Grata Espresso

Golden Bean Awards 2014

More roasting medals this year for Central Victoria’s Custom Coffees.

 October saw the running of Australia’s largest and most prestigious awards for specialty coffee roasting, the Golden Bean Awards.

Held in Port Macquarie QLD this year, the event hosted over 1300 entries in twelve categories and was judged by a panel of 200 industry peers, over the week.

The Golden Bean Awards are a huge event on the coffee roasters calendar and are a sought after award.

In recent years, Custom Coffees has won a total of 5 medals in different categories and 2014 was another one of those winning years for the business.

Custom Coffees entered three coffees into the competition and came away with two medals, and outstanding effort considering the enormous number of entrants and the quality of coffee available.

This year Custom Coffees won a Bronze Medal for our outstanding Fairtrade Organic Cascadia Decaff in the Decaffeinated Latte category, for the third time in a row. 

They also took out the Silver Medal in the Organic Espresso category for our beautiful Fairtrade Organic Soul Blend. 

“These new awards are a testament to our continued dedication to roasting the excellence, with a dedicated team of ten passionate coffee professionals,” said Andrew McDonald Customs Coffee Director.

Custom Coffees is based in Bendigo Central Victoria and were the first, and continue to be, the leading coffee roaster in Regional Victoria. 

“I’d like to congratulate the whole team at Custom Coffees for their dedication, passion and continued pursuit of coffee excellence. You’ve made us proud again this year, well done.”  Andrew said.

customcoffees.com.au

The Top Four Cafe's & Restaurants in Bendigo?

February  2015

1. Masons Of Bendigo http://tinyurl.com/n6z665a

2. The Woodhouse http://tinyurl.com/ldlozzn

3. Simr. http://tinyurl.com/k548dxo

4. The Brougham Arms http://tinyurl.com/l4z3wfd

What do they all have in common?

All Award Winning establishments.
All demand premium ingredients and produce. 

And all long time Custom Coffees clients.


www.customcoffees.com.au

Nespresso Compatible Coffee Bombs

At last, Artisan coffee in a pod.

After a lot of R&D over the past 12 months, we think we've nailed it.  Beautiful award winning coffee in a convenient Nespresso compatible pod.

We developed three different strengths, 'Atomic Bomb', the strongest blend, the 'Cluster Bomb' for those who want a little less kick and 'The Dud',  - decaf!

The beauty in these pods is the suburb balanced coffee flavour, not a metallic sharp taste,  and the depth and longevity of the crema displaying the quality of the ethically sourced AA Grade coffee beans in the specially developed coffee pod blends.

Hi Andrew.

Coffee is amazing. It does exactly what it says on the tin... 'Compatible Pods that taste like coffee'.

Super smooth, no bitter after taste and certainly no metallic taste...Bravo, I'll be back for more.

Thanks again Andrew, ... and good luck with Coffee Bombs.

Alan Browning 

This crema remains perfect after 30 mins!

With fresh coffee the entire shot seems to be crema as it brews. Only after the pour stops does it settle out into two clearly defined phases. With older coffee you can often see a thinner, separate head of foam settling out as the shot pours. The resulting coffee is often thin and watery meaning the little crema we have disappears quickly.  (Read - 'other' Pods - stale, flat, metallic taste)

Crema is one of the many joys of an espresso. The honeycomb network of bubbles traps many of the aromatics ready to release them as the bubbles burst on the tongue. It lends both an appealing texture and an appealing look to the drink, and will remain inextricably linked to the romance of coffee.   

coffee geek.com

coffeebombs.com.au.

A Division of:  

Every wondered how your E61 Group Head works?

The vulnerable E61 Group Head has been in service since 1961 first seen in the original Faema E61 Espresso machine .

A derivative of the original patented design are still used today by most of the large espresso machine manufactures.  Weighing around 4kg and made of of nickel plated solid brass, it was and still is renowned for it's fantastic even thermal qualities, partly due to its thermal mass, but more so to its patented thermosyphon head heating, a movement of heated water purely driven by hot water cooling slightly along its journey - thus creating a free and continuous circulation of hot water through the group head, much like the circulation of heated air cooling and falling in a room, only to be reheated again and rising. 

Still today a lot of espresso machines use the manual original version of this group head. A manual leaver drives a cam providing three different positions of valves. 
1. Off / dump pressure. (fully up)  
2. Pre infusion (allows ambient pressure heated water into the poprtafilter to wet the ground coffee)  (mid point)
3. High pressure pump on. (fully down) 
The length of the pre infusion and high pressure extraction is up to you, opinions vary on what the correct timing for each is. 

In a push button society where ease of use and digital timing take the guess work out of the extraction, the 3 way cam has been replaced with a simple of / on solenoid of course thus removing the important manual pre infusion step. Different manufactures have different way to get around this, some pulse the pump for a second, stop, and restart to pre infuse, others have stepped pressure building to achieve the same result, or its ignored all together. The important point here is that all still rely on a basic design concept devised in the 1960's by Carlo Ernesto Valente -  the venerable E61 Group Head. 

The video below beautifully shows the inner workings. 
What a great piece of engineering - those crafty Italians.