February 2016 mycuppa Newsletter

Is it Tea time yet?

 Forty years ago, my father was arranging the street sign for Mum's new cafe in what was once a bustling Nelson Street Wallsend, NSW.

It was to be called "The Upstairs Coffee Lounge".

 As young kids often do, I fired off a series of rapid questions to Dad on the way to the sign writers.

 

"Dad, why is Mum calling it the Upstairs Coffee Lounge when she drinks tea?"

 

"Because it will be a coffee place, mate", Dad patiently replied.

 

"But she drinks tea, and so do all of the other ladies that come to our house", I carefully challenged him.

 

I can't recall if Dad had the right answers at the time or if we got distracted with something else; however, after all these years, I still find this same question often bouncing around inside my brain.

 

Why is it that so few people make a fuss about tea?

 

It's the most widely consumed beverage on the planet after water; more than 3 Billion cups of tea are prepared daily from more than 3,000 different varieties.

 

Mention the word coffee, and you will be bombarded with strong opinions, divided preferences, fierce brand loyalty and, sometimes, even court debate or controversy.

 

This month, we have extensively revised our entire tea portfolio, adding fresh and exciting products such as the flower and herb teas, Berrylicious blend and a new line of health teas, all offered at an exceptional value to our customers.

 

To see the new range of mycuppa teas, follow this link here.

 

 

Peru Organic

Peruvian coffee is grown at exceptionally high altitudes in the Andes mountains.

We know that higher altitudes are generally beneficial for better quality coffees, and with Peruvian coffee, we see a bright, effervescent snap, subtle sweetness and nice rounded medium body.

 

Peru is an excellent choice for Organic coffees due to the hard work of a few exporters/importers in getting the farms and the mills up to USDA standards.

 

We have landed a small lot of Organic coffee from Chanchamayo to use as our current Peru MCM offer in the mycuppa store.

 

A hard, dense bean delivering a superbly rich toffee and caramel flavour infusion with a balanced body and long, clean, sweet finish.

 

They make wonderful silky smooth chocolate notes from milk-based espresso.

 

You can buy this wonderful coffee, Peru MCM, here - organic coffee beans from Peru.

 

We have also purchased a ton of new specialty Peru FAIRTRADE Organic coffee that will arrive in early May 2016.

 

We tasted this coffee in early Feb, and it was superb.

 

How I fixed my irritating espresso channeling problem

No, I'm not about to be the voice of a loved, departed soul.

Still, I will discuss something that is the most critically important contributor to improving your consistency in preparing espresso coffee.

NOTE: - For those of you not using a manual espresso machine and manual grinder, you are advised to skip this article completely, e.g. for owners of automatic grind-dose-tamp-espresso machines, stove-top, filters, drip or percolator, plunger, pod or capsule machines - this does not apply to you - unless of course, you are interested to learn more about coffee preparation techniques.

 

You may have heard me mention channeling before in previous articles. It's a rather dry and technical topic.

 

If you truly desire performance improvements to your coffee-making skills, please be patient and persist.

 

Unfortunately, it's not easy to write about channeling without involving a lot of hi-res images to support explaining the technical terminology.

 

Channeling results from pressurized water from your espresso shot finding pathways of least resistance to flow through your ground coffee inside the porta-filter (group handle) and into your cup.

 

The result is a thin body, lack of flavour, reduced or muted acid and a distinct lack of sweetness from combinations of under-extracted and over-extracted coffee.

 

It may even be bitter - oh my god, don't blame the coffee roaster!

 

 

Less than 100% of the ground coffee was used effectively during the espresso shot. In many cases, depending on the severity of the channeling, the espresso is less than half of what it should be.

 

To read the story on how to diagnose a channeling issue and how I fixed my irritating channeling problem, please click on the following link: espresso channelling.

 

A new store is coming.

Four weeks ago, I would not have thought this initiative would be on the agenda in 2016 after an insane 2015.

After all, it has been less than three years since the last complete rebuild for the mycuppa online store.

Well, life in the e-commerce lane moves fast, and due to a series of events over the last month, we have developed a new strategic plan for our E-Commerce infrastructure that will be rolled out in stages over the coming months.

 

We have started building a new mycuppa.com.au, and I'm proud to say this involves 100% of the software and services being sourced from Australian-owned and run companies.

 

In this modern era of global software dominated by overseas IT systems, we are very happy to be able to support an Aussie company as these opportunities only arise sometimes.

 

Many hundreds of hours of work are involved, and more information will become available closer to the event.