London Coffee Festival

You get the opportunity to travel down to London completely free -  what do you do?

Well, that's obvious! You go to the UK's biggest coffee festival, right?

The previous year it attracted over 30,000 coffee connoisseurs and enthusiasts over 3 days. I'm going to take an educated guess and say they smashed that number this year. 

The venue is Central London down Brick Lane and with 3 halls to explore there was more than enough to look at and to try out. 

Featured  were over 250 artisan coffee and gourmet food stalls, tastings and demonstrations from world-class baristas, interactive workshops, street food, coffee-based cocktails, live music, DJs, etc. etc. You get the picture - there was a lot there.

My girlfriend Sophie accompanied me for today's adventure. I must add that before she met me she hated coffee but I may have changed her opinion over the years and as you may expect she likes it. A lot. 

Anyway we arrived at the venue and joined the end of the line. We must have arrived 20 minutes before it opened and there were already 100 people waiting patiently in line.

Whilst waiting, we were handed the London Coffee Festival newspaper and the latest edition of the Caffeine mag (brilliant!). Once we entered we were instantly handed our first of many coffees that day. After a good first walk around the 3 halls we looked at what was on around the show. 

Having picked out of the long list of the various events, we chose to see the Coffee Masters, the Cupping Session, Roasting and Latte Art Live where the British champion was giving a display. 

We must have been there no more than an hour and we had already had 4+ coffees. It was safe to say we were buzzing!

Firstly we watched the start of the semi-finals of the Coffee Masters. For those who are not sure what Coffee Masters is, it is a multi-discipline competition which is a pretty big deal in the coffee world. The top baristas go head to head in each discipline to get the highest overall score. The disciplines are cupping, brewing, latte art, the order challenge, signature drink, espresso blend and the origin.   

It’s a seriously cool competition go check out the website - http://www.coffeemasters.org

Anyway, back to the festival. By an hour and a half in, Sophie was all coffeed up but I was still going strong. Because, hey, its free quality specialty coffee, why not, right?

We also got to try the espresso blend Caravan supplied for the Coffee Masters. It was perfect.

 Another highlight of the day had to be the Latte Art live area where we got to watch and take part in producing fantastic coffee art with the British Coffee Art champion Dhan Tamang. Just watching this guy work was pretty special. How he makes it look so easy and relaxed. Trust me its not as easy and simple as they make it look! 

All Press - a London based coffee roaster also let me have a play with their La Marzocco Linea Mini espresso machine which in all seriousness puts my lovely home set up to shame. Such quality and brilliance in a compact form, although you would expect that from a £3.5k machine. Yes £3,500 pounds for you to make a coffee at home, people. I’ll pop it on my Christmas list...

All day there was music coming from everywhere in the venue and the live bands were great. The food was absolutely spot on. Basically the whole atmosphere and vibe was completely as you would expect. Super chilled but with a flurry of enthusiastic people having a great time. It’s great to step into a world such as coffee and see it as lively and popular as this. You need to check out the highlights video which has just gone live! See the link - www.londoncoffeefestival.com/Home

I'm  already looking forward to next year! 

Coffee anyone?

Also a quick congratulations to James Wise for winning the Coffee Masters competition!