Our goal for these meetups is to give a friendly environment and space for coffee enthusiasts to meet each other without judgement.

Hashtag for the event: #caffup

Optional event registration: HERE.

#caffup will be taking place every 2nd Wednesday of the month at 7 pm, in a rotating basis of coffee shops. Here are the first few months:

May: Caffe Streets / @caffestreets on Twitter and Instagram

We’ll be trying out their cold brew concentrate as well as their diluted version (iced coffee).

June: Intelligentsia Broadway / @IntelliCHI on Twitter, @IntelligentsiaCoffee on Instagram

July: Ch’ava Cafe /@chava_cafe on Twitter and Instagram

Players were given envelopes with their role and team assignments. Waxwing uses Chicago history to assign each player to either the Feds or the Mob. We had a few hit men and dirty cops scattered through Wormhole and at the end of the night, the Mob emerged victorious. Individual players were also able to obtain points throughout the 2-hour game. At the end of the game, points were tallied up and the MVP from each team received a pair of crawl tickets, bag of Sulawesi donated from HalfWit Coffee Roasters, and game registration from Waxwing.

It was an absolute pleasure working with Waxwing. We’d also like to thank the cool folks behind Wormhole and HalfWit for allowing us to take over their space.

Future special events will be listed on this page. If you’re a business and would like to work with us to throw an event, please email at info[at]caffentures.com.

The Big Central is a giant regional barista and brewer competition thatpulls competitors from all over the north/south central states. This competition works to introduce new coffee roasters, baristas, and coffees to the world.

Two competitions occur at the same time: the Barista and Brewers Cup. Round 1 begins on Friday, January 18 and ends on Sunday, January 20. This year’s competition is hosted by PT’s Coffee Roasting & Kaldi’s Coffee in Kansas City. You can find more information about it here.

Barista #1: “I really love this Costa Rica on V60. It has super citrus notes like orange rinds, also a velvet body, and this crazy grape finish.”

 

Barista #2: “Oh, I know! I even got a little brown sugar and caramel apple when we were cupping it earlier in the week. I tried dialing it in a little more so we could pop that fruit.”

And you, the customer, sit there staring into your cup- the cup that contains the coffee they’re talking about- and you’re bewildered. Why can’t you taste the orange rinds? What’s wrong with your taste buds?

Nothing is wrong with your taste buds. Really. It takes tremendous time and concentration to be able to pinpoint flavors and even then, you’re not always tasting the same thing as the next person. Only 25% of the same population are supertasters. The rest of us are just chugging along, willing our palate to be stronger.

Let’s change perception of flavor here. One of the most comfortable and welcoming coffee cupping sessions I’ve been to happens every Friday morning at Counter Culture Coffee’s Chicago training center. Best advice I’ve gleaned from them is to use the power of a memory to help you define flavor. Does this coffee remind you of the beach? Then extrapolate and let us suggest that you’re tasting some salty air, crisp breeze, and maybe some fish.

Smell is a very strong trigger for bringing up memories and you should use this to your advantage.

Take this one step further. What if you’re awful at associating with memories? I have a terrible memory so I’ve begun to associate coffee with experiences, especially when I’m trying to make descriptors more accessible to the general coffee-drinking population.

The coffee that I currently have at home is Gaslight Coffee Roasters‘ Ethiopian Yirgacheffe and I’m using it as an example to define it through various other interests:

Weather- Sunshine on a crisp autumn day

Film- “Little Miss Sunshine” (quirky, but welcoming to many people)

Music- “Lollipop” by Mika

Activity- Apple picking

Dating profile- Positive, laid back, occasionally enjoys a bike ride along the lake

See- this is a coffee you’d like to be friends with. If you were told any of those above descriptors instead of say, “bergamot, lemongrass, and pineapple” (I made these up), how likely would you to buy that coffee? I’m banking on more likely.

I’m not saying to rid the world of taste descriptors altogether, but if you’re just starting into coffee and need help identifying flavors, try describing it through a different route.

Since I know that testimonials are important in a business’ credentials, I’ll let you decide for yourselves after reading these two articles:

Bow Truss Blog

After the beans were finished roasting, the sensory delights continued with manager Talya’s dessert and coffee pairings. We sipped hot chocolate, munched on dried cranberries and indulged in some strawberry shortcake while trying to guess which dessert was the best representation of each coffee.

Gapers Block Drive Thru

No two coffees are the same, nor should they be made the same way. Pouring coffee brings out more of the delicate notes in a brighter, fruitier coffee (think Ethiopian) that, unlike a chocolatey-caramel flavored cousin, would get lost in a French press. The result is a cleaner, well-rounded cup. This is what I learned while sipping my way through a “caffeinated adventure” with Caffentures Blue Line Coffee Crawl, organized by Jenn Chen.

 

Again, thank you all for your support. The coffee-loving community is a beauty to be a part of.

– Jenn

It’s fairly simple:

1. Coffee flights are uncommon in Chicago cafes. You can’t go into a shop today and order up a sample flight. Lucky for you, we serve up THREE coffee flights on each crawl!
2. Crawls are personalized to attendees. We ask you questions at event registration to gauge your coffee experience level and in turn, the workshop presenters tailor their presentations to you.
3. Ask every burning question you’ve wanted to ask about coffee. Groups max out at 10 people so not only are you in an intimate and welcoming environment, but these baristas and owners are dedicating time to talk to you.

Convinced? Join us on a crawl!

Coffee that was used: Finca El Puente, Honduras. Roasted by Counter Culture Coffee.

Making cold coffee in a store vs at home is completely different, especially in priorities. Home baristas have an advantage here, because you can make smaller batches with greater control over the variables. The methods listed here are not the only ways to make cold coffee. We ran out of glassware and there’s only so much coffee that can be imbibed in one sitting.

For each method, we used 24 g of grounds to produce 10 oz of coffee. We tasted coffee after it had been in the fridge (or steeping) for 14 hours.

Here are the methods we tried:

1. Hot brew pourover, immediately cooled in fridge. 
2. Cold brew Toddy
3. Hot pourover for the bloom, iced water for the remainder of the pour
4. Cold press: coffee soaking in room temp water, French pressed after 14 hours
5. Hot pourover directly over ice
6. Cold pourover directly over ice
7. Trifecta over ice (this was for fun)

Without giving too many nerdy facts, we determined that suprisingly, #1 had the best taste, followed closely by #3. This was incredibly reassuring, because it’s really easy to do this at home!

Both methods require freshly ground coffee, a measurable amount of water, and a type of coffee pourover.

For the hot brew, cool in fridge method, just brew as you normally do in a pourover and immediately store the hot coffee in the fridge. This particular method highlighted complex notes of spice and tang with a slight dryness at the end.

This is an example of a coffee blooming. Notice the bubbles. The coffee is degassing!

For the hot bloom, iced water method, pour enough hot water into the pourover to “bloom” the coffee. Allow 2-3 minutes for the coffee to degas, almost letting the coffee bed dry up. Pour the remainder of your water volume with ice water (we used a few ice cubes to cool down water). This method gave us light, sweet, and floral notes after being stored for 14 hours.

You may be curious on why cold brew wasn’t one of the top choices here. The cold press and Toddy methods came out to be flat tasting with no peak acidic notes. Perhaps next time, we’ll try cold brewing it longer to extract more taste.

In the meantime, try out the above two methods at home and let us know how it goes!

1) A clean steam wand.

Example of a dirty steam wand.

Does the barista let steam go after every use? Does he/she wipe the wand with a clean cloth?

A clean steam wand is key not only to your health, but also to steaming milk in a quality manner. That steam wand dips its way into hundreds of milk drinks a day- do you really want to drink a latte that may have chunks from a drink made 5 hours ago? Yeah, didn’t think so.

A coffee shop can be a stunner in decor, but if it fails here, you do not want to stay to check how their coffee tastes.

2) Coffee bags contain whole beans and have a roast date.

Roast date at the bottom of an Ipsento Coffee bag. Handwritten, to boot!

Do they only carry whole beans? Is there a roast date on the bag?

If available, the retail bags on the shelf are a good way of telling a shop’s dedication to coffee quality. These beans should be whole bean only to prevent the quick flavor decay that grounds have (old grounds tend to smell like must & staleness). As some already know, ideal coffee-drinking time is within two weeks of the roast date. Thus, these bags on the shelf should really only have coffee that was roasted in the last week.

3) Tidy condiment bar/ bus bin.

Dirty coffee cups should not be sitting in a bus bin for hours at a time.

Is the condiment bar stocked and clean? Is the bus bin emptied when full?

A shop who cares about both quality and cleanliness will care about their condiment bar and bus bins. Condiment bars should be clean and fully stocked. Bus bins should be emptied when full or if not full, at least every hour. Granted, these condiment bars can get messy pretty quickly in the middle of a rush hour, so don’t discount the shop immediately if you see a mess. If it’s a big spill, the cleanup should be immediate. If it’s minor, it should be addressed with the normal wipe every hour or half-hour.

So there you go- three quick tips on checking for a coffee shop’s quality! As mentioned before, even if all three criteria are met, there are many other variables that can be messed up to produce a poor cup of coffee.

This is not your typical drink-a-cup-of-coffee-at-every-stop coffee crawl. Instead, we’re taking that idea and adding in a workshop twist. At each stop, you’ll have a mini sensory workshop. If you take brew temperature as a variable example, this is how it’ll lay down:

• Take one coffee and brew it at three different temperatures: lower than ideal, ideal, and higher than ideal
• Then, we’ll take samples of each one- about 3 oz- and talk about the taste differences
• Goal at the end of each workshop is for YOU to articulate what the variable meant to you in terms of taste

If you take this tour over and over again, even if the variables we test are the same, you won’t have the same experience. Not only will the group dynamic be different, but coffees will change with seasonality.

So give us a try and buy a ticket to an upcoming crawl!