freebie » Pete Drinks

A return to Bewley’s this week – the Irish tea and coffee importers whose Panama we’ve featured before. Although based in Ireland, the coffee is fairly widely available in the UK as well.

This is the Araku India coffee, grown in the Araku Valley in Andhra Pradesh. Unlike some of their range, it’s nice to see that this is a Fairtrade product.

The grounds have a rich aroma, with dark fruits and old wood and just a touch of molasses. Brewed, the sweetness and the fruit is somewhat lost, and the old wood comes through more strongly.

There’s a richness to the flavour too, with warm dark fruits slowly yielding to a long lasting but gentle tannic bitter finish. The depth of flavour and full body makes me wonder a little about the strength 4 label, but it manages to keep that bitterness nicely subdued.

Overall a very drinkable coffee that deserves 3 stars.

Many thanks to Bord Bia for these samples.

Aromo Coffee are a company that primarily focus on producing coffee in ‘pods’ for those fancy coffee machines. There seems to be quite a range of different shaped pods for various machines, and by the looks of it they have the whole range covered.

I’ll be honest – I don’t understand the point of those machines in a domestic setting. They seem to be an expensive way of restricting yourself to only drinking coffee that comes in the right packaging, and it’s not like making coffee with my trusty Aeropress is particularly complex or messy.

Still, as comments on last week’s post proved not everybody shares my scepticism.

For us luddites, however, Aromo do produce some of their coffee in ground form – although not the full range.

This is Bounce, a strength 5 blend of Brazilian Daterra Bourbon and Sumatran Mahandeling beans. Before I get to the coffee itself, I feel obliged to talk about the packaging.

Packaging performs two basic tasks – it contains the product, and it attracts the consumer. While this bag certainly contained the coffee very effectively, what the hell were Aromo thinking when they came up with this artwork? How does “crazy pouty woman” possibly say to any potential customer “this is going to be a rich, fulfilling coffee”?

The entire range appears to feature a variety of overacting models in different poses, but at least the rest of them look happy – the branding for Bounce makes me wonder what the hell I’m letting myself in for.

Ok, rant over.

The grounds themselves have a nice rich aroma – dark toasted grain, a warm, almost apricot like fruitiness and an undercurrent of dark bitter chocolate. Brewed, the fruit is lost, but there’s still the warm toasted notes coming through nicely.

In the mouth, it’s a very tasty, well balanced coffee – rich and fruity, countered perfectly by a satisfying but short-lived bitter finish. The chocolate aroma doesn’t really put in an appearance in the flavour, but it’s a minor niggle.

I’ll be honest – the branding is such a turn-off, a part of me wanted the coffee to be terrible too, but it’s not. It’s really very nice, and easily deserves 3.5 stars. And for those of you living in the future, with your pod machine things, it’s great to see a company producing a range of coffees in a useable form.

But I’m going to fine Aromo half a star for that packaging – not something I want snarling out of the cupboard at me!

Many thanks to Aromo Coffee for the sample coffee.

Bettys are perhaps better known for their Tea Rooms, and for the fact that they own Taylors of Harrogate. However, they have a separate online presence and even have their own range of coffees, and they were kind enough to send a sample my way.

This is their Peruvian Pangoa, a medium-dark roasted coffee from the Ashaninka region. This is one of the areas where the wonderfully named Yorkshire Rainforest Project works, so it’s nice to see that 10% of the price of this coffee goes to the project.

The grounds have a nice rich aroma of milk chocolate and redcurrants, an undercurrent of toasted nut and just a hint of pipe tobacco.

On brewing, the toasted nuttiness comes through more clearly and there’s still a fruitiness, but the chocolate has gone.

It’s not a particularly sweet coffee in the mouth and the fruit from the aroma doesn’t really put in much of an appearance. That said, it’s got a decent body to it, and the nutty character comes through nicely. The finish is short but nicely bitter, with a distinctly tannic hit.

Initially pleasant but unremarkable, this coffee has grown on me over time – easy drinking, but complex enough to stand out from the crowd, this earns 3.5 stars.

On a slightly different note, can I make a plea to all online coffee retailers – if you’re going to include photographs of coffee beans, could you make them of the actual beans and not just a random generic “beans” image? I say this because Bettys have clearly used exactly the same photograph for this, their Nepal Snow River and Ethiopian Mocha Limu coffees.

To be fair, this is hardly an issue unique to Bettys – I actually struggle to think of any online shop that doesn’t do this – and it’s not like anyone actually buys coffee based on how it looks, but it (perhaps irrationally) annoys me.

Many thanks to Bettys for the sample.

Bewley’s are an Irish company who have been operating for four generations. They started out importing tea, but soon added coffee to their repertoire. Bord Bia have been kind enough to send Pete Drinks some of their range to sample.

This is Panama, a strength 4 coffee grown on the slopes of the Baru volcano. I’m not sure I’ve ever had a coffee from Panama, so it will be interesting to see what it’s like.

The grounds are quite dark, with a rich fruity aroma of dark berries, a hint of tobacco smoke and an undercurrent of bitter dark chocolate. Brewed, it’s more of the same – a rich, fruity aroma with some tobacco and very little sweetness.

It’s a decent coffee in the mouth; rich and darkly roasted, with some fairly deep bitterness coming through the subtle dark fruits. I find it a touch unbalanced, lacking the sweetness that it needs to hold the bitterness in check – it is perhaps more deeply roasted than my tastebuds prefer.

Overall it’s a tasty cup, but it’s not setting my world alight and earns 2.5 stars.

New London breweries continue to appear almost weekly, which makes my attempt to maintain a list of them increasingly futile. This is, however, the sort of problem I relish!

One of the newest kids on the block is Shamblemoose – so new in fact that at the time of writing, they’re still in the process of moving into their brewery. They’re one of two outfits who will be brewing out of the same premises down in Penge, sharing the space with Late Knights.

Last month they launched their first beer down at the Union Tavern – a pretty awesome pub that serves an impressive range of London beer and probably deserves a post all of its own – and I headed down to try a pint or two.

The beer in question is their #4 American Brown Ale; the picture probably says everything there is to say about it. I failed to keep more than half a pint in the glass long enough to take a picture.

It’s good.

Breweries tend to split into ‘traditional’ – brown ales with English hops and CAMRA approval, and ‘funky’ – pale hop bombs where every hop has to begin with a ‘C’ and every pint has to come out of a keg.

Shamblemoose have deliberately taken a middle ground. The beer is named perfectly; it’s a very traditional, approachable Brown Ale with a sweet caramel character perfectly balanced out by a slowly building but not aggressive hop bitterness. Those hops are all American, sweet citrus and floral aromas; but they’re subtle, at the sort of level you’d expect in a Brown Ale.

The balance is perfect and genuinely different, and I take it as a good sign that Shamblemoose have something new to bring to the table. I can’t wait for them to start growing their range, not least because I heard mention of a Smoked Porter – something that requires a real deftness of touch, which they appear to have in spades.

I’m not normally a huge fan of cocktails; I’d rather have a simple beer or wine than some of the more ‘imaginative’ drinks that some bars come up with (beer cocktails, particularly, bemuse me beyond belief).

However, when the folks at The Forge & Foundry down in Camden invited Pete Drinks to visit they tempted us with talk of Espresso Martinis. Coffee and booze, as we’ve already established, can be an excellent combination.

The Forge & Foundry is actually two venues in one – The Foundry is their restaurant and bar, while The Forge is a small music and and performance venue in the same building providing an impressively diverse range of events.

This is their Espresso Martini, looking like a rather scarily large espresso with a rich crema and some extra beans to top it off. And I’m happy to say it’s a seriously coffee-y drink, with Kahlua and a fresh espresso contributing to a rich, bitter coffee which balances perfectly against the strong vodka kick.

The coffee comes from the Camden Coffee Shop, a fantastic looking old-fashioned coffee roasters a couple of doors down from the restaurant. George, the owner there, roasts his beans on the premises and produces a unique blend of Brazilian coffee for the Forge & Foundry. Sadly the shop has been closed every time I’ve been in the area; but I hope to visit when they’re open soon.

We sampled some of their other cocktails too – Kavey was a big fan of the Cherry Drop cocktail of the month – and both their alcoholic and non-alcoholic offerings are well balanced, richly flavoured without any component becoming dominant.

Combined with some good food, interesting performances and an easy walk from Camden Town tube, not to mention some delicious coffee, it’s hard to imagine that we wont be back for another martini!

Pete Drinks was a guest of The Forge & Foundry

Pete Drinks

Coffee: Bewley’s Araku India

Coffee: Aromo Bounce

Coffee: Bettys Peruvian Pangoa

Coffee: Bewley’s Panama

Shamblemoose Brewery

Espresso Martinis at The Forge & Foundry

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