You Oughta Know #33

In this issue of You Oughta Know: Winner winner chicken dinner; You need to buy more coffee cups - science says so; Nespresso’s ‘coffeewashing’.

Mar 06, 2024

Nau mai haere mai and welcome to You Oughta Know - your regular update on all the things happening in the coffee world!

Welcome to autumn, that strange time of the year where Super Rugby is trying to pretend it’s relevant, and the Black Caps make us wonder why we even watch test cricket any more.

The weather seems to be as confused as our sporting codes - with crisp, cold mornings making way for 26 degree afternoons.

Luckily coffee is the beveragino for all occasions - warm, cold, wet, dry - doesn’t matter. When you have coffee, you can make a hot AeroPress on the beach to keep you warm, then swim in the water when you get too hot. Magic.

In this issue of You Oughta Know: Winner winner chicken dinner; You need to buy more coffee cups - science says so; Nespresso’s ‘coffeewashing’.

ICYMI - the latest from The Magic Roast

It’s been popping off like Phil Goff here at TMR towers. Here’s are few of the latest yarns that you might have missed:

Winner winner chicken dinner

There’s been winners a plenty this last week (not the Black Caps though).

NZ Regional Barista Champs - Auckland

The first of the NZ Regional Barista Champs was held on the weekend in Auckland, with Hanna Teramoto taking out the top prize.

Hanna is no stranger to winning, having taking out the national title in 2014 and 2022, and being the legend behind KŪ - by Coffee Tech.

L-R Agnese Sokolovska (3rd Place), Wayne Burrows (Runner Up), Thomas Dixon (4th Place), and Hanna Teramoto (the Champ). Source: NZ Specialty Coffee Association.

The Christchurch regionals go down on 10 March (this Sunday!) and the Welly comp goes down a week later.

Keep an eye on NZSCA’s Instagram to follow the action.

Milk Lab Barista Battle NZ 2024 winner - Tauranga’s own Shogo!

And over on Instagram, Shogo from Tauranga’s Baby Afro and Curly & Wavy took out the top prize in Milk Lab’s Barista Battle.

milklabconz

A post shared by @milklabconz

This unique and completely virtual competition challenged New Zealand’s best baristas to make the best latte art, using only MilkLab’s range of alternative milks.

It was a great competition to watch unfold on Instagram, showing that alternative milks are more than up to the task for amazing looking coffees.

Shogo gets a trip to Melbourne to compete against Aussie winner for the title of the best in Australasia. That goes down at the Melbourne International Coffee Expo in May. Lets get in behind Shogo!

Legends.

PDG: Different cup shapes affect the flavour of coffee

Does your partner get mad when you bring home yet another mug? Well, it sounds like we are well justified…

In this article from Perfect Daily Grind, they look into how different cup shapes impact flavour of coffee:

“A growing body of research indicates that cup shape has a greater effect on the experience of drinking coffee than we originally thought. In 2018, Brazilian neuroscientist Dr. Fabiana Carvalho published a paper suggesting that cup shape influences not only our overall enjoyment of a particular coffee, but also how we perceive sweetness and acidity. Her research built on a similar study, which suggested that the weight, texture, and shape of coffee cups have a huge impact on our sensory experiences.”

Yeah, cool and all, but are there practical applications? Looks like it. The article interviews Tim Wendelboe, a coffee legend, who described how he uses different cups to get different things out of different coffees at his cafe.

Definitely worth a read.

The Pourover: Clooney’s Coffeewashing

“If a sustainability project takes place and no consumers hear about it, did it really happen at all?”

The Pourover coffee substack has a look at Nespresso’s use of George Clooney, big glossy adverts, ‘strategy’ and talking about ‘sustainability’ as a part of it’s ‘coffeewashing’ efforts.

On ‘coffeewashing, The Pourover says:

Coffeewashing—like “greenwashing” before it—is a word I use to describe coffee companies’ deceptive or misleading claims about the positive social, economic, and environmental impacts of their products or actions.

They go on to say that Nespresso, and it’s parent company Nestle use ‘coffeewashing’ as a way to cover up some of the “supply-chain controversies [they'] have been responsible for in recent years”. Such as:

“Young children picking coffee on Nespresso-supplying farms in Guatemala, for instance. Coffee suppliers in Brazil investigated for multiple instances of wage theft. Poor working conditions and “exhausted workers” at a factory in France. Zooming out, Nestlé has a litany of scandals too lengthy to fully list—luckily there’s an entire Wikipedia entry for them—but to pull just one example, the multinational corporation admitted that beans from Brazilian farms that use slave labour may have ended up in its coffee “because they do not know the names of all the plantations that supply them”.”

This is a heck of a look into their practices, and yet another reason to turn your back on Nespresso and everything it stands for, as I wrote about back in 2014.

Go check out The Pourover.

Coming up on The Magic Roast

Bean of the month: keep an eye on my Instagram for clues ;)
A review of the AeroPress Flow Control Cap - thanks to The Magic Roast Members
If it’s not Fair Trade(TM), is it fairly traded?
A review of the Orea V3 brewer