The London Coffee Festival 2014 – Bespoke Water
September 16, 2014
So, a whole year has passed since we first launched the Bespoke Water division within Pendred Retail at The London Coffee Festival. There was not the remotest chance we weren’t going to return to the scene of the crime, and so this year we occupied a stand just a few along from where we were last year.
Once again we were blessed with the help from industry friends; Marco lent us one of their fabulous uber boilers (good job as our stand now has an uber sized hole in it) – we want a Splurty next year, and our lovely customers Caravan gave us some delicious beans to brew up; I hope they don’t mind that we destroyed half of it with dirty London water…. :-0 We offered something on the non trade days in the form of Blue Crow Media London’s Independent Coffee Maps which we had for sale on the stand.
We had a rotation of friendly baristas on the bar, preparing chemex after chemex of water taste demonstrations to visitors to the show. Rather than the two varying TDS levels within a happy range that we showcased last year, we kept it a bit more simple, brewing with water straight out of the tap against water filtered through our reverse osmosis units. Luckily most of the public were emphatic in their surprise at the difference in flavour, in particular, a couple of guys from Edinburgh were amazed at how ‘heavy’ tasting the coffee was brewed with London tap water, blessed as they are with very low mineral water themselves.
Ant and Ben from Black Box Coffee, located normally on the Floripa site, were generous with their time and banter. We also had guest shifts from James, who’s coffee bar at Lyles is our latest install and opening at the end of this month; Bruno, who flits through the industry providing support in many ways, from barista coaching to bar design and project consultation; we even caught James Hoffman, of Square Mile, making a morning brew before the UKBC finals.
Thanks to The London Coffee Festival, over four hectic days, we managed to brew and taste a load of delicious different coffees, mingle with exhibitors (not forgetting those epic coffee parties) , supply delicious RO water to Bewley’s/Grumpy Mule and Has Bean Steve for his Ibrik performance. We spoke to a large proportion of the ridiculous 22,632 number of visitors who walked through those doors, hopefully shared some of our water knowledge, and ultimately will sell some more of our systems.
See you at the next one!
