 Hello dear readers! If you regularly read this blog you would know that we have been doing a little spotlight on each of our staff members for the past few weeks. The purpose of this is for you, our customers, to feel more familiar with the people who are making and serving you your coffee! This week we asked Miriam to answer a few questions, so let's get right into it!
Q. Why do you make coffee? A. I make coffee because I love the community that it creates. There’s just something about standing behind the counter taking or making a coffee order that makes asking questions and getting to know new people so fun! Q. What is your go-to order right now? A. A flat white with hazelnut on oat milk! Q. What do you want to do with coffee in the future? A. I want to continue to use coffee to build an atmosphere of community and belonging. I think everyone deserves a place to call home and a group to call family, so I want to create a space where people can find that! Q. What country do you really want to visit and why? A. I really want to visit Greece and Malta because they are so beautiful and have a lot of history attached to them! Q. How many siblings do you have and what was your favorite part about growing up with them? A. I have 6 siblings- one brother (he is the oldest) and 5 older sisters. My favorite part of growing up with them was the holidays. We had some fun traditions and lots of food! Fun fact: the only vehicle large enough to fit us was a 12 passenger GMC white van that we would pile into in birth order! We love having Miriam as a part of our team, she is incredibly skilled in making coffee and is such a joy to be around! We hope you have a beautiful and restful weekend and we look forward to seeing you when you come into The Meeting Place Cafe! Be sure to tell us that you follow our blog! Blessings, TMPC
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 Good Afternoon! For this weeks blog post, we would like to continue our staff spotlight! Joanna has been with us for about three months and is also one of our baristas! Here are some questions we asked her!
Q. Why do you make coffee? A. I love the atmosphere it creates. Coffee has a great way of bringing people together and creating a chill environment where people feel comfortable. Q. How many languages do you speak? A. Three and a half. English, French, Spanish, and learning Portuguese. Q. What is your go-to order right now? A. Cappuccino with hazelnut syrup Q. What do you want to do with coffee in the future? A. I want to open a cafe- hostel that will help broken and abused people get back on their feet, while also giving travelers and community members a safe place to relax and build friendships. Q. What is your favorite food? A. Sushi! Our hope in continuing to share more about our staff team is that you, our customer, will feel more connected to the people who are making and serving you your coffee! Our cafe exists not only to serve you drinks, but also to build relationships with you! Enjoy your weekend and stay safe! Blessings, TMPC  Hello and happy Friday to all of you who are reading this! As you may or may not know, last week we posted a little spotlight on one of our baristas, asking some questions to help you, our customers, get to know the people who are making and serving your coffee! This week we would like to continue with this little series! Ana has been on staff with us for almost nine months and here are some questions we asked her!
Q. Why do you make coffee? A. Because coffee brings people together. There is nothing quite like the feeling of sitting around a table or sitting around the house with people you love and enjoying a good cup of coffee. Coffee is also soothing and comforting when the day seems hard and when there seems to be nothing exciting happening, a coffee break makes everything so much better. Q. How many countries have you been to? A. 17 Q. What is your go to order right now? A. Cappuccino with one pump of vanilla Q. What do you want to do with coffee in the future? A. I want to open a coffee shop along with a bed and breakfast and be able to use it as a ministry to bless the local community but also to provide jobs and a better life for people who are in difficult situations. Q. What is your favorite thing about cafe culture? A. When groups of friends gather and laugh and have a good time over coffee and pastries We look forward to meeting you, don't forget to mention that you have seen our blog when you come in! Blessings, TMPC  Do you want to know a little bit more about the people who are making your coffee here at The Meeting Place Cafe? Well, you're in luck because we are doing a staff spotlight this week on one of our baristas!! Maddie Mae is one of our newest baristas, she joined our team in September of this year! Here are some of the questions we asked her:
Q. Why do you make coffee? A. "It's very exciting to me! The more I learn, the more it intrigues me, and there's so much more to coffee than you would expect there to be." Q. Have you always liked coffee? A. "No. I started to really like coffee at the beginning of this year." Q. What is your favorite drink? A. "Iced caramel latte." Q. What do you want to do with coffee in the future? A. "I want to open my own cafe and have it be a beautiful community where people come to hang out and meet people, but also just enjoy each other and good coffee!" Q. What is your favourite thing about cafe culture? A. "Meeting new people." We look forward to sharing more about our other staff members and we hope that you enjoyed learning a little bit about Maddie! Our staff team is very friendly and loves meeting new people, so please feel welcome to come and hang out with us over a good cup of coffee! Blessings, TMPC Dear readers, this week we would like talk a little bit about coffee roasting! As some of you know, the coffee cherry is picked and then roasted before it actually makes it to the bags of coffee that you purchase from the shops. Coffee beans can be roasted in different ways such as light, medium, and dark, and the flavour of your coffee largely depends on the roasting process. “it is for the home brewer, perhaps the most important stage of the entire chain of events that takes us from farm to cup” “roasting the coffee beans.. this keenly observed and succinct process that gracefully traverses the line between science and art..” As you may be thinking, this is a very complex process that requires skill and diligence. After the coffee is picked from the farm, the roasters will buy it. Many roasters, but not all, will take into consideration the sustainability and ethics of the farm. Roasting coffee requires much skill and can very easily be messed up, this is why the roaster needs to be someone who possesses a great deal of skill. “..a bad roaster or an average roaster… can very easily corrupt even the finest specialty beans” The method of roasting a bean can change and manipulate the flavor dramatically which is why roasters will go through years of roasting and experimenting and trying different methods and styles until they come up with something that they like! “…the growing realization that coffee is enormously complex has only really cemented a feeling of acceptance as to how powerless we are to truly affect and select its attributes on a molecular scale.” Coffee roasting can take anywhere from 7-20 minutes generally speaking, and the main idea is to generate a flavor through applying heat to the beans. The water contained in the beans will slowly start to evaporate, this is the drying process. Then the beans will become so dry that they go through a stage called first crack. Think of a snail that has become too large for its shell that it pops off! The coffee can actually be consumed at this point but depending on the roast style, the process can be continued and roasted more. The longer you leave the coffee in the roaster, the more nutty, charred, and smokey the flavor becomes. The darker roasts are often used for espresso. There is so much more to this process, but hopefully this was a helpful intro into the coffee roasting process. We hope that you feel inspired to do more research and to learn a little bit more about all that goes in to the process of having a delicious cup of coffee! Have a blessed weekend! TMPC information sourced from The Curious Barista's Guide to Coffee by Tristan Stephenson. Published in 2019 by Cindy Richards.   Hello and good day to all of you lovely people who so faithfully read this blog! Today I thought it would be fun to share some random facts about coffee! Hopefully some of them are new to you! Let's get right into it..
1. Hawaii is the only American state that grows coffee 2. It was said to be discovered by a goat herder 3. Apparently adding cream to your coffee keeps it warmer for 20% longer 4. Coffee is a fruit 5. The most expensive coffee in the world “Kopi Luwak” is made from cat poop 6. Around 65 countries in the world grow coffee 7. A coffee tree lives for around 60-70 years and produces fruit for about 50-60 years on average 8. There are two main kinds of coffee beans: arabica and robusta Here are some websites where you can learn more about these facts and also find some more: https://www.agiboo.com/16-interesting-facts-about-coffee/ https://www.kimberleycoffee.com.au/blog/15-interesting-coffee-facts/ Have a lovely weekend! Blessings, TMPC  Have you ever heard someone in front of you ordering a coffee with a Ristretto shot? If you’re anything like me, you stop and think "wait, what is that?!" Well good thing you’re reading this because I’d like to explain it to you! Ristretto in Italian means ‘resitricted’. Essentially, this shot is pulled shorter than your normal espresso shot. The process of creating ristretto is the same as a normal single or double shot, but instead of letting the shot pull for the full length of time, it is pulled much shorter. Because of this, the amount of coffee that you are getting is much less, but hat doesn’t mean that there is less caffeine content. “Since a ristretto is an overall shorter pull than an espresso, the final drink is a slightly sweeter, more concentrated flavor that plays out without any bitterness.” Every cafe is different, but in our cafe it works something like this: a normal shot will pull on average for about 30 seconds and a ristretto shot will pull for about 15 seconds! I hope that you find this helpful and feel excited about ordering your next coffee with a ristretto shot just to try it out!!
(information in quotations taken from https://perfectdailygrind.com/2015/06/extraction-wars-espresso-vs-ristretto/ ) Dear readers, I know that none of us were expecting to come into this year and have to learn what social distancing looks like or having to work from home for the first time, and possibly having to frequent your favorite local restaurants and cafe less. Yikes! Who could have known?! But in light of the current circumstances, we as The Meeting Place Cafe staff were reflecting on some of the positive things that have come out of this season for all of us, and we created a few points that we wanted to share with you. Here are the top three things that have challenged us to grow most! 1. Relationships- We all have a group of even a handful of friends that we like to catch up with at a cafe or meet up with for an adventure, but that had to change for a little while which was tough, but also showed us something about our relationships. We found that a space was created for one on one meet ups, forcing us to go deeper in our relationships and really talk and get to know our friends on a much more personal level. This is really beautiful, as we often fall into the habit of ignoring the real "stuff" when we're with our friends and we ignore the sometimes difficult realities and instead we try to focus on having fun and unwinding when we see each other. But we have started to ask questions like "how are you really doing?" There were also a lot less people in the cafes which allowed for customers to get to know staff better! I personally started having regular little chats with the staff of one of my favorite cafes in the area, and am happy to say that we are all on first name basis now! 2. Skillset- We decided that this was a good time to improve our coffee skills and make our drinks better and more consistent! We have been working on our latte art! We were even adding little personalized notes on the cups of our customers! But we also know that it wasn't just us, but plenty of other companies and coffee shops really took advantage of a slower season to make sure everything is up to the best level! Only the best for you! 3. Creativity- We have had to find new ways of reaching out to people and make sure that people still knew we cared about them and had been thinking of them even when we were closed. We recently started a prayer request jar where people can let us know how we can be praying for them! It has been great to take time to talk to our regulars and keep up with their lives! I know there are a lot more positives that have come out of this season, but also am not unaware of the difficult things that we have had to go through. If you are someone who needs some encouragement please don't hesitate to reach out as we would love to hear from you. Many blessings to you, Love TMPC    Tamborine Mountain is more than just a place to catch pretty views. Last month, our cafe internship team was able to take a trip to Tamborine Mountain Coffee Plantation to learn more about coffee farming and the bean to cup process. Before going on the plantation tour, we were able to sit at the cafe and enjoy delicious coffee and baked goods. Their Australian-Grown tasting board featured their award-winning coffee beans in 4 forms (flat white, espresso, batch brew, and cascara) each with a smooth taste that delighted us with every sip. The cafe boasts a friendly and engaging staff along with delicious home-baked pastries making this place a must try for anyone looking to get out of the hustle and bustle of the city.
After enjoying our time at the cafe, we joined the plantation tour to learn more about the process of roasting and brewing coffee beans. The tour was informative and entertaining with a walk through the coffee trees and a tour of their roastery. During harvest season, the plantation opens up for volunteers who are willing to spend the day picking coffee beans from the trees for a more hands on experience. The tour ended with a coffee tasting that didn’t disappoint. Overall, we highly recommend this experience for anyone wanting to learn more about what goes into their favorite cuppa. For more information, visit Tamborine Mountain Coffee Plantation No matter what's going on around us, the world keeps running and we still need our daily coffee to fuel us through the day. But what's worse than having an amazing home brewing method and not knowing how to use it? I can't think of anything. So, we're here to help you get that perfect cup of coffee from home with a V60.  Step 1: Start with great coffee. We recommend beans from Elixir Coffee Roasters, Five Senses Coffee, or The Grove Specialty Coffee. Step 2: Follow this simple receipe from Sample Coffee Step 3: Enjoy a delicious, hommade cup of coffee! |
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