As mentioned earlier, a few of my fellow baristas (and one baristo haha) went up to Portland Roasting Company to take a tour and brush up on our skills. We started the afternoon off with a delicious lunch at a bar and grill place that was delish! (I must find the name....). Then off to PDX roasting we went. We toured their warehouse with all the Monin syrups, Mighty Leaf teas, Dr. Smoothie containers, and, of course, bags and bags of green coffee beans waiting for their turn to be roasted. We learned how the Swiss Water decaffination process works, and where the beans come from (many people who are employed or involved at Portland Roasting have been to the farms, met the farmers and even purchased land in far off countries so that it may be used for growing coffee). We then proceeded to the roasting room and saw their whole process from roasting to bagging.
This is one of two of their roasters. This is the smaller of the two, and roasts 150 pounds of coffee at a time. It is the newer of the two, and was designed to be fully automated, but they found it was much better to just have a person operate it. To give you some perspective on the size of it, the round drum just in front of the roaster itself comes up to my waist.
Then, shortly after a potty break, we moved into the cupping room and began talking technique. Steve, our tour guide and all around coffee bad ass, made us "drip" coffee with a device called a Chemex. BEST CUP OF COFFEE I HAVE EVER HAD. I intend to have one in my house someday... but the Chemex deserves its' own blog post.
We then dove right into latte art. My fave. Steve gave us some great pointers and helped us to brush up on our skills. I feel that I have become a lot more consistent at it at work... but have yet to take any photos. Here are a few that I have taken since leaning the great art of the latte:
It was so fun, and got me all excited about my job ,and how to improve myself. I learned a lot! I'll get a post up about Chemex... but first I gotta do my research... ;)
P.S. The picture at the top of this post is of Portland Roasting's Bike delivery unit. Since the company itself is right SE of downtown, they prefer to have all of their downtown Portland deliveries be made by bike. No exceptions. (They take pride in being a very sustainable company... :) ) Even better was yesterday, when moving Sarah into her dorms at Linfield campus in NW Portland for nursing school (which starts on Monday) we saw mister bike delivery guy hauling ass past us. I think that is SO awesome!
No comments:
Post a Comment