I’m very behind on posting stuff but I hope to catch up soon! I had a trip to Sydney in September and collected pictures of coffee, and cafes in general. Trying to get even more photography in, so instead of my usual word-heavy blogs, this is going to be mostly pictures!
Edition Coffee Roasters
I have this thing where I never, ever manage to blog about Melbourne. I have no idea why, I think it’s because it usually marks the end of a long trip and then I don’t ever find the time to write about it. So my last ditch effort is to make this single post about the most amazing place for coffee – Aunty Peg’s. It’s Proud Mary’s cellar door, a black coffee haven, and I was lucky enough to go during their Gesha showcase with different varietals!
I could say all sorts of lovely things about their coffees, but pictures are worth a thousand words 🙂
With a few hours left of 2016, I figure I’d tidy this blog up a bit and squeeze a couple more posts in from my adventures earlier this year. One of my favourite new cafes (yes I’m heavily biased) is Neighbourhood by Sean McManus. He was absolutely awesome when I used to frequent Single O, and now he is even more awesome with his little hole in the wall!
Not only does he have his own oat milk, his espressos are quite different! I love them because I find they’re the perfect flavour – a filter profile with the punch of espresso. His hot chocolates look pretty awesome too!
So here’s a photo dump of coffees, a shiny machine, and a resident plant!
Bar 9 probably remains the most prominent specialty cafe in Adelaide, and what I love about this place is their “extracurricular” activities. They’ve hosted movie nights (Spirited Away and truffled popcorn), latte art competition (Jamdown ’14), and most recently, dessert nights!
Continue reading Bar9: Dessert Your Friends – 20 August 2015
Exchange Specialty Coffee is just over 2 years old, and like Single Origin Roasters, I’ve loved watching it grow. I was their “first” customer when they opened (technically their second), and in a non-creepy way, this has become my second home in Adelaide. While I admit to having a heavy bias towards and strong familiarity with this cafe, I still benchmark other cafes against the service I receive from here, because why not!
I have a preference for cafes with food (Artificer being the exception), and watching the food here evolve has been fantastic. The coffee is almost exclusively sourced from Market Lane now, compared to the early days when Tom wanted to cycle through coffees from Mecca and Reuben Hills. Like Single O, their food menu and presentation has always been great, but I feel that while Single O has shifted away from my presentation preferences, Exchange has shifted towards what I like to see (and take pictures of!).
Oh, Artificer! There are lots of places that I hype up for myself and set sky high expectations, that come crashing down as I realise they aren’t half as great as I was expecting. Then there’s this place. A place/two man crew that I’ve followed for a very long time now, ever since Shoji worked at Single Origin Roasters, before he was awarded SMH best barista 2012, and before I’d even heard of Dan until he popped up on my radar and then later, I learned that he’d won SMH best barista 2013. That’s a nigh unbeatable duo!
A great, hipsterish cafe that serves only coffee, I’ve always had a filter coffee that has blown me away here. I believe my first experience was a Burundi batch brew which was so sweet and fruity, it was amazing! For once I didn’t compare this to any previous Burundi experience I had, and I was very very happy with it. Though I’m not sure it was a Burundi, because all they really had was Bolivia? Either way, I found the two taste profiles to be similar as I came back to have all their other coffees – Bolivia Estanislao Pununi being another incredibly sweet coffee – some of the sweetest coffees I’ve had ever! I couldn’t believe how good the coffee tasted every time. And they serve piccolos in their espresso cups! It’s adorable!
The true test was when I had their Columbia El Triunfo, which I knew would taste very different from their Bolivian coffees. It was very nicely brewed, with a more acidic profile than the Bolivia, but also more tea like, again I was reminded of it being similar to a geisha. So, it was great, though I liked the Bolivian coffees better. I also managed to try their Brazil Santa Mariana as an espresso, and now that’s what I call a nutty coffee! Those hazelnut flavours came right out with a great finish! So basically, perfect coffee, all the time.
Continue reading Artificer – 2015
Very seldom do I get to see a cafe evolve through time in a way that makes me feel proud of them. There are currently two in my life: Single Origin Roasters and Exchange Specialty Coffee. The only reason Artificer isn’t here is because it’s too new. Plus being in another state makes it somewhat difficult to assess too.
A lot of new specialty coffee stores opened in the last year, so much so that I ended up making myself sick from a single coffee crawl because I hadn’t paced out my coffees and ended up dehydrating. Here are the cafes I visited in a two week run; two are specifically left out: Artificer Coffee and Single Origin Roasters because both these cafes have a special place in my caffeinated heart.
I was so excited about going to Japan, but a little apprehensive at the same time as it was the first time I’ve visited a country where I didn’t speak the language, and didn’t have anyone who could translate for me. However that little barrier became something that made me love the country so much more – I had so much more fun because of the fact that I couldn’t understand a thing!
Now I avidly follow some Japanese baristas, so I had a small list of places I could go to try out some coffee. Since my visit, there have been so many more places that have popped up so that a revisit is definitely required.
The barista-owner of the cafe I frequent was very excited for me when I mentioned I was going to London, as he used to live there and worked at Workshop Coffee, so he made a map for me of where I could go for coffee.
