While searching for coffee shops for an upcoming trip to London I came across this great statement on the website of Taylor Street Baristas.

The first time you have a really good coffee can be a bit of a curse. With one sip, your expectations are radically transformed. All other coffee is ruined for you. Coffee shops that used to prop up every corner of every city block soon reveal themselves to be mere pretenders: the blind serving the blind.  Purveyors of limp and burnt and watery coffee.

With one sip, your coffee options dwindle to a precious few: a mere handful of skilled baristas capable of meeting your newly enlightened needs.

Yours is a wretched plight, indeed. For those who inhabit this lonely world, we welcome you to our humble little corner of the web: a place where real coffee lovers can gather around and share and console and learn from each other.

So true.

We’ve spent a couple of really interesting weekends around coffee experts recently – the local and then national barista competition to see who was crowned best coffee maker in the country. The winner represents New Zealand at the World Barista Championships in Bogata in June.

The competition is very precise – just 15 minutes to make each of the 4 judges an espresso, a cappuccino and a signature drink (must involve coffee, no alcohol and showcase coffee in some way). Points are awarded for flavour, technique, coffee knowledge and experience. The contestants wear a microphone and have to talk through what they’re doing and are under close scrutiny from the judges – watching everything – how much coffee they spill from the grinder, how much milk is left over, and how tidy their work station is.

We knew one of the competitors quite well, Massimo from Fuel, plus recognised a lot of the other baristas from around town competing in the Wellington champs a couple of weekends ago.

It was a really fascinating experience and with the cameras everywhere and big screens showing close-up shots of extractions and milk pouring it was just like the world champ videos I’ve seen online. I think at the Wellington heats we were the only coffee drinkers/customers there – most seemed to be other baristas and people from the coffee trade – felt quite special! Unfortunately now The Mister thinks he knows everything about how milk should be poured to form symmetry on top of the espresso so I’ve been getting ‘advice’ every morning for the last couple of weeks on how I could improve my milk – what!?

A couple of pics from the Wellington champs (at the Supreme roastery):

Nick from Memphis Belle who won the Wellington competition

Aidan from People’s Coffee being watched by the technical judges

Arui from Christchurch showing the tasting judges the coconut she was going to heat up to enhance this flavour in her coffee

And some from the NZ champs yesterday (at the Mojo roastery):

Aymon’s every move being recorded

Massimo constructing his signature drink

And the winner Winner Hideyuki from Christchurch being mobbed by the paparazzi for an interview!

Heaps more photos here on Flickr.

There’s a sign up at Fuel today – 15 years they’ve been making coffee! And I’ve been drinking it from one or other of their cafes, holes-in-the wall or carts for 13 of those years. I reckon on average I’ve had a Fuel cup in my hand every day for the last 13 years. So great they’re still around – a real Wellington institution.

Remember a while back when Supreme opened their revamped Woodward Street store I went down and took a bunch of photos and commented on the little ‘exhibition’ space in the brick wall? Well the minute I saw that space I knew what I wanted to take to put there one day – and that day came last week when our Supreme Friend tweeted that he was looking for something new to put in the space.

I rushed down there with the treasure that I knew I wanted to display – just on loan – my New York prism!

Oh how easily the little Vespa model was cast aside so I could ‘install’ my treasure. We discussed all sorts of lighting and signage options but for now, one of my orange cards serves as the art credit. Feel very famous!

Being a loyal Coffee Supreme fan girl I put on my (apparently pristine) Supreme t-shirt and headed down to the revamped Woodward Street retail store this morning to bask in its newness on opening day … hoping they’d let me in the door seeing as my loyalty has somewhat wandered elsewhere in the Supreme family of late with my blatant adoration of Customs Brew Bar and Ralph’s Brazilian beans! However, I had been going to the Woodward Street store for years and always enjoy a catch-up with the guys there so wanted to go see what all the fuss was about.

It’s a fantastic transformation! The store was teeny tiny before and other than removing 2 layers of false and mezzanine ceilings to give them room upwards, the store is no bigger but it’s totally different and very very cool. Here’s a photo from Supreme’s blog of the ‘old store’ (more here)

And here’s what it looked like when I went down this morning

It’s now a really cosy garage/workshop space with shelves of coffee stuff (some proudly displaying the new Woodward logo) and interesting little details like an ‘exhibition space’ in the brick wall – currently on display is a little Vespa model (am wondering what orange thing I can take down from my collection to display ‘on loan’!)

While still mainly doing retail and mail order beans, there’s plenty of room for a handful of people to stand around and chat and the guys will even make you a mug of coffee (in a much-loved old brown mug that you’d easily believe came from a workshop bench) from their Clover, on the house, so you can try different coffees and learn about the tasting experience.

A true coffee haven! When I got back to the office I could still smell coffee – delicious!

Have finally got back to Nikau since coming back from New York. With it not being open on a Sunday it’s slightly more inconvenient for us to go, having so much to jam in on a Saturday. However, we called in for Saturday breakfast this weekend.

We we welcomed back with hugs like old friends and it was great to see familiar faces there and a few new hair styles. We were out of view of Kelda (boss chef) but somehow she got wind we were there and came out to say hi and welcome us back – we felt Very Important.

Didn’t have a date scone (gasp!) as it was breakfast time, so had my old fav toast and peanut butter – something I hardly have at Nikau with us never usually being there for breakfast. Their homemade milk toast is really good – I only need one slice as it’s delicious and thick and you can actually taste milk in the crust.

My coffee was delivered in my special cup (even after all these months!) – good texture and well made although I have decided I really don’t like the flavour of Supreme’s Fair Trade Organic beans – it has a very distinctive ‘green’ taste, quite acidic, but I have no choice until they switch beans which I don’t think they’ll do being an organic cafe. It was great to be back and next visit will have to be for a date scone.

I’m thrilled to see Nikau is blogging again too – well done guys!!

Nikau Gallery Cafe, City Gallery, Civic Square, Wellington @nikaucafe