It's not often that we get the chance to make coffee in one of London's best specialty coffee shops - using some of the best equipment in the industry. We got to witness first-hand the sheer attention to detail that went into every small decision at the shop.
The daily flower arrangement from a local florist, the stunning interior decor, leveraging owner Junchao's architectural background and the meticulous workflow, built for optimal efficiency and performance - clearly constructed with every little detail in mind from someone who is a true industry expert.
I arrived at 10:30am and was greeted with a warm welcome from the team, who got me prepped up and ready - immediately I was taken behind the bar, where three Brewista Gooseneck Kettles were waiting for me alongside a brand new Lagom P-100 - which I had never used before and other various exciting pieces of equipment that I would have access to: A customised Reverse Osmosis system, which had been set to yield me a base level of 14ppm, every filter brewing device you could imagine, RDT and WDT tools, Lotus and Apax Mineral Kits, and many other gadgets that I don't even know the names of (I'm so out of the loop).
It had been about 5 years since I had properly tried to dial in filter coffees for an audience, especially in a shop with standards as high as Calico - and never for a busy London based establishment. So needless to say, I felt like I'd be out of my depth - but after a few dial in brews, I realised pretty quickly that the setup was so optimal, that even with poor brewing on my part - everything would taste pretty phenomenal anyway!
After dialling in the first couple of brews and getting positive feedback from the Calico team, I felt much better about my chances of making brews worthy of the bar. We had opted to use each of the kettles for a different brew recipe.
Kettle 1: 14ppm custom RO water + Apax Lab Jamm, mineralised to 50ppm
Featured Musaza Lot 18 - Rwanda, Anaerobic Natural and El Diamente - Peru washed.
Kettle 2: 14ppm custom RO water
Featured Duwancho - Ethiopia, Natural
Kettle 3: 14ppm custom RO water + Apax Lab Tonic, mineralised to 45ppm
Featured Theilor Cruz - Peru, Gesha Washed
To keep things simple, I kept my brew recipe the same for each coffee, and just modified the grind size:
Origami Brewer + Wave Filters
15g Coffee - 240g Water at 92c
0:00 - pour 50g in 10s (50g total)
0:40 - pour 70g in 10s (120g total)
1:10 - pour 60g in 10s (180g total)
1:40 - pour 60g in 10s (240g total)
Grind sizes on Lagom P100:
Musaza: 7.8
El Diamente: 8.0
Duwancho: 8.0
Theilor Cruz: 8.3
The main caveat with these recipes, is that pre-brew mineralising is only accurate if done at room temperature, so whenever I ran low on water in any of the two kettles using Apax lab mineral kits, I would need to cool the kettle down and mineralise from scratch, testing with a TDS reader to make sure that I was in the right range, and using bypass to get the water into the right TDS range.
Calico have been great supporters of ours since their launch only four months ago, sporting some of the very best decaf in the world behind their bar (It's our Really Good Decaf, so I might be biased).
Cupping
Once the Bar Takeover was complete, and I managed to sneak away for some lunch, I went back to set up a cupping table, featuring many of the spectacular lots that we have upcoming from our friend Dylan Aguilera in Costa Rica.
Needless to say, some of the coffees that we will have arriving to us throughout the summer this year will be SPECTACULAR! Dylan and the team have been putting on a masterclass - look out especially for their Gesha and Anaerobic coffees coming soon.
We're greatly looking forward to putting these coffees behind the bar at Calico in the not too distant future, where we'll be coming back for an Espresso Takeover.