Coffee pot nepal

In order to help people find a way to prepare of the abundant and tasty local coffee and despite the loadshedding situation, Jimmy Carson, currently working in the Arniko store designed a pretty cool flyer. Its long overdue! Currently the pots are only on sale in certain Cafés and speciality coffee places with a limited clientel. This flyer should help to alert more people to what they are missing.

Look out for it around town.

ps. Jimmy is a talented artists and graphics guy and is availble for projects in Kathmandu. Contact him via the email address on the where to buy page.

Beans coffee is now also stocking espresso pots

Beans Cafe lies at Kupondol, from way inside kan deuta and in front of Nepal Rastra Bank. Well place is quite simple and cozy. You can get Varites of coffee there. Also some bakery items and sandwich. My Favorite is cheese cake. Price is also very much reasonable there. Plus people are also very nice and warm.

http://www.lukeko.com/648/beans-cafe

Nepal needs help marketing coffee internationally. INGOs to the rescue!

Helvetas are advertising a job for a SENIOR PROGRAMME OFFICER (BUSINESS & MARKETING)

Perhaps it would be better if they hired a quality officer, perhaps an Ecuadorian or Colombian or Kenyan expert who knows the secrets of making good beans. And most of the secrets are not secrets. There are many steps in coffee processing and many steps for the quality to be degraded.

Coffee is something that goes in people’s cake-holes and that means quality is everything. From looking at many of the products created in fair trade, pro-poor, community-based projects, the quality often leaves much to be desired: wonky candles, honey with ants in, good doses of mould in the dried ginger, caustic soap and so on. And with coffee too: picked to early, mishandled, over roasted – all opportunity lost. I hope the new Senior programme officer is rabidly quality focused.

And what about the home market? Why can’t someone spend a week training the various shabby baristas around Kathmandu to make the stuff properly and consistently properly. Have any of these guys ever event drunk a really good coffee I wonder.

What about a coffee festival with some freshly roasted beans from all over the world. Get baristas cupping or at least drinking the results of coffee prepared properly. Get the different brands of coffee produced here tested in a public forum. This has not yet happened here before. And why not do the same for the coffee drinking public – brew up some good coffee and educate them before they go down the Starbucks route of accepting any bucket of sugary-milk. How about inviting a coffee connoisseur here to go around the cafés and see who is making good coffee and who is making awful coffee, and them publish the results widely.

I remember the best coffee I ever had, siting on a small terrace in Paris on a Monday morning. No actually it was in Holland, with the guy who had the portable hand press, I forgot his name, but I remember he was stationed in a car park as his little trolley was too wide to get through the door of the building he should have been in. Or was it that café in Switzerland…

Everyone should have their own ‘perfect cup’ moment. In raising the level of expectation of people here, perhaps there will be some immediate feedback to producers regarding what is good and what is not. Why should all the good coffee go abroad if a market can be created here? In creating a buzz about Nepali coffee in Kathmandu, perhaps the world will begin to pay a little more attention to Nepal.

Oh, Helvetas, http://www.teacoffee.gov.np/‘s website is down for days now. Why can’t someone create a website which is just about Nepali coffee which is buyer / trader / drinker focused, which provides all the information they could want about coffee in Nepal?

Is this view ill-informed? I welcome your opinion below.

Espresso is short and strong. If you are new to it, it may not be, er, your cup of tea. But espresso coffee is the base for making other drinks like Americano, Macchiato, Capuccino and Latte.

Americano

Most simple is turning a strong, short coffee into a weaker, taller cup by just adding boiling water.

http://www.ehow.com/how_962_make-caffe-americano.html

Macchiato

The name Macchiato refers to coffee being ‘marked’ by a little milk. So still strong and short but a little bit softer due to the addition of hot milk. Find instructions on how to make a macchiato here.

For cappuccion and latte you need to froth milk. Normally this is done by passing steam through cold milk creating millions of tiny bubbles in the milk giving it a velvety texture. Without a good espresso machine, this is hard to do. However, it is not impossible.

Cappuccino and latte

Frothing milk: Jar and shake

One first way is to introduce air bubbles into the milk by shaking it damn hard! Try it yourself. Here are some instructions: http://www.ehow.com/how_4750814_steam-milk-espresso-machine.html

Frothing milk: use a french press

Maybe you have a french press at home. This also lends itself well to making frothy milk. More instructions here: http://www.ehow.com/how_2149949_froth-french-press.html

Making cappuccino and latte

There is a line between latte and cappucino. I have heard people in cafés here describe a real cappuccino as a ‘dry’ cappucino, which I guess just means a latte. Simply put – espresso with added warmed milk is a latte, and with added foamed milk is a cappucino. Feel free to argue about this below in the comments section!

Dale at Top of the World Coffee is now stocking a coffee pots. He is pretty special in Kathmandu as he roasts and grinds all of his coffee to order. He is perhaps the most experienced coffee taster in Kathmandu. Perhaps only Mr Gagan at Himalayan Java is trained in coffee tasting.

Anyway, you can order your coffee online and they will deliver to your door free, within the ringroad.

I discovered also that Dale is behind the excellent “Mountain Man Trekkers Fuel” among other things. See all the coffee and other products here:

http://www.topoftheworldcoffee.com/order/

Now handily available in Sagarmatha Bazaar in Thamel in the Arniko flagship store. Don’t know where that is, check this map to help you.

This comes highly recommened. I don’t have the technical words to describe its flavour etc. But it is rounded, not bitter and perfect for making in a coffee pot. Go buy some!

Somebody once told me about the 5Ms of coffee preparation. I could never remember what they were exactly as each and every M was an Italian one. So today I looked it up and I will tattoo it on to my forearm lest I ever forget.

1. LA MISCELA – The blend

This is a little bit obvious. If the coffee you have is not good, there is no way you’ll get a nice cup of coffee out of it. So get some advice from somebody who knows about coffee, or at least buy a reputable brand. As a maker of coffee at home,  make sure the coffee you use is fresh and tightly close the packet after use and put it in the fridge or freezer if you have. use it within a couple of weeks. Best to buy fresh from ground beans in small quantities and use within a week or two.

If you are in a café, check they are grinding the beans freshly for you. Somewhere near Thapathali there is a young guy an a coffee shop grinding beans to put in a plastic box to be stored on a sunny windowsill. You can always ask them where they get their coffee from and how fresh it is.

2. IL MACINADOSATORE – Grinding

Not much you can do about this without equipment. However, espresso grind and filter grind are not the same. Try to get the right one for your needs.

3. LA MACHINA – The machine

Given a good blend, ground properly to the right fineness, the machine is the next factor. The temperature and pressure of the water passing through the coffee directly affect the flavour. With your espresso pot, just try to put hot water on the bottom chamber to shorten the heating time and take off of the gas when the bubbling noise has started.

4. LA MANO DELL’OPERATORE – The human touch (of the operator)

If you are in a café, it never harms to ask the person making your drink which their favorite cup of coffee is. “No sir/ma’am, I don’t like coffee!” This is not a good sign. Leave.

You may also want to take ‘La Mano dell’operatore’ (the hand of the operator) literally for a minute and and read this. Worth thinking about.

Anyway, much of the flavour of your drink is in the hands of the operator. Let’s hope they know what they are doing.

5. MANUTENZIONE (maintenance)

If the coffee machine is not maintained properly its performance is going to decrease. That’s life. While you can’t jump over the counter and check out the big espresso machine, you can check the toilets, the cloth used to clean the tables or the size of the dirty-finger ring around the light switches and deduce how well maintained the machine is.

With your own coffee pot, rinse with water after every use and use your fingers only to remove old coffee and excess oils. Dry with a soft cloth and store in separate pieces.

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So if your coffee tastes no good, it’s going to be down to one of the reasons above. Have a go at working it out!

If you find the coffee is not brewing correctly, check first to see if steam is escaping from the area where the top and bottom are screwed together. Sometimes you’ll a little water bubbling out of here. If the connection here is not tight – if steam can escape out the side – the pot will not work. Try to screw the parts together more tightly next time. Hug the pot close to your chest and twist the top and bottom together as tightly as you can.

We had a similar problem with our old Bialetti machine bought in Italy. Turns out I’d been banging the coffee basket out of shape every time I threw the old, used coffee grounds in the compost bin.

The wonkiness meant that the steam generated could escape up past the coffee, so no pressure builds up and no water gets pushed up throught the coffee. Our solution was to put a rubber band around the coffee basket and that worked nicely.

You might also check that the filter-screen is clean – if this is clogged with coffee grounds or oils – it could prevent the steam/coffee from rising to the upper chamber.

I just got this interesting bit of trivia from a guy called Alex Sysoef who runs http://www.organiccoffeedeals.com/ where you can get a free eBook of coffee recipes:

Now, when your feet first touch the floor in the morning and you are groggily making your way to the coffee pot, you probably aren’t thinking about where coffee came from or who discovered the magic stuff. But the origins of coffee are really rather interesting, and after you have finished that first cup, you might like to know how it happened that you have a cup of coffee to get your day started off right. There are several versions of how coffee was discovered.

One story is that a sheep herder from Caffa Ethopia named Kaldi noticed that when his sheep ate red “cherries” from a certain plant, they became very active. The sheep would have been bouncing off the walls, had there been walls. The sheep herder decided to try the “cherries” himself and soon he was as hyper as his herd of sheep. A monk came along and scolded Kaldi for “partaking of the devil’s fruit,” but then the monks discovered that the red “cherries” helped them to stay awake while they were saying prayers.

This isn’t the only story about the origin of coffee, though. There is another story about an Arabian, Omar, who was banished to the desert along with his followers to “die from starvation.” There was nothing to eat in the desert, and Omar and his followers were sure to die. Then, in an act of desperation, Omar ordered his followers to boil the fruit from an unknown plant and eat it. The fruit and the broth saved their lives and it was considered a miracle from God. The residents of the nearest town, Mocha, were awed by the miracle, and the plant and the beverage were named Mocha to honor
the event.

Take you pick…both stories are great. Originally the coffee plant grew in Ethiopia (Ethopia), but once it was transplanted to Arabia, it was claimed by them.

But how did it get to Nepal? Anybody know?