Last night we set up a booth at WBUR's Cityspace. The format was interesting in that I got an hour to serve coffee while people arrived for the event. Honestly not knowing the scale of the event, I chose a brew method that wasn't built for speed or capacity, the Siphon.
It's a throw back for me because it was one of my favorite methods back in my early coffee days. We'd get together and brew on a hario TCA 2 cup and load it up with coffee to evaluate roast issues and character. So much stronger than a cupping that you could really see the issues in a coffee.
Back then we (barismo bloggers) had a reputation of being known for this method to the point that I got invited out to the west coast to present a bar doing just siphon. It was my first major event I traveled out of Boston for and would turn out to be a who's who of the next decade of specialty coffee. This being nearly 20 years ago now, it was back when the coffee community was just starting to do throw downs and barista jams.
So maybe it was a reach to be trying to set that up in a situation where I didn't have an idea of how many people would attend or be interested in tasting coffee at night but I gave it a shot on the idea of bringing it back to basics.
So siphon brew on one side and to give contrast, I put the same coffee (Colombia El Plan) as our cold brew on the other. So attendees went from the basic clean coldbrew to the heavy dosed siphon for contrast. The idea being the coldbrew we do is clean and more like regular coffee where the siphon will have all that structure and layers of flavor. It worked really well and we got a huge response from it. I haven't really ever gotten so many good high level coffee questions in an event that wasn't pro.
Afterwards, there was a panel and some seriously good conversations. I got to swing a mic around and answer some solid topics. It was great fun but my takeaway was that the coffee scene in Boston is in a position to get a bit of a revival.
