I have a love-hate relationship with blogs and socialmedia. The need to be seen and heard and talked-about is perhaps common among human beings and has always existed somehow but the latest advances in technology (internet, digital photography, free blogging, sharing and networking tools) has made our wish to be seen, heard and talked-about very easily achievable and almost a dominant trait in us, in society. If you don’t post it, it never happened. If you don’t have X number of followers, you don’t exist.

My initial main purpose setting up a blog named portafilth was not so much to make noise and to be seen or heard but more a defensive move to stop annoying facebook friends with my frequent picturepostings in the coffeeporn album. An album full of close range low resolution mobile phone pictures taken on visits to out of town coffeebars, a way for me to remember the details of those trips and perhaps brag a little about the cool places where I had my cups of coffee.

So let’s get back on track and do some bragging again shall we? A filthy little travelreport about: OtotheStotheLtotheO = OSLO! Yeah!

Reading blogs and tweets, one might be led to believe that coffee in Norway is centered around Grünerløkka and the boutique specialty roastery/coffeebar named after almost-rockstarbarista and roaster Tim Wendelboe. This is, well at least in MY eyes, wrong. But TW was nonetheless one of the main pitstops for my 28hour Oslo visit last weekend. And TW did not disappoint.

The space is very nice, simple, functional, clean. Serving only coffee, selling coffeebeans and a very limited range of brewing equipment. We tried the sampling menu with all of the current five single origin coffees, all as Aeropress. It was really lovelly to have 5 great coffees served at your table, presented in such a beautiful yet relaxed way and most impressive was that all five coffees were brewed consistently, almost perfect. Sure the Kenyan coffees were slightly slightly too lightroasted even for me but still a great visit.

My Oslo favorite (we visited 3 times in 12 hours) was Fugeln dating from the late 60s, mixing vintage design pieces with great modern artwork, serving great coffee from not less than four Oslo roasters: Solberg & Hansen, Kaffa, Supreme Roastworks and your man Tim Wendelboe. Wine, beer and fancy fancy cocktails are also served. Even though Fugeln is trendy and well designed in a 60s Scandinavian Airlines way it does not appear over-designed, it actually feels like a home, you feel welcome. After over 40 years in Oslo they are now planning to open a second outlet in Tokyo.

Java coffeebar was perhaps my favorite coffeebar designwise: A long functional bar, open, big windows letting the sun in, beautiful mosaic walls and cool industrial lamps bolted to the ceiling reminding me of one of my favorite games Portal. Serving coffee from Kaffa in espressoform but also V60 and Syphon.

Another favvo place was Liebling: a nicely designed cafe slash design shop serving breakfast and coffees from Supreme Roastworks. Laid back, friendly and with some great details

Question: What 1M city can boast having a local coffeechain with 20 something outlets focusing on Cup of Excellence coffees? Answer: Oslo! Kaffebrenneriet is that chain. The few places I visited all offered not less than five cup of excellence coffees! When speaking to the Oslo baristas they actually didn’t recommend going here, that says a lot about the general quality of specialty coffee in Oslo.

Stockfleths is another local Oslo chain, clearly quality and specialty focused, with the first cafe dating back to 1895, serving beans roasted by Solberg & Hansen. To me Stockfleths and Solberg & Hansen is better respresentatives of Oslo coffee than Tim Wendelboe: Laid back, Old School companies not linked to any wave, hyped up and boosted by catchphrases on the internets. Institutions with traditions that have managed to keep up with the times with the same general high level of quality coffee today as when they were founded, well the last part is my guess I have no idea how the coffee tasted back then, but you get my point.

To sum up: Oslo is a very pleasant coffee experience, generally very high quality of brewing and coffee in general, a good selection of different local roasters and some lovelly designed spaces and great service..all in a pretty small town/city. Impressive. To me a very worthy Coffee Capital of Scandinavia, only challenged in Europe by London?

theDotheyevenHAVEspotifyinNorwayPlaylist

Rebecca & Fiona – If She Was Away
Fleetwood Mac – Everywhere
The Pierces – You’ll Be Mine

Last Sunday there was this big thing called the World Barista Championship (WBC) Final in Bogotá, Colombia. It was the first time EVER this coffee spectacle was held in a coffeeproducing country and it was the fist time EVER a barista from a coffeeproducing country won and apparently it was the best WBC….like….. EVER.

But do people care? Or have we lost interest as this frank post from coffeegeek Mark Prince indicates?

I am a coffeenerd and I still somehow care about WBC; studying great baristas fascinates me, I have enjoyed volounteering at national barista comps and at the WBC in London last year as I learned so much about coffee and met a lot of fun people. WBC is still very important as a way to spread best in class technique and practices and a place to gather as an industry once a year, but couldn’t it be more than that?

Let’s be honest, The WBC and most coffee competions are not relevant to the great public, media, the regular coffee enthusiast, home barista or even most specialty coffee professionals. WBC type of barista competitions are difficult to understand, the rules and scoring system are unknown by most and they are often boring to watch.

But now stop the grumpiness and negativity and focus on making improvements. OK, I will expand on Mark Prince’s ideas on how to sexy up WBC and list six ideas on how to make the competition simpler to understand, sexier, more fun:

| Provide Taste/Judging Transparancy by letting judges provide prompt feedback and scores. Judges tell barista and audience how the drink tasted directly at consumption, if you really love the espresso, say so! If it is bad, don’t just sit there and make notes! Feedback is GOOD! When time is out, judges consult max 2mins while the barista is interviewed by the MC/Host and then the induvidual judges provide score 1-10 using some visual signs. This will make it more fun and exciting to watch?

|| Simplify: Bring down the number of judges to 3 or max 4 including the headjudge, remove the technical judges that often disturb the barista and audience and let the sitting sensory judges cover their job too. There are too many people running round at stage at competitions, it is confusing and resource-consuming. Competitors have such great technique nowadays, technical judges are not needed.

||| Let the judges interact with the competitor and the audience, give them mics and let them talk. Judges are often interesting coffee-personalities and it would be fun hearing their views and opinions on technique, taste and other matters. Learn from TV shows like Masterchef, Idol, America Got Talent etc, cheesy but fun.

|||| Publish detailed scores digitally with no delay. Keep the audience interested in the scoring throughout the competition: who is leading now, with how many points? This is pretty easy to accomplish with today’s technology. Not only total scores but data/stats that explains why a certain barista made it to semifinals and not the other, who got the tastiest espresso so far, what does the Japanese barista need to improve on in the final to win? I still don’t understand why Sweden’s Alexander Ruas just placed 42nd in this year’s WBC, was his espresso bitter, the latteart on his capu flawed or was his presentation lacking something? I want to know!

||||| Introduce a blind-tasting part of the competitions. If specialty-coffee is supposed to be all about the taste and not about great presentation, storytelling and packaging, then let first part of the competition be blind for the judges, let them taste the drinks without knowing who prepared it and hear the barista dictating what the drink should taste like.

|||||| Customer Focus Design the stage-setup, the competition schedule, etc etc around what’s best for the customer =the audience. We are in a service industry, we should be good at this. Our main competition should not be made to suit the judges and the competitors, it should be designed with the audience in mind; fun, fastpaced, educating, entertaining.

OK that’s the first six that came into my mind, I am sure there are more? and some good ideas on how to go about to make a change to keep WBC alive, current, relevant, sexy?

The I’m Bringing 1990 Back Playlist

Innercity – Pennies From Heaven
Soul II Sould – Geta Life
Crystal Waters – 100% Pure Love

So I started working for a coffeecompany but instead of buying coffee I have been buying glasses lately. What’s up with that? Well it’s not ANY glasses, the first one is called SG-120 and does not only have the coolest blip blop name but is probably the most beautiful cortado glass you will ever drink from, only our Japanese friends can make glassware look so delicate, so light.

The second glass is perhaps my all-time favorite piece of glassware, The glass is called Unie and is simple, balanced, practically unbreakable and is a great representative of democratic timeless design, not only beacuse it’s manufactured in France but because of it’s reasonable price. Unie has up until very soon been really hard to find in Sweden, you might have tried a certain cowboy-latte served in the 250cc version; I have bought my little collection at different second hand shops and from the sell-out event after the main hotel in my home town mysteriously burned down.

So why all this glass nonsense? Well I did not post this just to promote these beautiful glasses and brag about bringing them to Sweden but tarther to ask the question: Is the glass Half Empty as our friend Mr Filth suggests in the picture above or Half Full as his friend Mrs Porta thinks?

Throughout my life I have been a very successful Mr Filth, good at finding issues with other peoples ideas, great at critizizing, finding faults, complaining, coming with suggestions and improvements. Looking at things from a critical point of view is often productive if done correctly and in a balanced way; Mr Filth is needed in many situations, he often plays an important role.

But it’s not always that fun being the grumpy, never smiling, devils advocate the whole time, sometimes too much negativity just stops developments and progression and I personally have been too much seeing just the emptiness in the glass. Soooooo The last year or so I have tried to chill out more and I THINK I have become more like Ms Porta. Don’t worry I am still a man, I just checked, and I am not green, checked that too, but I have tried to be more positive, trying to look at the glass in a more postive light, looking at it as being half-full, or even somtimes pretending that it is soon three quarters full while focusing on trying to fill it up. I might not have made great progress yet, but I am working on it.

When it comes to coffee, specialty-coffee and specialty coffee in Sweden I am Ms Porta all the way though. Regardless of some rather negative thoughts reflected latelly on some blogs that I follow:

Syn City’s Jesper once again shown his impatience with developments in Sweden, declaring that Swedish media does not get specialty coffee and that we need to “step up our game”.

Da Mateo Matts is looking back at 2005 in nostalgia, stating that specialty coffee in Sweden has been dismantled since 2005 and he wonders when we will start building again.

Schack-Svart Henrik points the finger at Stockholm’s coffeebars and states that they are too few and not good enough.

All threee posts are a good read, have many valid points but as the positive Porta creature I am now trying to be I must say – DUDES! Chill, you are too negative! Sweden is a beautiful coffee-nation, Stockholm is a great coffee city. 2011 is better than 2005.

Sure if the purpose of your posts are to gather interest, create debate and bring the troops together to build a better future then OK, I’m with you but then let’s do it for real, not just on blogs, twitter and facebook As far as I understand we could accomplish most things mentioned in your posts if we just take it step by step with a positive attitude:

Let’s work together on a media-strategy to get great stories published by Swedish and International media. Believe the Hype!

Let’s create one or a couple of industry seminars as the one in 2005 mentioned by Matts or the Irish initiative with the ugly name described by Jesper.

Let’s try to be creative around how we can push the stockholm coffeescene further, let’s do some more/better events/things and prepare Henrik until he later opens that cool elitist coffeebar.

ending on a positive note with the nineteenth portafilth spotify playlist:

Young Galaxy – We Have Everything
Atmosphere – She’s Enough
Jonathan Johansson – Aldrig Ensam