Carl Bjorkstrand visits Gruppo Cimbali in Milan and MUMAC

Just recently, Carl Bjorkstrand, La Cimbali UK’s Managing Director enjoyed his visit to the Gruppo Cimbali headquarters in Milan, along with a visit to the Museum of Espresso Coffee Machines (MUMAC). He reports that he was impressed by the versatility and use of the MUMAC facility and that visiting never feels like work because the people are welcoming and also share his love and passion for coffee!

The headquarters of Gruppo Cimbali is located in Binasco, near Milan. The building is 46,000 sqm indoors and has a total area of 85,000 sqm., housing four production facilities.

The MUMAC opened in 2012 as a celebration of Gruppo Cimbali’s 100 years. It was the largest and first of its kind for exhibiting the culture and history of professional espresso coffee machines. It presents an overview of more than 200 coffee machines and 15,000 documents and valuable audio-visual materials, which are displayed in a way to ensure maximum viewing and engagement.

As well as a museum for coffee machines, MUMAC is also a centre for coffee excellence and training. Whist there, there was a lot of activity in the cupping room where a well-known Italian artisan roaster – Paolo Scimone was roasting and cupping Arabica beans from the highlands of China. It’s very unusual for this coffee to reach Europe, so it was interesting to see how Paolo was homing in on the best roasting parameters.

Cimbali are always hosting people from different areas of the coffee world, and positively encourage them to come and make use of the great facilities that we have to increase coffee knowledge for everyone.”

For more information regarding MUMAC please visit:

www.mumac.it

For more information regarding Gruppo Cimbali please visit:

www.gruppocimbali.com

Success for La Cimbali Activities for the First Half of the Year!

It has certainly been a productive first half of year for La Cimbali with the success of the special coffee shows and events that they have been involved with.

The first event for 2015, held last January, was SIGEP which was held in Rimini, Italy. There were over 175,000 visitors that came from all over the world to witness the show. This was the 36^th annual event; it was a show that has everything under one roof and also included the Italian Barista Championship. La Cimbali was happy to be part of the unique fair trade.

The next event was the Gulfood Show in Dubai, dubbed as the world’s largest food and hospitality show. There were around 5,000 companies that exhibited at the event. The La Cimbali team from Italy had a great spot in the main hall where they were able to demonstrate their top performing coffee machines, which included the award-winning M100 HD and M1.

In March, it was the first time for La Cimbali to participate in ScotHot. This show runs every two years and it is also the biggest catering and hospitality show in Scotland. Their stand was at the SECC, Glasgow, and right opposite the stage where the UK Barista Championships took place. Suffice to say that the atmosphere around was buzzing! La Cimbali took their M34 and M100 HD coffee machines, and Matt Lasek and Rob Ward showed how they could be used for all types of businesses.

La Cimbali love being at The London Coffee Festival, which was the event that officially launched UK Coffee week. This vibrant show brought together coffee lovers, professional baristas, foodies, and coffee shop owners who love anything and everything coffee!

During Cimbali’s Coffee Flight Sensory Experience, which ran across all four days, they demonstrated how using technology and different approaches to coffee extraction, they could take one coffee and produce four distinctly different drinks. It was really popular with visitors and they can’t wait to be part of this festival again next year.

Right after the The London Coffee Festival, the next show was the Caffe Culture which celebrated its 10^th year. La Cimbali were delighted to sponsor and support the Coffee in Good Spirits competition with their M100 coffee machines and Magnum On-Demand grinders. The competition brought many top Bar Tenders and Baristas together who created lots of amazing coffee and alcohol inspired signature drinks.

Running from May right through until end of October, Milan is the host city for Expo this year. The team from Gruppo Cimbali was thrilled to be part of the TuttoFood event at Expo Milano, and showcasing their latest coffee machines and accessories was one of the most important events in their calendar this year.

Europe’s biggest event – the SCAE Nordic World of Coffee took place in Gothenburg, Sweden. It was the SCAE’s largest exhibition ever and some of the best Baristas, Roasters and Trainers in the business ran a series of sessions over the three days. La Cimbali’s Sensory Science demonstrations were really popular and they were overwhelmed by the sheer number of international visitors.

Not long now until Cup North where they will be one of the official sponsors of Tamper Tantrum. La Cimbali are really excited to be part of this great event again.

For more information regarding Cup North please visit:

www.cupnorth.co.uk

For more information regarding Tamper Tantrum please visit:

www.tampertantrum.com

La Cimbali One of the Sponsors for Cup North 2015

It’s that time of the year again for the Cup North 2015 event. La Cimbali UK will once again take the title of one of the sponsors of this event. This year, it will be held on 7-8 November at the Victoria Warehouse, Manchester. They promise that this year, they will be better than ever.

This year, there will be three sponsors for the event and La Cimbali is proud to be one of them, especially for the Tamper Tantrum forum. This forum is dedicated to broadcasting incredible stories, opinions, data and theories from the coffee industry to a worldwide audience, encouraging learning and debate.

This event will surely be a great opportunity for La Cimbali to showcase the changing and growing coffee scene in the North of England. Last year, they have also had success during the event.

For more information regarding Cup North please visit:

www.cupnorth.co.uk

For more information regarding Tamper Tantrum please visit:

www.tampertantrum.com

Cleaner Arteries when You Drink Regular Cups of Coffee?

In the past, there have been numerous studies that attributed coffee as one of the factors that contribute to heart disease. It was an argument back then when coffee was thought to cause high cholesterol and also elevated blood pressure in drinkers.

A recent study by Korean researchers has said otherwise. This study has once again opened the debate about whether coffee is good for the heart or not.

This could be good news for coffee drinkers as this study involves coffee drinking and clean arteries. They found that those who regularly drink coffee have arteries that could be unclogged, decreasing the chances of heart disease, based on the 25,000 respondents, both men and women, who had routine checks performed at their workplace.

The study showed that the participants who drank between 3 to 5 cups of coffee in a day showed better results on their medical scans.

The researchers used medical scans to look for any diseases of the arteries that supply the heart. In coronary disease the arteries become clogged up by the gradual build-up of fatty materials within their walls. Tiny deposits of calcium in the walls can be an early indication that this disease may be starting.

The results showed that none of the employees in the Korean study had outward signs of heart disease but that more than one in 10 did have visible calcium deposits.

The researchers then compared the scan results with the employees’ self-reported daily coffee consumption, taking into account other potential heart risk factors such as exercise, smoking and family history of heart problems. The final results showed that people who drank a few cups of coffee a day were less likely to have calcium deposits in their coronary arteries than people who drank more than this or no coffee at all.

As a recommendation for the results of the study, there is more research needed to confirm this link as other factors such as gender, location, diet and lifestyle have not been included in the study.

For more details regarding this research please visit:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-31690358

La Cimbali’s Great Experience at the Nordic World of Coffee Show

The Nordic World of Coffee Show took place in Gothenburg City. Being Sweden’s second biggest city, it has often been described as the ‘Little London’. This was the perfect destination for the event because it was a central location with world-class restaurants, hangouts and a lively café culture.

The week started with the RE:CO Symposium, led by James Hoffman, CEO of Square Mile Coffee Roasters. This even brought together industry links and expertise from the SCAE and the SCAA. Hoffman, who is also a World Barista Champion and Author, has been a main player in trying to create a global view of the coffee industry. Topics that were included in the Symposium were World Coffee Research and the Role of Science and The European Coffee Market. The topics gave delegates the chance to look at coffee scoring and cupping as a global language. In the coffee industry, this helps to give a more open feel to the language.

Camille Delebecque from Afineur was also at the Symposium. His work has been notable on Biotechnology and the manipulation of coffee flavour by using disruptive fermentations before roasting. Rob Ward, La Cimbali’s Coffee Specialist, tried coffee which he described as ‘an incredible lift of strawberry sweetness and reduction of bitters in the cup’. He surely has a few ideas about this for La Cimbali’s coffee farm.

Other highlights during the three days were Charles Spence from Oxford University who was speaking about the multi-sensory experience and coffee, and Morton Münchow from CoffeeMind who had carried out some recent research on specialty coffee and the perception of customer’s taste. The research revealed interesting results, as a good number of people picked a lower grade coffee as a taste reference over a higher grade. This backed up some tests that I had done in the past between fresh and stale coffee, with people choosing what they are used to, and not what tastes better! But this doesn’t mean that we should stop selling and sourcing higher-grade coffee, it just means that we have a greater responsibility for education in everything that we do.

As well as all of this going on, there were the finals of Latte art, Coffee in Good Spirits, Cup Tasters, Brewers Cup and Roasting competitions. Overall, the event was a success and even had a number of international visitors.

La Cimbali are now looking forward to their next shows in Milan and Manchester later on in the year. More details will follow soon…”

Ingredients That Surprisingly Taste Good With Espresso!

Try something new with your Espresso!

Coffee is quite a versatile drink. If you’ve visited a local coffee shop, you have probably seen the number of different concoctions they have to serve their customers. Coffee can be mixed with many things and they still taste good and refreshing for aficionados. Therefore, here we once again recognise a number of ingredients that will taste good with espresso.

Inspired by the love for chocolate Easter eggs, La Cimbali released a blog a couple of months ago that contains a list of five favourite foods that went well with espresso. Therefore today, they have once again come up with another list of things or ingredients that can be added to espressos. The things in this list may be a big unusual, but they will still help in producing great-tasting coffee.

Normally, we associate good coffee with common ingredients such as cream, milk and sugar. Of course, we can’t forget that there are also those of us who love our black coffee.

Here are a few suggestions that the La Cimbali team at the Elstree headquarters have thought of and they think that these are definitely worth a try.

Butter

Adding butter to your espresso is a bit crazy… but wellness experts swear by it! Particularly in the morning, this buttery drink is said to provide energy to keep you going for the rest of the day, and some people even drink buttery coffee to replace their breakfast! But adding butter to hot drinks is not a new health craze – as in Tibet the locals have been adding butter, salt and black pepper to their tea for years, and in Singapore, low quality coffee beans are often stir fried in butter in a wok before being strained through a filter.

Coconut Milk

For those of you who crave a non-dairy latte, why not try making your espressos with a dash of coconut milk. It provides an interesting alternative to regular milk or cream, with a strong flavour that comes through from the very first sip!

Egg

Mixing raw egg with your coffee in the morning may not be top of your ‘to do’ list, but in the Nordic countries of Scandinavia, many coffee drinkers add an egg to their coffee to clarify and colour it without leaving any sediment. 

Salt

Salt is known to be a good addition to coffee as it softens the bitterness. Some people even add salt directly to their grounds before brewing, but good coffee beans shouldn’t need it. If you let your coffee go cold…. adding a pinch of salt can perk up the flavour again.

Alcohol

We all know how great coffee tastes with Whisky, Kahlua and Tia Maria, but have you ever considered adding Vodka! In Sweden there is a traditional drink that involves adding strong distilled liquor to coffee, which is similar to Vodka. This certainly puts a kick into a regular espresso!

This list may be a bit strange for some. There may be a few who will not be too excited to try adding these items to their morning coffee. However, you will never know if they taste great or not. If it doesn’t, then it’s as easy as just serving up another, normal cup of coffee for you.

Try something new with your espressos today!

The Gruppo Cimbali plans for next week’s Nordic World of Coffee event!

Events that involve coffee are great events. They are not only a social affair, but also a good venue for learning more about coffee, and this will definitely happen at the Nordic World of Coffee event. It’s only a few more days until the doors will open at the SCAE Nordic World of Coffee. This is one of the biggest coffee events in the whole Europe and it will take place at the Swedish Exhibition and Conference Centre in Gothenburg. It is expected to be the largest event ever held at the SCAE.

Rob Ward, the resident Coffee Specialist at La Cimbali, along with his team from Gruppo Cimbali has a lot of plans for this event. They have expressed their excitement for the things they have prepared for their stand.

During the past few months, the Cimbali team has been working hard to make sure that everything will be ready for the occasion. For the 3-day event, there will be a series of sessions where the best trainers, baristas and roasters in the business will be showing their skills.

We are thrilled to announce that on our stand we will have:

·        Benjamin Graff, who is the current Austrian Latte Champion who will be running a Latte Art Masterclass with tips and tricks on how to improve creativity and consistency

·        Filippo Mazzoni, who is the Mumac Academy Training Centre Manager who will run a session on ‘Customising your Pressure Profile’ – a practical way to assess and extract the most from your espresso

·        Jonathan Morris, who is a professor and historian who will discuss how the E61 changed the world by providing an intriguing look at the history of the espresso coffee machine

·        Francesco Sanapo, who is a previous Italian Barista Champion trainer and self confessed all round coffee lover, who will deliver a session not to be missed – simply called ‘An audience with Francesco Sanapo!’

As a plus, Rob Ward will also let their customers experience the Sensory Science so that visitors will be able to understand more about flavour and taste, as well as the methods for brewing that will influence them.

The Gruppo Cimbali stand – located at D8 & E7, can be found just inside the main entrance doors and over to the right.

The SCAE Nordic World of Coffee opens on Tuesday 16 June, Wednesday 17 June and Thursday 18 June, from 10am-5pm.

For more details please visit: www.worldofcoffee-nordic.com