The Seventh Nordic Barista Cup is happening this weekend! Sprudge.com has been volunteering on location in Oslo. Between lectures we’ll keep you updated with TITULATING EXCLUSIVES and FROTHY GOSSIP while simultaneously keeping the NBC’s official web site updated with Sarah Allen.
The lights went dark as George Howell, during his fantastic and riveting lecture on specialty coffee, let the audience know how he really feels:
“In the United States we see this massive fad for cold water brewing for iced coffee. I can’t imagine anything worse for terroir. Cold water does not produce acids, many of the aromatics are not produced with cold water. The first principle of creating The Golden Cup is to have hot water at 195-205 degrees Fahrenheit, near boiling essentially, in order to extract the things you have paid money for to exhibit and to appreciate. And yet, here we have specialty people at the top end selling iced coffee that tastes completely generic. The word is often described as bourbon, a drink similar to whiskey, if you will. The woody notes precisely, the caramel, the flavors of roasting, but not the flavors of terroir. And yet this fascination is, to me, a detour to where we should be going. We need to deliver, as precisely as possible, the sweetness and aromatic profiles of high quality coffee.”
Download an audio version of George Howell’s entire lecture here.
Video of lectures will be online at the NBC website this weekend.
