Joe’s, located on Liffey Street, within Arnott’s, takes pride in the wide range of beans that it has available to coffee aficionados, with Workshop (from London), Kaffa (from Helsinki) and Drop Coffee from Sweden amongst the brands it has available in their shop. We chatted with Roark Cassidy from Joe’s about how contestants in the Home Barista Competition should go about selecting their beans with which they will compete.
What is the most important thing to have in mind when you’re choosing your coffee beans?
Certainly there are a number of things that are equally important but one thing that’s key is freshness. If it’s espresso, it can be too fresh, meaning that you need to let it “off-gas” for about five to seven days, because if it was roasted to a filter profile and you make it on the espresso machine it can cause problems because it’s still releasing gases from the beans and can destroy the milk. So you can have this beautiful latte art and then all of a sudden all these bubbles appear! It can generally just be a bit unpredictable so we find that if we let it rest for five to seven days then you get the sweet spot, you get the nectar. With filter it’s the exact opposite, you want to drink filter as freshly as possible.
Freshness is the baseline and some companies are fanatical about freshness. For example, a company in the States, Stumptown [from Portland, Oregon] wouldn’t supply to us, not because they didn’t feel we could supply their coffee well, but because they’re so fanatic about freshness. They wanted all their filter coffee drunk within two weeks, from the time it’s roasted to the time it’s drunk. However we’d lose about a week in transport so we’d only really have a week to sell all the coffee, and that just wasn’t viable.
What would be your advice regarding Single Origin vs. Blends?
Typically blends tend to be a cheaper route. People that focus on single origin are going for small harvests and just looking for the best from that particular area, that particular farmer. With the blend on the other hand, you’re trying to mimic the slightly nicer coffee by using characteristics of different types of coffee.
There are three tiers of coffee: commodity, commercial and speciality. Everything we do at Joe’s is speciality, using the highest grade coffee, and you taste it in the cup. At the moment our house espresso is a blend of Ethiopian and a really high quality Brazilian bean. We also have the Kenyan which we have for both filter and espresso, meaning they’ve used the same bean and roasted it slightly differently so that they get a different result which is more appropriate for espresso (roasted slightly darker and in a different way and you get a totally different result).
Does the actual source of the bean carry any weight in the competition?
Yes I think for the homebrewer, you should also look at the origin and the provenance. It’s only in the last 20 to 30 years that people have started realising the conditions that people are producing coffee in and they’re horrific. I could be paying €4 for a cup of filtered coffee at Joes and, yeah, it’s expensive but the person making the coffee has got a really fair deal. Often times that isn’t the case and people don’t want to know about the bad stuff but I think it’s definitely worth giving that extra little bit of time and thought. I would encourage people to know where your coffee coming from, it would definitely be nice to see the home baristas being aware of that.
What discrepancies are you most interested in seeing within the competition?
Having a good espresso machine at home is quite a rare thing, if you want one on which you can get good results they can be quite expensive. To think that someone’s got a €3,000 – €4000 machine at home is quite hard to believe, whilst you can actually produce the same coffee that we have here if you just have a decent grinder and filter, so it will be interesting to see how they handle that.