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Kyle has been knee deep in rehearsal for his show thats opening this weekend, so I am left the task of trying to encompass our incredible, action-packed week spent in Greece, consulting for the ambitious men behind Evergreen Casual Food Bar. I’d started to write this post at the airport in Athens - this is what I’d managed to crank out:

its nearly 5am in Athens on what is for me sunday morning. I’ve been up for the last 20 hours straight and am sitting in the airport with my pile of luggage waiting to check in for an Air France flight to Paris. I feel as though I could pass out at any moment. My convoluted travel itinerary will have me back in Seattle 26 hours from now. I’m pretty sure my usual difficulty with sleeping on planes will be overcome…

I don’t have the presence of mind to fully recount everything that happened this week, but many elements stand out in my caffeine-addled mind. Some words in my lexicon have been overused this week - “optimization” coming out of my mouth so often that it now appears in almost every potential context. Both Kyle and I have taken to speaking in a manner similar to that of our hosts - sentence structures changing in some way that I’ve not been able to correct even in my internal monologue. Some subtle indoctrination into this place seems to have occurred…

From this I went on to gush about how awesome our hosts were and how inspiring the experience had been, but I’ll spare my readers such delirious prose. Eventually I came to be back in good ol’ Seattle, hallucinating mildly from sleep deprivation.

The original training itinerary Kyle and I had concocted was intimidating. Five days packed tight with espresso preparation, cupping exercises, roasting theory, menu development, bar flow design… a massive knowledge dump, a hit-and-run consultation marathon, a one-shot one-kill assassination attempt. The first days had some setbacks and frustrations. The roaster was not yet operational, some of the coffees we’d brought to work with didn’t survive the trip, and much of our activities had to be executed amid the chaos of individual schedules, construction, and acts of god. But the passion, enthusiasm, commitment, and ambition of these guys was enough of a spark to keep us marching ahead.

On the roasting end, we made up for lost time by roasting late into the night following the first test batches, which were promising. Their Diedrich IR7 was equipped with an automation system - an investment they made mostly for its datalogging potential. Roasting manually on this machine was a bitch - the touch screen being finicky, the important data hard to read, the granularity it presented in the controls proving to be false, and its live profiling chart at too low a resolution to be of any value. It took a few roasts for me to adapt to this handicap but ultimately I found a groove and worked through a full batch of each of the excellent green coffees we had at our disposal. By this point in the week I’d planned to give Antonis some profiling exercises and was instead merely hoping to figure the machine out enough to get a couple of batches palatable enough to drink.

Cupping these coffees the next morning, less than 8 hours after they’d been roasted my expectations were low. As it turned out, they were all quite astonishingly good, giving us more options for blending than we’d imagined possible. Each coffee was pulled as a single origin shot, tasted by all and discussed at length, pushing the limits of caffeine tolerance and palate fatigue.

We talked through some blending philosophies and worked out many potential blends on paper - some extremely simple or with exaggerated proportions to use as guideposts in our shot pulling marathon. Again the results were astonishingly good for a first iteration, and we feel like we’ve created a good methodology for them to further explore with.

Kyle took Alexis under his wing as his skill, focus, and stamina made him an obvious master barista candidate. Look out European barista stars, Alexis has aims for the competition circuit. The whole crew at Evergreen did an excellent job of handling Kyle’s training assault, pushing us to back up our strict methodologies by explicating our underlying theories.

Though we didn’t see very much of Greece, the experience of drilling down with like-minded coffee geeks was a trip unto itself. Menelaos’ vision and intensity are backed by his insatiable curiosity and knowledge of molecular gastronomy. Antonis has demonstrated a discerning palate and an eagerness to take on the art of roasting with a seriousness rarely encountered. Athens is about to be spoiled by its first taste of third-wave espresso culture.

Some of our top-secret experiments with drink development were cut short but are showing some promise. There is a need to concoct some beverages that will have some of the characteristics of popular greek coffee drinks but at a new level of quality.

There is probably more to say but I’ve bored my readers enough and I’m running out hyperbole. Evergreen is an ambitious, multifaceted, and expensive operation, but I believe it will be wildly successful and that these guys will ultimately make a serious contribution to the coffee craft. You can wade through some of our photos here, here, and also here for maximum redundancy. We miss these guys already and wish them the best of luck in the busy weeks ahead as they prepare to open their doors. A pound of coffee to the first of my 14 readers to pay a visit to Athens and file a report on their progress…

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 5th, 2006 at 7:00 pm and is filed under Coffee, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.