the spokesperson said.

Mr Lavazza’s grandfather Luigi founded the family business in 1895 and when his father Luigi died in 1971, Emilio was appointed chief executive. He then became president of the company in 1979 – a position he held until being made honorary president in 2008.

He was the main architect behind his company’s television-led marketing campaign, and expanded the Turin-based company’s operations into foreign markets.

The company became synonymous with the Italian espresso under Mr Lavazza.

He commenced the international expansion in earnest soon after becoming president, opening a French office in 1982.

Now Lavazza holds 48% of the Italian retail coffee market and has operations in countries as diverse as Brazil and India.

It has forecast sales of more than 1.1bn euros (£1bn) in 2009.

By Greg Beato Source:http://reason.com/archives/2010/02/09/starbucks-midlife-crisis

Last summer in Seattle, Starbucks opened 15th Avenue and Tea, an unbranded café featuring “small batch coffees sourced from individually owned farms” and a variety of fussy brewing methods designed to appeal to those connoisseurs who believe a cup of $4 coffee ought to be at least as complicated to make as a Big Mac. Live music is provided by a small-batch indie rock piano band sourced from a tiny town in Wisconsin. There’s an in-house “tea master,” and occasional outbreaks of poetry. Starbucks is 39 years old now, and like a lot of 39-year-olds, especially those who’ve experienced great success in their salad years but are beginning to wonder if they’ve lost their touch, it’s having a bit of an identity crisis.

In 2008, Starbucks closed 661 under-performing locations. In 2009 it shuttered an additional 300 stores and laid off 6,700 employees. In an attempt to position itself against newer, hipper rivals, the company started talking up its “heritage.” It resurrected a less polished version of its logo for use in certain branding situations. Presumably, its coffee is still brewed from coffee beans, but everything else in its new stores seems to have made a radical career switch. The bar at a London Starbucks is upholstered with scraps from an Italian shoe factory. The countertop at the Paris Starbucks is made out of recycled cell phones.

For all their ostensible authenticity, such adventures in interior design cannot match the truly radical act of installing espresso machines in bank lobbies. Like Seattle’s other great cultural export from the early 1990s, Nirvana, Starbucks has always been most vital, most interesting, most revolutionary when at its most commercial.

Granted, not everyone thinks of the chain as radical. Take Bryant Simon, a historian at Temple University. In his 2009 meditation on Starbucks, Everything But the Coffee, he offers the usual critiques of the company. It says it sells coffee, but it doesn’t. It says it’s a venue for conversation and civic discourse, but it isn’t. It sells overpriced coffee-like beverages and a safe, predictable, environment. It preys on needy, status-seeking consumers by offering them clean bathrooms, innovative products, and a soothing ambiance in myriad convenient locations. For Simon, Starbucks was designed to be an exclusive, elitist institution: When CEO Howard Schultz began adding locations in the late 1980s, he “made sure to put his stores in the direct path of lawyers and doctors, artists on trust funds and writers with day jobs as junk bond traders.”

If you’re thinking to yourself, damn, that’s totally unfair to writers with day jobs as unemployed writers, well, yes, that was Schultz’s evil scheme! He wanted to introduce fancy coffee to people who weren’t already drinking fancy coffee. So, Simon reports, “unlike an owner of one of the beat coffee shops in the 1950s, he didn’t set up in transitional neighborhoods or fringe places like, for instance, Chicago’s neobohemian Wicker Park.”

In the late 1980s, of course, there weren’t many cafés serving high-quality coffee anywhere. Coffee consumption per capita was at its lowest point since 1962, soft drinks had recently surpassed hot caffeine as the nation’s favorite beverage, and Coke was in the midst of a campaign advertising its utility as a breakfast drink. The few cafés that were selling espressos and capuccinos, however, were located precisely in places like Wicker Park.

In choosing to locate his outlets in busy downtown locations, Schultz was expanding the world of high-end coffee—diversifying it, in fact, by taking it beyond its insular, self-conscious subculture. The décor of his stores amplified this process. They had the clean and slick streamlining of a fast food restaurant but were more comfortably appointed. Instead of walls lined with old books, there were gleaming espresso machines for sale, packages of whole beans, ceramic cups. They felt a little like a Williams-Sonoma store crossed with an unusually tasteful airport lounge. They were cafés for people who would never set foot in a bohemian coffeehouse, people traditional coffeehouse entrepreneurs had completely ignored.

For less than the price of a Whopper, you could hang out in a sophisticated middlebrow lounge/office for hours on end. And they were popping up everywhere. Exclusive, elitist? Starbucks was exactly the opposite, introducing millions of people who didn’t know their arabica from their robusto to the pleasures of double espressos. Finally, good coffee had been liberated from the proprietary clutches of hipsters, campus intellectuals, and proto-foodies and shared with bank managers and real estate agents. In offices across America, it suddenly smelled like ’ffeine spirit.

For Schultz, this mainstream customer base was both a boon and a curse. In Pour Your Heart Into It, his 1997 account of Starbucks’ rise to global behemoth, he reveals a preoccupation with authenticity that echoed Kurt Cobain’s. In 1989, he initially balked at providing non-fat milk for customers—it wasn’t how the Italians did it. When word trickled up to him that rival stores in Santa Monica were doing big business in the summer months selling blended iced coffee drinks, he initially dismissed the idea as something that “sounded more like a fast-food shake than something a true coffee lover would enjoy.”

Eventually, Schultz relented. And really, what greater punk-rock middle finger is there to purist prescriptions about what constitutes a true coffee drink than a blended ice beverage flavored with Pumpkin Spice powder?

Simon recounts the birth of the Frappuccino in Everything But the Coffee too, but while he acknowledges the grassroots origins, he quickly positions it as an item the chain is “pushing” on “caffeine-dependent women and men.” In his estimation, the company’s “consumer persuaders” and “mythmakers” are the ones with real power. They’re constantly selling false promises, implanting “subliminal messages” in store décor, and otherwise manipulating hapless consumers.

In reality, the chain’s customers have played a substantial role in determining the Starbucks experience. They asked for non-fat milk, and they got it. They asked for Frappuccino, and they got it. What they haven’t been so interested in is Starbucks’ efforts to carry on the European coffeehouse tradition of creative interaction and spirited public discourse.

Over the years, Starbucks has tried various ways to foster an intellectual environment. In 1996 it tried selling a paper version of Slate and failed. In 1999 it introduced its own magazine, Joe. “Life is interesting. Discuss,” its tagline encouraged, but whatever discussions Joe prompted could sustain only three issues. In 2000 Starbucks opened Circadia, an upscale venue in San Francisco that Fortune described as an attempt to “resurrect the feel of the 1960s coffee shops of Greenwich Village.” The poetry readings didn’t work because customers weren’t sure if they were allowed to chat during the proceedings. The majority of Starbucks patrons, it seems, are happy to leave the European coffeehouse tradition to other retailers.

At 15th Avenue and Tea, the quest to cultivate highbrow customers continues. There’s a wall covered with excerpts from Plato’s dialogues. Blended drinks are banned from the premises, and you can safely assume that Bearista Bears, the highly sought-after plush toys that Starbucks has been selling since 1997, won’t ever appear here either.

But if Starbucks really hopes to re-establish its authority as an innovative, forward-thinking trailblazer, it should perhaps use its next experimental venue to honor its heritage as the first chain to take gourmet coffee culture beyond the narrow boundaries of traditional coffeehouse values and aesthetics. Imagine a place with matching chairs, clean tables, beverages that look like ice cream sundaes, Norah Jones on the sound system, and absolutely no horrid paintings from local artists decorating the walls. A place, that is, exactly like Starbucks!

Because despite its ubiquity, despite its advancing years, Starbucks is still the most radical thing to hit the coffeehouse universe in the last 50 years.

Source:http://www.travpresso.com/626/the-history-of-espresso.html

If you are an avid coffee drinker then chances are that you probably know all about the varieties, types, flavors, and prices of various coffees that you drink on a regular basis. However, if you’re not that familiar with espresso then you may be in for a surprise. Espresso is quite different from coffee products because there is a very different method of making the liquid. Here are some interesting facts about the history of espresso, though, that you may not have known previously.

Developed in Italy

Did you know that espresso was actually developed more than ten centuries after the coffee beverage became popular? In fact, regular coffee and coffee beans weren’t found until about the 9th Century. On the flip side, espresso was actually developed from the beginnings of coffee, but it wasn’t until the early 20th century that people began producing a beverage that is known today as espresso! Indeed, espresso was developed in Milan, Italy around the early 20th Century and the drink was actually made by hand even though it was very time consuming to do so. This resulted in a machine being made specifically for the creation of espresso beverages. In fact, workers in cafes and coffee shops throughout Italy who dealt with using espresso machines to make espresso were regularly known as “baristas,” and becoming a barista was actually a job often given to young people, just as a job at McDonald’s or another fast food restaurant might be considered a starting point for young people in America to work.

The Switch to Machines

As mentioned, espresso was originally made by hand. However, there are a couple things that lead up to the beverage being made in a machine. First, the spring piston lever was designed to emit pressure on a certain something, and this machine was used to make espresso since espresso was made through the use of pressure and hot water. Although before the machines typically made espressos beginning in the 1940s, steam pressure was mainly the culprit and the method that people in Italy used to make espresso by hand!

Needless to say, however, coffee beverages that didn’t include espresso were popular long before espresso was being made. Just as there are all sorts of different flavors that coffee can be made with, though, there are also many different flavors that can be added to the espresso beverage. For example, some cultures usually add a bit of cinnamon to the espresso mixture and cinnamon is actually the most widely used spice for espresso as a whole. On the other hand, some of the other spices and herbs that are used with espresso include peppermint, mint extract, vanilla, and a brown sugar mixture just to name a few.

It’s indisputable, though, that the finding of espresso totally transformed the popularity and consumption of coffee beverages worldwide! Granted, many people are thankful for this change, but the fact of the matter is that espresso and coffee are considered two different drinks altogether although one was derived from the other!

By Jennifer Warner
WebMD Health News
Reviewed By Louise Chang, MD

http://www.medicinenet.com

Taking a Break to Relax Helps Your Brain Absorb Information

Jan. 27, 2010 — A coffee break after an important meeting or class may be just the thing your brain needs to digest new information and improve memory.

A new study suggests that resting while awake aids in memory consolidation and improves memory recall, much like getting a good night’s sleep has been shown to do.

“Taking a coffee break after class can actually help you retain that information you just learned,” researcher Lila Davachi, PhD, assistant professor of psychology at the Center for Neural Science at New York University, says in a news release. “Your brain wants you to tune out other tasks so you can tune in to what you just learned.”

Researchers found that activity between the hippocampus and neocortex, two key brain areas involved in memory and processing, increased during periods of wakeful rest after a learning task. This increase in activity was also associated with improved memory.

“Your brain is working for you when you’re resting, so rest is important for memory and cognitive function,” Davachi says. “This is something we don’t appreciate much, especially when today’s information technologies keep us working around the clock.”

Resting Revs Up Memory
In the study, published in Neuron, 16 adults were shown pairs of images followed by periods of wakeful rest. The participants were not told that their memory of these images would be tested later, but they were told to relax and think about whatever they wanted during the rest period.

Meanwhile, researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain activity before, during, and after the tests.

The results showed that there was an increase in brain activity between the hippocampus and neocortex while the participants were shown the images and during the rest period.

In addition, those participants who had greater increases in activity between these two areas while resting and seeing the images performed better on associative memory tests than those who had weaker responses.

Researchers say many studies in humans as well as rodents have demonstrated that sleep performs an important role in memory consolidation. But these results suggest that sleep may not be the only time the day’s experiences are strengthened in memory. Wakeful rest periods, such as coffee breaks or meditation, may also help improve memory.

SOURCES: Tambini, A. Neuron, Jan. 28, 2010; vol 5: pp 1-11.