A short journey to Oslo to learn about the Nordic Barista Cup and the coffee scene in Scandinavia.
Shortly after his return from RwandaA Bourbon cultivar variant from Rwanda and Burundi. Bourbon coffees are named for the island in the India Ocean where French colonists grew it. Some history from the... ...more, Tom went to Oslo Norway for the Nordic Barista Cup. Why? Just to learn more about the coffee scene, see some friends there, and go to Oslo!
Click here to see some photos and read why Tom traveled to Europe for a barista event instead of going off to a country that grows our coffee.
Tom also uploaded a few new videos. One is a Bunn Trifecta demo from Norway and the other is a taste of some expresso (they drink expresso there) from northern Europe. – Byron
“I’m glad to visit Norway and eat kebabs. This place was strange and I don’t get it. In the coffee scene everyone is very positive and loves each other to the max. Nobody says anything slightly disparaging. Then again I know Norwegians love their death metal and secretly worship satan. (joke) (maybe not a joke). People at the coffee event are overwhelmingly white … gosh that’s a lot like the SCAA! What is it about a brown beverage that brings out the cream like this? I totally feel like a foreigner here. Shit is so expensive! What am I doing here?” -Thompson Owen reminisces on Oslo
We headed over to the well known and well regarded Solberg and Hansen, just steps away from Kaffa. The photo of the one they call “Igor” is near the cupping room. Oddly, nobody knows exactly who he is. But he seems to have a rather crazed, fixed gaze. Probat roasting samples at Kaffa with a bottle of Aass. The other type is the draft beer, called Aass Fat. 
Weigh scale on their green coffee distribution system Some people actually preferred the Loring batches. I know Bjornar and I both agreed that the Probats were better. One of the coffees was pretty weak too, an El Salvador Santa Rita – just blah. Hand pour Hario bar at Mokka cafe- The Honduras they served was great!. Frank Sumatra! That night, a beer and food pairing with infusions of coffee as well. Some of the food was pretty exotic for me Bjornar took charge of this machine, even though he had not used it. I was mostly busy roasting batches on the Quest at the same time. The oldest Probatino roasters are a bit of a nightmare – gas is all-off or all-on, no visual flame control, the temperature sensor is mis-placed …. etc 
The Cascara beer was a highlight, but wasn’t actually going to be presented until the following night, But with my inside connections I was gifted a couple bottles. Cascara, the coffee skin, was from Aida Battle, just as the Cascara we offered this year. The cascara was dry-hopped in the beer recipe. I must admit, I did not love it – it was alright, more spicy than fruity. 
A brand of coffee brewer, so it seems. An assortment of parchment samples, green coffee, and even some decaf? 
Control panels always look good – this is on their green coffee handling system THe covered cooling trays on Solberg & Hansens small batch roasters. So cute. So effective George’s presentation was about coffee processing, and the cupping experiment he set up was a separation of a lot of Guatemala coffee with varying levels of silverskin (chaff) clinging to the bean. He asserts that the coffee completely covered with silverskin that cannot be removed with a fingernail is likely from an immature coffee cherry. Cupping Loring vs. Probat roasts at Solberg. My first impression; the Loring roasts seemed one-dimensional, clean, yet simple. Bjornar is the roaster at Kaffa – I met him on the Rwanda Cup of Excellence jury. With Andreas, they suggested I come to the Nordic Cup, which was more about roasting this year than previous, it seems. This was the cupping following Jaime Duque’s presentation on Colombia coffee production. The 6 defects that we cupped ranged from mildly bad to gawd-awful. One was like vomit, literally. In the back of the hall, DJ Andreas at the mixer. And they roast Expresso at Kaffa. I did not even know you could get expresso in Europe. All the old Probat UG have this on their air flow from this era. Next day was the first of the Nordic Cup. Actually it was a smaller group focused only on roasting, and all of the day’s events and cuppings were roaster-oriented. It’s the main reason I went. This was supposed to represent the good parchment, but in my opinion it was pretty poor quality in what I like to see in Colombia. In fact I will be there in 2 weeks so I can compare! The best coffee always goes into green bin 15, I can just tell… This is where they sell merch and have public cuppings on Saturdays All jet-lagged, the Kaffa roastery, flanked in white with near-luminescent floors, is something between a coffee hospital and the steam room of the Death Star. Storm Troopers or Cylon Warriors, somewhere nearby for sure. All of Robert Thoreson and Kaffas barista awards are at Java, against an amazing tile backdrop – really beautiful place The menu of roasted offerings at Java cafe, with a few things we share such as Costa Rica Villa Sarchi and Arce Caturra Pastry is art – is this not? THe last morning was spent poking around the Kaffa cafes in Oslo, the original one called Java, the second one called Mokka, and then the their retail store Kaffa Buttik next to Mokka Loring shipped a Smart Roast to Oslo just to set it up and use it for the cupping, scheduled for the next day. Of all the roasters I would NOT try to “plug and play” I think a Loring might be it. It needs a lot of fine tuning, or so I believe. This was the lineup of finished batches, Probat Vs Loring Smart Roast Marzocco in Solberg Lab The new meeting area in the Kaffa roastery, quite a spacious place, for the time being. Roasteries have a way of filling up quickly. Words of warning, not understood of course. Jaime Duque’s presentation and the cupping of defects was very instructive, especially since he presented parchment samples of some of the defects. This one was very fermenty, if I remember right. Paul Songer had a dense lecture, very informative. The challenge of understanding such a complex reaction, one that cannot be easily observed or arrested at exact stages, adds to the difficulty. This was the original roaster that Robert used for Kaffa, but now it has been replaced by the 2 older Probat models Solberg has a whole slew of Probat roasters – the trier handle on their Probat UG-22 We needed to roast a bunch of Colombia samples for Robert Thoreson’s (Kaffa) presentation the next day. But this was a very early Probatino lacking many of the features of later models. It was not easy to use. Trippy decorative metal skin on the Probat. I like the old stuff that had the hand-hammered look. I opened up the Quest M3 roaster I bought once the transformer arrived. It was slow to heat, and I didn;t want to overload the transformer but we eventually nudged it up to a place it would work well. The problem was that the cycles on the transformer were not correct for the roaster, so the drum was turning too slow. The coffee was sitting in the bottom of the drum. I compensated by lowering the batch load and upping the air speed with the fan control. We stopped at Kaffe Brenneriet, a competitor of Kaffa and a place who serves coffee roasted by Solberg & Hansen. They are a huge buyer of Cup of Excellence buyer. Mundane perhaps, but these scooter-carts are really cool. Kaffa had one, and seeing a 60 year old mechanic at the Oslo aiport speeding by on one is a head turner too. Siphon, Aeropress, Chemex at the Mokka store of Kaffa. Solberg has these two small Probat roasters. I think they are 5 Kilo capacity each. Moose was another offering I wasn’t expecting. The night before I had reindeer meatballs! I ate Rudolf! The moose was actually quite good- strongly smoked but nice. More Loring roast cupping. I also felt the body in the Probat batches was better, more rounded, and I felt they were sweeter and more dimensional. Alejandro and David in this picture. In the Solberg lab, some nifty new cupping bowls with their new graphics … very nice. Flash forward to the next day, all the baristas had shown up for the event, and it was quite different than the first day with only 20 or so people, all roasters. Stephen Vick and his coffee tattoo. Saw quite a few coffee tattoos actually. 
The original Has Beaner and myself, looking jet-lagged still. Later on that afternoon, the Loring demonstration was on. The attempt was to match roasts from the Probat UG-22 more or less and cup the two against eachother. The guilty transformer. Heavy, expensive, and not quite the right spec. Sample roaster overload. Some spiffy new Probat 2 barrels and surprisingly a Sirocco roaster, made by Siemens in the ’80s. This one was suspiciously unbranded and the information for electrical was etched out by hand -odd. The whale kinda took me off guard – wasn’t sure it was kosher to eat any whale, but it is local product from the coast, and I have never heard of controverisal Scandanavian whaling – only Asian/Japan. SO with some trepidation I tasted it. The first recipe, a tartar, was nice, but this roast beef style whale was really wild -too much.
