Way too much information and a smart guy saying dumb things. But hey! It’s an imporant purchase, isn’t it?! We do a deep dive into pressurized dual wall baskets and what they mean for your coffee, plus, what’s the upgrade path for the Breville Bambino Plus buyer? Espresso, Latte Art, and the Pressurized Portafilter… It’s all here in this video review.
They tell you that coffee is stale only 30 days after roasting. They also say that pre-ground coffee can’t retain flavor over time. Let’s find out if that’s true! Over a year ago, our friends at The Good Cup Coffee Company sent us a package that included a number of nitrogen flushed drip bags which had an expiry date on it with an unbelievable shelf life: one year. We took a drip bag and put it in the back of a cupboard with the simple agenda of brewing and tasting the coffee one month past the expiry date on the label. To do so, we’ll be making a few adjustments to brewing technique and recipe in order to give the coffee its best shot at succeeding.
WATCH THE VIDEO HERE:
Now, it’s hard to know what life will be like or where exactly you’ll be in 13 months (especially lately!) And so this pre-set date catches DailyDrinkMag.com EIC, Kayo Cosio while on the road in a provincial project. From his room in the B&B, Kayo brews the expired coffee and tastes it to see if it’s still any good.
There’s an underlying appreciation for the fine things here in the Alchemist cafe. It seems like there’s a concerted effort to have all the best stuff on deck. Fine Hasami porcelain Kalita Cups and the under-counter Modbar espresso machines provide hot water, steam, and pressure profiled espresso are two of the key indicators of this. The setup is completed by what can be described as “possibly too many Malkhonig EK-43s grinders,” two of which are upgraded with aftermarket volumetric bean slide dosers to support the needs of a fast moving bar.
[Read more…]They’re not the first ingredients that come to mind when you think about what you want to add into a latte. When was the last time you crossed black pepper onto a rosetta? Surprisingly, The Coffee Academics is able to connect the dots. Having a coffee that brings with it a transportive experience is somewhat appropriate. In a city that’s tight and fast paced, Academics has seen the need to provide that extra element of escape through its menu. This is one of 4 signature drinks that manage to convey a spirit of experimentation that’s similar to the fancy cocktail menus you get in HongKong’s legendary bars.
Flavor-wise, agave nectar is a relatively neutral flavor. It’s sweeter than honey and the latte definitely tastes sweetened as a result of its presence in the drink. The aroma of the pepper is distinct though, and the contrast between spice highlights the sweetness even more.
Cascara has been looking for a purpose for years. For the uninitiated, cascara is the husk of the coffee bean that is removed during the milling process after the coffees are dried. It’s essentially wood cellulose at this point, or you can think of them as tiny coconut husks. Sometimes, farmers use the husks as fertilizer, sometimes they’ve used them as extenders in livestock feeds. But the problem is that we just drink so much coffee and for every sack of coffee beans produced, you also create a sack’s worth of cascara at the same time. Over the last decade, we’ve seen an attempt to sell cascara as a tea. We’ve tasted these teas and they are indeed sweet and pleasant, but it’s been known to be unsafe to consume for extended periods of time.
HuskeeCup is a product that has managed to utilize the cascara in a unique way: by turning them into coffee cups. HuskeeCups integrates the coffee husks with a BPA-free polypropylene into what they’re calling an eco-composite polymer. Now while using what’s essentially a plastic to construct their product may seem counter intuitive, the product is supposed to be incredibly durable and usable both by consumers and by traffic-heavy cafes. In fact, the first times we used HuskeeCup was at Singapore’s No Sleep Club and at The Populous. Extending the lifespan of a product will keep it out of landfills and recycling centers.
They also claim that the kind of plastic they use in this biopolymer is easy to recycle, which is why the cups only come in 2 colors: an off-white and a charcoal grey that integrates natural charcoal to give it its color.
As a latte cup, it retains heat well, is easy to hold because of its ripped design, and seems to be good for latte art because of it’s egg-shaped inner molding.
Problems? Lipstick seems to adhere to the cups pretty aggressively and won’t come out in a regular dishwasher. Apparently this is due to the wax and oil properties of most lipsticks. You can probably remove such stains with a direct application of detergent and circular scrubbing techniques, but it’s something to consider if you intend to roll out Huskee cups in your cafe.
All things considered, we see HuskeeCup as a good step forward in sustainability and circular design for the coffee industry. Choose it for reasons of principle or aesthetic or function.
Or all of the above.
Think about what you want in a great neighborhod cafe. You want enough space and sunshine so that it feels like you’re out of the home, and you need enough communal space for meeting up with friends or even business contacts. Probably more important than anything else, you want it to strike a balance between great drinks and still being affordable enough to patronize regularly. And if you’re gonna be running a neighborhood cafe in Metro Manila, Quezon City is a really great place to start. There’s a pretty equitable balance of homes and businesses, as most people working there also do live within the same city. These are the elements that lead to a solid group of regulars — customers you can expect to see in the cafe two to three times a week.
Enter Prominent, a gas-station cafe on QC’s D. Tuazon street. On first glance, Prominent seems to check all the boxes. The ambiance is bright and clean. The location is accessible without being busy. And the drinks are affordable, offering up the expected choices (Espresso, lattes, cappucino) alongside more experimental drinks like their new Honeycomb Latte and ChocNut Latte.
On this visit, we decided to try the ChocNut Latte. For the unfamilliar, ChocNut is a local Filipino candy bar that combines pulverized peanuts with cocoa with coconut milk. ChocNut has a distinct flavor and is inexpensive, which has lead to it’s popularity over the decades. Every pinoy kid knows ChocNut. It has also more recently been front of mind culturally because of it’s appearance in the Netflix anime series, Trese. And to be honest, this is probably why we chose this drink over the rest of the menu.
The drink itself was quite sweet, but not more sweet than a ChocNut. It’s essentially a cafe mocha with the chocolate swapped out for the crumbly candy bar. The espresso is then pulled directly out of Prominent’s newly upgraded espresso setup, which features a Compak E10 conical burr grinder paired with a custom Synesso S200. The espresso is a blend from Mandaluyong-based Plain Sight Coffee Roasters, dropping down into the cup to melt and caramelize against the ChocNut. Steamed milk is poured into the cup to complete the drink.
Taste-wise, this ChocNut Latte is a home run. It combines the need for coffee with a nostalgic aroma and flavor. Pure comfort in a cup. You probably won’t want to order it every day, but it’s an awesome afternoon or late night latte that you can go to once a week. It’s a treat.
Rounding out Prominent’s neighborhood cafe experience is their retail rack. Pick up a Kalita or Origami pour over dripper, filters, or whole bean coffee. But on top of that, Prominent if featuring another product that’s unique in the market: their own house-made workwear fashion line. The first to launch are a set of heavy cotton t-shirts and linen trousers. Both pieces come in a number of colorways and are embroidered with Prominent’s coat-of-arms-style emblem. True to the rest of the Prominent experience, the designs are clean, for day to day use, and balance quality hand-made product with prices that are affordable.
Keong Saik Road and the surrounding area that has seen a boom in hip concepts over recent years, but perhaps the concept that has most excited us has been a split-deck cafe and bar that goes by the name of No Sleep Club. Taking the coffee and cocktails trend to a new level, both bars and their menus are open at all hours. That means that you can have excellent cocktails with breakfast or lunch, or a cappuccino in between negronis. It doesn’t really matter if it’s 10am or 10pm. And both are excellent.
It should probably be said that while the coffee menu is relatively standard as far as specialty coffee concepts go — their area in Singapore being incredibly competitive in this respect — No Sleep Club’s cocktail menu is where you see them pushing limits for experimentation. Expect to read ingredients such as “thai herb distillate” or “lacto-fermented plums” while ordering. Your interest will be piqued and eventually satisfied as things do ending up tasting just as good as they sound like they should.
Aside from their coffee and cocktail programs, No Sleep Club boasts a pretty solid kitchen very much capable of serving excellent plates that swim on the border of comfort and experimental. Onion gravy-covered bangers to linguine wrapped chilli crab to whole basque cheesecake. For us, we indulged in plate of fresh-glazed doughnuts with ice cream to match our after-dinner drinking mood.
But more than just the culinary experience, the energy of No Sleep Club is something special. Lighting is warm and cozy without being too dim, ambient music on rotation is a blend hip songs you’ve maybe not heard yet along the occasional one that you have. It makes you feel strangely like you’re on the edge of where cool is just about to go. Visual, auditory, olfatory, and taste are all wrapped up in a punk rock voice and design aesthetic. With their approach to ambiance and culture, we see No Sleep Club as a Singapore equivalent to Hong Kong’s Yardbird. Lord knows they’ve got the skills and the menu, the t-shits and the style to box in that weight class.
This month, our friends over at The Second Mile Coffee, Curve Coffee Collaborators, The Good Cup Coffee, and Ballentine’s sent us exciting packages to celebrate our love for drinks. We’re more than happy to share our haul with you.
To start, The Second Mile Coffee sent us two goodies: a Time More Electric Mini Kettle and a Time More Chestnut C2 Grinder. The kettle is new to the market. Right off the bat, we can see that it’s a standard gooseneck kettle, albeit smaller than the usual size. Its handle has a copper tip. The electric base is a 220-volt piece of tech that boasts a completely touch-based adjuster. Pretty cool.
Meanwhile, the Time More Chestnut C2 Grinder looks sleek with its gunmetal coloration. We’ll make reviews of these two products somewhere down the line, so stay tuned. In the meantime, you can get your own Time More Electric Mini Kettle through The Second Mile Coffee’s running promo: for Php 4850, you get the kettle AND three bags of coffee. If you ask us, that’s quite a steal.
Next, we have Curve Coffee Collaborators’ Lake Napalit kit, featuring a coffee varietal from the aforementioned place in Bukidnon. Inside the environmentally-friendly box are three different ways to enjoy the coffee: a bottle of cold brew concentrate, a bag of whole beans, and a box of drip bags. We are frankly impressed by this package and couldn’t wait to review the coffee as soon as possible.
On a similar note, The Good Cup Coffee sent us their own coffee as well. Unlike Curve’s three different ways to enjoy one varietal, The Good Cup sent us three varietals each to be brewed in one way. These are the El Paraiso Gesha, the Ethiopia Gesha Village in drip bags, and the Ethiopia Kilenso. We’ve already reviewed the surprisingly affordable gesha (Php 90 for a cup?!?) in a previous video, which you could check out on our YouTube channel.
Finally, Ballantine’s sent us a nifty tote bag that came with an eclectic set of goods: a grey hoodie, a blue tee, a pint glass, a can of Coke, and a single lime. Also, they came with two bottles of blended scotch whiskey (which are probably what we should’ve led with). We’re still thinking about what to make of this package. Is it a puzzle? Is it preparation for a big event? The truth is probably a lot simpler: maybe they want us to make whiskey soda with a splash of lime. We’ll see.
Which one of these babies are you excited to learn more about? Share it with us in the comments section of our video!
Kurasu is on a mission to spread the beauty of Japanese coffee culture around the world. Their bar inside The Company, a coworking space in Singapore located just a couple of minutes away from City Hall MRT station, is their first shop outside of Japan. It is a simple set up but conveniently accessible to those working inside the building and regularly walking in and out of the space.
[Read more…]Due to pandemic and government lockdowns, our F&B and hospitality industries have been some of the hardest hit by the quarantines. Bars have the extra impact of a curfew and liquor bans that have covered much of the city. Now, more than ever, supporting Philippine made goods and independent small enterprises like Run Rabbit Run (RRR) becomes incredibly important. So if you are going to enjoy a few drinks at home, it’s a good idea to support local businesses, especially when their products are — without a doubt — world class.
In this video, Editor in Chief Kayo Cosio unboxes the package and gets on the line with some of the people involved in bringing us this special box set. We Zoom video call with Aaron Goodall from Don Papa, Enzo, and Christina of RRR. They graciously took time to show us how each drink is made.
Available at https://www.runrabbit.run/cocktails-to-go, this package is called “A Rabbit in Sugarlandia” and costs Php1600. It serves about 6-8 drinks, which averages out to about Php200-Php260 per drink. That’s a pretty awesome deal if you are used to paying Php450 for beverages of this quality.
In detail, here’s more about the drinks from the Run Rabbit Run webpage:
1. MASKARRA OLD FASHIONED A take on a rum old fashioned that perfectly balances the locally spiced tasting profile of Don papa masskara with a touch of aromatic bitters (INGREDIENTS : Don Papa Maskarra, Simple syrup, Angosturra bitters)
2. BANANA RUM DAIQUIRI A classic cocktail that is Balanced with rum, sugar and lime with a touch of banana liqueur. (INGREDIENTS : Don Papa 7yo, Banana syrup, lemon)
3. DON CHOCORONI A kingston negroni with don papa rum- that is infused with cacao husk to give this special negroni a rich balance of vanilla, chocolate and tart. (INGREDIENTS : Don Papa 7yo, Chocolate Tea, Campari, Martini Rosso)
