The team behind KeepCup, the environmentally friendly and reusable take-away cup, are offering two talented Instagrammers a chance to win a more environmentally friendly way to get to their favorite café.
To enter, just share your best photos of you and your favorite KeepCup on Instagram and tag with #keepcupstyle before November 30th. A panel of judges will select two of the best photos, whose lucky photographers will win a customized ride from Mojo Bikes.
Don’t have a KeepCup (read my thoughts on them here)? Lucky for you the latest shipment of DCILY KeepCups have just arrived in 8oz & 12oz sizes. So get yourself a KeepCup, fill it with your favorite coffee and start snapping photos of it around town. Next time you’re out and about, it could be on a fancy new set of wheels.
Visit KeepCup Style for more details and to browse your competition.
What do transexuals, exotic bird lovers, lake monster hunters, historic reenactors and a railway brass band have in common? They get lonely—and in this case they’re Swedish.
Löfbergs, following a recent rebrand, have launched a new ad campaign to celebrate the numerous and unique associations in Sweden that bring people together—and as a result drink a lot of coffee. The campaign features: The Association for Transsexuals (Free Personality Expression) in Malmö, The Great Lake Monster Association in Östersund, The Gothenburg Tropical Bird Association, The Swedish Railways Band Association and the Historical Society of King Gustaf’s Toast.
Along with video and print advertisements, Löfbergs launched a National Register of Associations where you can find other like-minded enthusiasts or create your own organization and fight loneliness in the company of others—over coffee. Memberships in associations have been declining in recent years and Löfbergs would like to reverse that, because associations contribute to less loneliness.
The new ads were created by, Volontaire, the same firm who developed the brilliant idea for @Sweden, the world’s first democratized national voice on Twitter—sparking the worldwide phenomenon of rotation curation.
Löfbergs, formerly known as Löfbergs Lila, is the largest family-owned coffee roaster in Sweden and are well-known throughout the country by their trademarked purple color (lila). Founded in 1906, it’s the coffee of choice at the Swedish Royal families gatherings and they’re also one of the world’s largest buyers of ecological and Fair Trade coffee.
I know Löfbergs as the purple bags in the grocery store filled with dark-roasted coffee. But they would like you to think less about their coffee and more about why we drink it—to be with others. No matter what’s in your cup, that’s a great gesture of humanity.
Taking their love for cycling, sustainability and espresso to a new level, Amos Reid and Lasse Oiva, two product design students from the Royal College of Art in London have built a belt driven, mobile espresso bar dubbed “Velopresso.”
The three wheeled bike uses a carbon belt drive system (grease free) to not only power the bike, but also a custom made grinder that shares a slight resemblance to the HG-1 hand grinder. With the change of a gear, five seconds of pedaling will grind enough coffee for a double shot—three if you’re doping.
Currently the Velopresso uses a camp stove to heat water and steam to power its leva espresso machine, but the designers have been experimenting with various ways of creating their own fuel from spent coffee grounds. The goal of making it even less dependent on carbon fuels—aside from the belts used everywhere else—would add to its sustainable caché. The project was recently bestowed the 2012 Deutsche Bank Award in Design and the creators are currently looking for ways to produce them commercially.
“Velopresso was conceived against the backdrop of a global renaissance in cycling culture that is being driven by the desire for more sustainable cities and lifestyles,” says co-creator Amos Field Reid, pictured below kneeling behind the machine. “The urban coffee scene is also expanding and diversifying, including a convergence with cycling culture. Velopresso engages directly with these cutting-edge urban cultures.” -Carbon Drive
Velopresso isn’t the first coffee bike that’s been featured on DCILY (Trailhead, Kickstand Coffee), but this is the first that takes advantage of the bicycles efficiency for powering heavy-duty equipment. This would be an appreciated addition to bike paths everywhere.
Last weekend I had the pleasure of joining Food Studio for their latest happening in Oslo—the field dinner. I was invited to help brew coffee for dinner guests one evening and be a guest myself the following night. Although coffee is what brought me to the table, it was served as part of a larger dining experience that the coffee industry strives to be a part of as often as possible—treated with the respect of fine wines and served following artful plates of King’s goose, pumpkin gnocchi and hyper local produce.
Food Studio organizes events that share the story of good, honest food and the people who believe in it. Meals are developed and prepared by well known chefs, or passionate individuals you’ve yet to hear about, using ingredients as fresh, wholesome and responsible as possible—sourced from the field we ate in and a few kilometers beyond.
Dinner was prepared all three nights by Magne Ilsaas, a graphic designer by day who spent three months at culinary school in Paris. The entire meal was cooked in the field just steps away and all five courses were paired with a delightful selection of organic or biodynamic wines by a sommelier from Moestue.
After desert, a coffee from Michiti in West Ethiopia (provided by Tim Wendelboe) was prepared using a traditional Nordic method of brewing called kokekaffe. The process is simple and works great for unique and enjoyable coffee outdoors.
We used a ratio of 65 grams of coffee to 1000g of water, ground fairly coarse. After taking the water off boil, the coffee was poured into the kettle and lightly stirred to fully saturate all of the grounds. After letting steep for 5 minutes, the coffee is ready to serve. Finally, the coffee can be poured carefully from the kettle into cups, but to add a bit of clarity, we filtered the brew through a fine metal strainer and served from a Chemex.
As each course was served throughout the night, a story about the food was shared with the table and the coffee was no exception. It was a pleasure to serve and an equally enjoyable experience to dine alongside new friends and experience real food prepared exceptionally well. Most of all, it was an honor to end the meal with an example of just how spectacular coffee can be, when it’s appreciated as it should be.
What began as a project to collaborate with great roasters and baristas to share delicious coffee at TED, unexpectedly transformed into a message and energy that transcended its initial purpose—it was a reaction to confusion. In the year and a half spent developing, organizing and running Coffee Common events in LA, NYC, Edinburgh and London—I learned an incredible amount. But most important were the people involved in making the experiences so fantastic and the knowledge they all shared so generously.
Working with Brent, Kyle, Peter, Sean, Stephen and Tim, meant being surrounded by an unmatched passion for coffee and their desire to share it with people. That energy is what drove our events forward and its what makes it so hard to see it come to an end. Coffee will continue to be at the heart of our work and our hearts will remain dedicated to sharing exceptional coffee. There will no doubt be other great things in the future and I look forward to sharing them with you when that time comes.
Thank you to everyone involved for making it what it was.
Since the early days of brew method videos, there’s been an impressive evolution in the quality of the videos being produced. From the academic, to the clever to the action packed—tutorial videos have become a way for coffee companies to educate consumers, market themselves and have a bit of fun in the process.
The latest addition to the brewtorial archive comes from Cartel Coffee Lab in Arizona. Using the same “Stranger Than Fiction” notations as their earlier video, their latest—also produced by Ah Dios—gives the mid-century modern Chemex a southwestern flair.
NPR ran a nice piece yesterday featuring Peter Giuliano (who recently departed from Counter Culture) and Allie Caran, who opened Artifact Coffee in Baltimore this summer, that highlights specialty coffee’s focus on coffee quality and its diverse flavors.
Increasingly, specialty roasters are working directly with coffee growers around the world to produce coffees as varied in taste as wines. And how are roasters teaching their clientele to appreciate the subtle characteristics of brews? By bringing an age-old tasting ritual once limited to coffee insiders to the coffee-sipping masses.
The writer, Allison Aubrey, visited a cupping at Artifact to learn about tasting the flavor nuances in coffee and some of the characteristics that help them develop.
Last night, 200 of the coffee industries finest gathered together in Copenhagen, Denmark to welcome the next 3 days of inspiring speakers, cuppings, Nordic barista team competitions and enough delicious coffee to satisfy all our discerning palates.
I am on-site with my colleague Tim Styles from Workshop Coffee to capture all the action. We will be uploading videos of the speakers at the end of each day, blogging and tweeting the highlights on behalf of the Nordic Barista Cup for those who can’t be here.
I’m a fervent believer that Seinfeld is and will be the greatest television show of all time. Every situation in life relates back to one of the 180 magnificent episodes—even if most could now be prevented with a simple text message. There is something so realistic, yet hilarious about those conversations about nothing that took place over a cup of coffee.
On July 19th, Seinfeld will be back on screen having coffee with his comedian friends. Only this time he’ll be driving around in a selection of shiny classic cars with a GoPro camera mounted on the dash to capture the hilarity or Larry David-esque awkwardness.
The show, called Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, will include appearances by Larry David, Ricky Gervais, Ed O’neill and Michael Richards (Kramer!) to name a few. Let’s just hope their candid conversations are just as memorable as the scripted ones.
Mark Youd is an artist based in Caerphilly, near Cardiff, South Wales. Before Mark gets to work on his paintings, he starts the day with coffee, which inspired this creative series of photography called “Caffeine Planets.” I asked Mark to describe the process:
It’s a simple, fun project based on the patterns that develop in the crema on my morning coffee…I use Nespresso from a Krups Pixie machine topped up with hot water, by varying the angle of the mug when the coffee is being pumped and/or the speed the hot water is poured, I can influence the pattern that is created in the crema. I take a photo (with nothing more special than an iPhone) very soon after pouring. I then crop the images in photoshop and apply very basic contrast and colour filters (and a healthy dose of imagination) to them while I drink the coffee. -Mark Youd
