V60 Karuna Coffee
To find V60 in Aldershot is a very rare event indeed. So rare this was a one off for Victoria Day. And it was free, or at least a donation, courtesy Karuna Coffee.
It was not good.
No surprise. So many things wrong.
- poor quality coffee
- poor roast profile
- not freshly ground
- not weighed or timed
- lack of skill in use of V60
I am used to high quality V60, I trial high quality coffee. This was not good.
For V60, the coffee has to be high quality single origin, traced to the farm or microlot.
I was offered medium or dark roast. This is to go back to the Dark Ages. No one discusses coffee in these terms. It will be a light roast, and the roast profile chosen to bring out the best the coffee has to offer, but it then has to have a skilled barista brewing the coffee.
Yes, there are dark roasts. A dark roast is to hide the defects of cheap low quality commodity coffee. It then requires no skill of the barista.
I asked of the Q grade of the coffee. Not known. OK a ball park, above or below 80? My question fell on deaf ears. Not good for a coffee roaster, Q grade of the coffee not known.
The coffee has to be freshly ground, precisely weighed, and that includes the water.
No one serious about coffee would make a V60 with coffee scooped out of a jar ground only God knows when.
V60 looks easy, nevertheless there is a skill involved.
V60 has to be served in ceramic or better still glass. This was a takeaway cup on a stall, albeit a compostable cup. A step in the right direction but what to do with the cup and are they compostable? The cup will go into the general waste stream. My cup retained and will go on the compost heap, together with a compostable cup I picked up later from Sustainability Fayre in Farnham. The main difference between Farnham, Farnham had a bin for the cups.
Compostable cups, reusable cups for example KeepCup, address symptoms not the underlying problem of takeaway coffee cups which are part of a wider problem of pointless consumerism. We have to eliminate takeaway be it through latte levy or legislation and encourage sit and relax in an indie coffee shop with speciality coffee served in glass or ceramic.
For an event such as Victoria Day with a fairly captive audience there should have been a bin for the compostable coffee cups. Maybe there was and I did not notice. Though I did query what to do with the compostable coffee cup? I could have thrown in the bushes, a reasonable thing to do if biodegradable, but probably would not have gone down too well. I did the next best thing, took away with me to throw on the compost heap.
I have to admit I am spoiled, V60 quality coffee, skilled baristas, world champion baristas.
Later in the day a cold brew coffee at Krema. A world of difference. But then it was roasted by Horsham Coffee Roasters and brewed by skilled baristas.
