–
==================================================================
This mobile text message is brought to you by AT&T

–
==================================================================
This mobile text message is brought to you by AT&T

–
==================================================================
This mobile text message is brought to you by AT&T

–
==================================================================
This mobile text message is brought to you by AT&T

–
==================================================================
This mobile text message is brought to you by AT&T

–
==================================================================
This mobile text message is brought to you by AT&T

today’s package of tree pulp brought immortality to the much-discussed underdog swan pour and added significant value to last week’s latte art hoedown — a feature written by a true outsider with a talent for processing the insanity she witnessed. if the live twittering was your fix, and after-blogging your chaser, then lillia’s piece is your hearty course meal.

web version of the story here. more photos, we hear, are floating around the ether. related review of shannon’s new forest park shop here.

UPDATE: key quote, from octane’s helfen:

“Respect the swan, dude,” Helfen says still shaking his head. “You gotta respect the swan.”

suspiciouser and suspiciouser is how you might describe these burgeoning southeast latte art competitions in which, no matter how many credentialed latte artists are in the house, the host barista seems to always win! so convenient!

there was jason dominy winning his own grand prize in charlotte, octane’s danielle outpouring some of the world’s best in her own atlanta bar last month and now, most staggeringly, coffee and crema’s alex beating jason AND danielle AND former millrock champion ben helfen in his own bar’s grand opening hoedown.

“throwdowns,” we suppose, are SO last year. latte art HOEdowns, though, have all the throbbing aura of a southern corn-pone pig pickin’.

“rigged?” the word was shouted in humor a few times in what was definitely the weirdest, funniest, most wildly unpredictable latte art bash this blog has ever attended. sundry live twitterers were sure to agree. if you get philosophical enough about it, though, you can actually come up with a pretty good explanation for the alex medina stunner that gives him credit for being gutsy, bringing down the house, pouring a rare latte swan at a crucial turn and grabbing that new grand-prize vario grinder all for himself. shucks, if you’re philosophical enough, you can explain anything!

the wrenching tick-tock hath already been posted here. this blog will boil down the plot twists into handy, over-reaching bulleted observations!

1. consumer judges. two of the three, at least, seemed to be gloriously unconcerned with the subtle difficulties of pouring a sharp, complex tulip. when confronted with a surprise swimming pond animal, however, the impression was profound. in other words, it was an expectations game — a consumer’s expectations. instructive! and, when you think about it, a possibly rad way to judge a latte art competition.

2. homecourt advantage. there’s nothing like the aural explosion that follows an unexpected twist from the local underdog. you might imagine the impact such a crowd reaction would have had on the judges themselves, whose own camera phones whipped out and whose ears were full of badgering opinions when it came down to a decision. alex played the field perfectly.

3. the swan itself. this blog, having sort-of demonstrated the idea a week earlier, didn’t even THINK about trying it in the heat of competition. everyone’s nerves were oddly on edge for such a collegial smackdown, and alex must have been especially nervous. to try the swan, then, after a mere week of practice, and to plop it down against a barista with tattoos of his winning latte arts, was unthinkably gutsy. also, it looked shockingly like a real pond swimmer!

respect the swan. guffaws and head-shaking followed the performance into the night. twitter still hasn’t ceased to carry the swan flu. t-shirts are being made. and alex has a deserved bit of liquid notoriety.

camera phones out. in greenville, swans and tulips are no small thing.

a surprise wreath, shannon’s tulip and helfen’s version in two stages.

octane’s danielle, liquid highway’s dustin.

then there was the mypressi twist, revolutionary espresso device of simplicity and ease. or so they said.

without question, the idea of brewing espresso with the punch of a nitrogen cartridge in a hand-held portafilter amounts to heretical folly of the most rankling sort. what will all those la marzocco factory workers do when we replace them with the injection-molded pocket BICs of espresso making?

and so, this blog can’t really blame that curmudgeonly tom — who definitely didn’t put the “sweet” in “sweet maria’s” — for lathering himself up with a bit of belligerent zeal soap. “best new product” inDEED.

and yet: the espresso, we insist, tasted non-horrible.

first we heard of the device in atlanta last week, helfen was waving a flyer and talking about how nine bars of espresso brewing pressure was somehow coming from the handle of this thing. turns out your basic whipped cream nitrogen cartridge supplies the oomph. you grind and pack a regular portafilter basket, fill the chamber just above with boiling water, and pull the trigger.

and then spro happens.

it’s tempting to imagine an application in which, just after hitting the snooze button, this blog could roll over, pull a shot INTO ITS BED MOUTH, and be quasi-juvenated from the comfort of our sheets. alas, the craftsmanship and theater of espresso is part of what pulled us in. also, there would almost certainly be some splashing. we don’t mind brown-flecked pillows so much, but the blogwife might.

the shots of hairbender we had from the mypressi convention booth were actually passable, if somewhat sour. this is likely because the boiling water had obviously been poured in far too long before “brewing.” also, it seemed kind of insane to demonstrate such a product with an espresso as demanding as hairbender.

we ended up thinking that, if we could figure out a way to duct-tape it to our mazzer for safe travel, it wouldn’t make a bad camping brewer — for lazy louts. caffeine addicts, in other words. sold on the virtues of industrialized user ease. with a gamer’s weakness for pressurized gas and triggers. yeah, them.

target demographic = perfectly clear.

–
==================================================================
This mobile text message is brought to you by AT&T

* now-former world champion stephen morrissey walked out of the pounding, chockablock “wedding” “reception” for those globetrotting newlywed barista zombies and cursed cheerfully in this blog’s face about the teeming nature of the crowd. then he spotted the blogdaughter, clinging shyly to our left hamstring. he covered his mouth, widened his eyes, and apologized profusely. but really. it was no problem. when we got in the car later that night, this blog simply told its progeny, “don’t listen that that Bad Man. he’s from SCOTLAND.”

* ben helfen is a t-shirt junkie like you love your grandma. came helfen, trotting across the vast slab of intermediate convention space all a-grin about all kinds of t-shirt meta-humor. see, the current ireland barista champ, apparently, disagrees with the now-former ireland barista champ, whose snobby comment about espresso spawned its own ironic, ben helfen-promoted t-shirt. thus the referential, inside-joke spin-off uber-tee! and if that sort of random linky irony isn’t obscure enough for you, there was also the slayer espresso machine tee. graffiti paint over vintage batman logo. so random! so cool!

which, we suppose, puts helfen in the decidedly pro-slayer camp when it comes to this new machine. other seasoned barista competitor persons from norway = decidedly unimpressed.

* korean finalist lee jong hoon, having captured the quailing hearts of c-n-c’s shannon and his korean wife youngwha, was clearly feeling the weight of expected glory shortly before his final routine, pacing back and forth as he did before the gaping restroom depot. the distraction of his fans, however, conveniently allowed this blog to become youngwha for convention floor-pass purposes while the korean flag-wavers did their effervescent best stageside.

* swedish cowboy barista fan club. it does, apparently, exist.

–
==================================================================
This mobile text message is brought to you by AT&T

–
==================================================================
This mobile text message is brought to you by AT&T

–
==================================================================
This mobile text message is brought to you by AT&T

* what strikes you about the much-ballyhooed u.k. barista champion gwilym (rhymes with “swill ‘im”) davies is that he doesn’t act much like a barista — not the english-speaking versions anyway. more like a cheery pub owner who reads kant in his spare time. a tweedy professor, but with more street smarts. a street-wise bloke, but with more twinkly humor. this seems non-incidental. the presentation, at the highest levels of barista competition, seem to reflect more and more the character of the coffee being tasted. so gwilym plays along, describing buttered toast and jelly in his espresso (ha! ha! like breakfast in shropshire!) and then doles out the envelopes: judges’ choice signature drink flavors. and then you think, “wait. that seems hard.” none of the hipster condescension, all of the humble artisan.

* what turned our head about the finalists: (a) no scandinavians, (b) two obscure coffee countries (korea and hungary) and (c) very nearly a producing country in the mix (guatemala rumored to be a close seventh). all firsts?

* what stunned about the other most drooled-upon competitor — chicago’s mike phillips — was the compact, hyper-controlled mastery of technical skills and the easy, man-on-the-street way he could talk about a scintillating coffee. almost like a home espresso junkie on steroids. oh wait! there was the rwandan espresso, chosen a mere two weeks ago and pulled with a 17-gram dose for his spro and cappuccino drinks. then an unprecedented grinder adjustment (!) and a 19-gram updose for longer espresso shots separated halfway through into two separate vessels. the front half: served cold, with augmenting ingredients of its own. then the deep dive, the warmer half with its own complementary substances. we’re pretty sure some judges were gobsmacked: several seemed openly awed when he made the finals.

* what stuck about the massively overpacked counter culture coffee party was the peanut shells that kept tumbling down people’s sweaty shirt collars as they talked and spat. also, the danish creative troubador linus torsater, of coffee collective, who talked as warmly of the residential coffee-buyers on his block in copenhagen as a baker speaks of his baguette patrons.

* what popped about the exhibition-floor coffee from burundi was the sparkling currant front end and the softly tapioca back end. burundi?!

* and so, there was the congealed mass of people in the counter culture training loft, the chummy gaggle of roasters in a downtown sports bar (?!) … and a pensive group of three in a booth at a far-flung pub where craftsman cheese and single-malt options ruled supreme. guess which venue suckered this blog into a bleary early-morning denouement?

–
==================================================================
This mobile text message is brought to you by AT&T

–
==================================================================
This mobile text message is brought to you by AT&T

also just barely not nuts enough to attend what was sure to have been the flowing latte art Canaan of the Year So Far. to be clear, this blog would normally be plenty nuts enough to loll on such a bar and gawk and jaw and swill all the artyness for a half-night. but that would have required ditching our own thursday night crowd, 20-deep, lined up at the home bar, drinking shots and washing cups and passing them back over people’s heads. hm. crash the bash or pour home art for thinkers and chums? it was a close call!

funny. by our watch, both of these maximal atlanta events are pretty much over by now. and yet there’s very little on these interconnected global webs to tell us how maximal they really were.

but definitely nuts enough to haul the blogfamily down for three days, gaze till we’re slack-jawed at the costumed barista practitioners from far-flung hinterlands like singapore and ukraine, pay our respects at the marriage feast of those ascendent barista zombies and maybe sniff about for exhibition floor passes. looking for where coffee and people mix well.

UPDATE FROM ATL: startlingly, the people who actually attended the aforementioned symposium seem to be uniformly raving. we’ll work on deciphering the particular things that they’re raving about.

consider how much more effectually those frenchies do espresso advertising and how much worse the coffee actually tastes … and you end up with quite the cognitive gap.

also, a market opportunity of staggering opportunity. think about paris: a jam-packed capital city of people perpetually on the move, of ever-present gaggles of jet-lagged tourists, of natives long accustomed to throwing down shots and snobbily defending the finest of foods — and nothing but lungo-lungo espresso gushers at every brasserie in town. a well-placed espresso bar of superior product would have to be one of the most logical things imaginable.

the right-bank soluna, “cafeotheque de paris,” is making an admirable stab. it’s like your grandma’s kitchen, if your grandma was an effervescent bohemian with a weakness for studly brazilian men and a la marzocco fb80 on the counter.

“this is my school of coffeeology,” she crowed, then dosed her single-estate brazilian espresso into the portafilter and traipsed around the shop waving it under our noses and demanding that we inhale. “see? see?!” she urged. “the best coffee in the world.” there was little tamping to speak of, and … well, what do you know. lungo gushers spurting out of the spouts. we braced for tangy weirdness, but didn’t have to. it was just watery coffee. not bad tasting at all, but also not what we would call spro. merely a pleasantly aromatic, watery shot of peanuty, tea-like coffee.

emilio rodriguez, the “guest barista” from brazil (yes, the producing country) lumbered out of the side room wearing — seriously — a tropical shirt and a juan valdez fedora, ceasing for the moment his pursuit of youtube barista videos. he gamely poured some squiggly latte art. “ooohs” and “aaahs” all around. “see?” she said. “see?!”

gloria, as she identified herself, is essentially pulling espresso the way parisians have always pulled espresso — long and fast — but with vastly better coffee. we have no idea who imports it for her … we tried to inquire a bit, but she bustled off to tutor a distinguished couple on a settee in the corner in the art of discerning “l’essence du cafe,” or sniffing the smelling oils.

most bizarre, perhaps, was the wall of drawers, each labeled with a different coffee-producing country including many to which your high-stepping snobbery may not have been introduced: sudan. ivory coast. the comoran islands. she claimed to have coffee on hand from 72 separate countries. not all for sale or for drinking, mind you, but for the pursuit of “cafeologie.” even with the aid of these globally connected woven webs, this blog is having a hard time finding half that many coffee producing countries.

leave it to a marais cafe, just a couple doors down from the now-trendy chez julien, to introduce paris to specialty coffee — but not at all in the way that the rest of the world conceives of it. the hinged window clacked, notre dame clanged across the seine and a customer forgot to pay, as gloria rambled on about “le nez du cafe.” one of those dreamy-eyed 20-something american girls you see wandering around paris in long flowered skirts stumbled in, inhaled and tried a practiced sentence of french or two at the bar.

“c’est mon universite’ de cafeologie,” gloria chirped. “voyez, voyez!”

hoffmann tipped us off, informed apparently by his parents. after years of swilling the acrid french espresso, we’re grateful for the reprieve.

wall-o-coffee.