Something Hilarious

I found something hilarious while browsing my old blog posts from my New Zealand time. Posted quite exactly two years ago. It is in Finnish but I recon it is not a big problem because I suspect that all my readers are more or less Finnish-speaking...

"Mä sain tänään ehkä huonoimman kahvin ikinä, jos nyt ei lasketa jotain hirveetä suodatinlitkua, se oli siis jotain mitä oikeesti kutsuttiin kahviks. Arvatkaa missä?
No en nyt jostain kumman syystä tiedä mitä arvasitte, mut se oli, ah taas yks upea amerikan ketjuylpeys, Starbucks. Se oli jotain ihan hirveetä.

Nummer Einz : Cappuchinoa [Huomaa kirjoitustapa...] VAIN yhtä kokoa, ei tyyliin Small, Medium, Large, Xxxtra Large etc...

Zwei: Kahvin pitää maistua kahvilta, ei miltää teollisen makuselta maitokahviaromi-litkulta..

Drei: Cappuchinossa kuuluu olla maitovaahtoa, ei sellasta vaahto mitä löytyy köksänluokan tiskialtaasta, sama pätee siis myös makuun.

Vier: Kahvi tuodaa pöytään, tarjoilijan kuuluu hymyillä yms, ei niin että joku alipalkattu nuori aasialaisjamppa huutaa tiskin takaa että sun so-called kahvi olis nyt valmis. [Ei nyt välttämättä...]

Fünf: Cappuchino ja latte tarjoillaa erilaisista kupeista, ei typeristä, kuluneista ja naarmuisista valkosista rumista kupeista jotai tietenki koristaa kaikkia sama Starbucksin logo.

Sechs: Kahvilassa kuuluu olla oikeeta musiikkia, ei mitään helvetin jazz-pimputusta, tai ei siinäkään olis mitään vikaa, jos se olis oikeesti hyvää sellasta, mut kun ei niin ei.

Joku ehkä tässä vaiheessa ihmettelee kuin kauan mä jaksan kirjottaa näitä, voi kuulkaa, niin kauan että mä saan oikeeta kahvia... =b

Sieben: Kahvila on kahvin / pullan nauttimista varten, siellä ei kuulu myydä joulukalentereita (Tottakai niitänki koristaa logo...), lelu kahvikoneita tjsp., tai mitään muutakaan mitä nyt voi noista jo päätellä että siel voitaisiin myydä.

Acht: Ei, kukaan ei halua piparkakun murusilla koristeltua lattea... (Eihän?)




Tässä näette millainen kahvin kuuluisi olla..." [Ja kaksi vuotta sitten tämä oli mun mielestä oikea cappuCHINO. Dear oh dear. Onneksi mä olen jotain sentään oppinut.]

Nuori Yrittäjyys - "Young Enterpreneuer" -thing

I apologise for the break since last post. After this one you hopefully understand the reason for that gap.

We have this "Young Entreprise(in Finnish)" -course in school. The idea of the course is that we students establish our own, near-actual enterprise. The goal, as in business usual, is to make profit. We run our firm until the end of the school year, May that is.

So, guess what my business sells. Yep, that's right, we sell coffee, Kaffa's coffee. In a nutshell our plan is to go to a company and set up a "coffee-catering" -event so that they can realise how good our coffee actually is and then buy it as their "personnel coffee".

We don't have websites yet but they are under construction, but you can be sure that I'll post them here asap.

I'll write a longer post about the business-thing, but next I have in my mind a few posts including CoffeeRail part 3 and something about the coffee I've tasted.

Busy, busy, busy...

It's been soooo busy lately, I'm sorry I haven't had time to update. Tomorrow there will be coming a longer post.

Today I was at school (even though its Saturday we had school) and our business sold 48 bags Kaffa's coffee! I'll write you about that "business" tomorrow. Keep reading ;)

At the roastery, once again.

Yesterday, after school, we went to the (Kaffa) Roastery with Niki (my business partner/coffee companion etc, and he's a guy, by the way) to help Benjamin. He would have had to do all roasting alone (Hope your enjoying your sun, Svante...) and would have stayed there until 5 am.

Being at the roatery is just amazing thing. We went there at 13 o'clock and whoops, its 9.30 pm. The time just goes by. How's that? Well, it is just so interresting to see coffee being roasted, drink and experiment new coffees, talk about it with coffee-people... I glad to able to work there, even for free. I fantasized about being paid for working there when Benjamin snapped: "Yeah, it is great." Maybe in the future...

My history with Coffee

The beach next to our house. Not bad, eh?


Some of you may wonder how that 18-year-old "coffee-expert" thinks that he knows everything about coffee. Well, claim to be any kind of expert. I won't even say that I know lot about coffee. I am just an enthusiast and I wrote how the coffees tasted, that's all. I hope I could be called an expert one day, but that day is still far away.

Espresso at La Torre

My history, or "career", with coffee began about two years ago. We had decided with family to move to New Zealand for a year. There was no any real reason for that, we just wanted to do something else for a while. Anyway, the coffee culture in NZ was totally different compared to Finland's.

We lived in Auckland, the largest city of NZ. In Devonport, the suburb we lived in, there was at least 10 cafés and maybe 10 000 inhabitants. In Lauttasaari, Helsinki (that's where I live) there is maybe two cafes and over 20 000 inhabitans. And the best thing in Auckland's cafés was that they were all good or at least proper. Well, I had only started my coffee-thing, but anyway the level of coffee served was totally different.

Alone in Auckland there were at least 10 microroasteries. Every café used freshly roasted coffee. At that time I could not really taste the difference between old and fresh coffee, but it was good. The reason for this, what I have thought myself and talked with a few people, could be that NZ has jumped straight from having no coffee culture at all to have one of the best coffee scenes in the world. They have not had the "filtered coffee -phase" and the largest coffee-drinking segment of population, 15-65-year-olds (or whatsoever) may not have tasted filtered coffee ever. But that is only my guess, I'd love to hear someone else's opinion also. (I'll write another post about Auckland's cafés.)

We came back to Finland year ago in summer and I noticed that there's no coffee culture here. For six months I tried to find a proper café in Helsinki but failed. In this January I happened to get involved with Kaffecentralen and went to their barista training. That was a eye-opening experience for me. I had not realised before how difficult it actually is to make an espresso. Earlier I had thought that it totally depends in the machine. Now I was told that it is the person, the barista, who makes the coffee, not the machine.

After that one-day training I started going to Kaffecentralen, also called KC, pretty much every day. KC is not only a café but they also import coffee and machines and sell all kinds of coffee stuff. The great thing there is that they change the espresso many times a day. Because of that I was able to taste different, always correctly brewed, espressos and learn their characteristic tastes. I had a coffee-diary where I wrote down all my thoughts about the coffees, about 30 entries overall. Another reason why I went there was that Ulrika Hannula, one of the pioneers of the special coffee scene in Finland. She has worked with coffee something like 14 years now so she had a thing or two to teach me. Maybe the most important thing I learned from her was that one can not learn coffee completely, ever. You can also learn something new, you are never ready.

This summer I traveld around Europe (Check my travel posts: CoffeeRail) and learned a lot about espresso. More about it in CoffeeRail. After my trip I got involved with Kaffa Roastery and roasting coffee. I had had no idea that roasting coffee is such difficult and complicated thing. Almost art, one could say. Whenever possible I went to the roastery (I have even made a few agreements with teachers so that I could go there during school...) and tried to learn something new. It is just so fascinating to see the transformation from raw green beans to beatifully coloured, roasted coffee.

Always when I drink coffee I try to analyze it: is the temperature right, how balanced it is, what notes does my nose find, how is the texture, jsut to mention few. That is how I tasted the coffees for my article. I used World Barista Championship's rulesheet (PDF) as a guideline, but mostly I just wrote how I thought the coffee tasted. Was it good or bad, too hot or cold.

As I mentioned before, I don't claim to be an expert or anything, I just wanted to tell people how bad the coffee scene in Helsinki actually is. I hope my arctile would make the café-owners realise that it is important to hire someone who is even a bit interested in coffee. That's good for us and for them.

Article in Nyt-liite

I work at La Torre once in a while on Saturdays.

An article written by me will be published in Nyt-liite (weekly edition of Finland's largest newspaper Helsingin Sanomat) this Friday on 6th of November.The article is about the coffee scene in Helsinki. I reviewed overall 14 cafés for my article and tested their espresso and cappuccino.

The result was quite miserable. Out of 14, only five cafés served at least somehow proper espresso. Most espressos were something between watery, bitter filtered coffee and motor oil. If I weren't a review I would have returned most of them and asked for my money back.

The cappuccinos were not very good either. Most common problems were following: too hot milk, once-used milk, underextracted coffee, large bubbles etc. Only a couple served proper cappuccino.

If you order Hesari, please check the article in Nyt. You can find the full reviews of all cafés here: Omakaupunki.hs.fi/erikoiskahvit