Please. Lie down before you hurt yourself.
Bahahaha. I am fine.
I agree that you can sometimes get varying quality with the batches of specialty coffee (and I use that term loosely for Toby's particularly). But that goes with many things: craft beer, artisan soap, restaurant food. By the same logic you would be drinking New, using Gillette foam and eating at McDonalds.
Not at all. You can get dependable & consistent product quality from Artisans (see aforementioned ONA). But yeah, I don't call Tobys or Campos as 'artisan' either. They are just a larger company with reasonable market penetration, making up one of the largest 4 suppliers of beans in the local market. It's just my opinion that the Vittoria beans are the most consistent, and supply reliable beans you can get.
Here is a test: roasted coffee is best used about 10 days after roasting, and should always be ground directly into the basket (rather than having it sit in the doser for a while). If your barista can't tell you the roast date of the coffee, and they aren't grinding on demand, then they aren't getting the best out of their beans. In theory it is possible to get an ok cup from Vittoria beans (they are seriously over roasted though), but usually the coffee is super old and has been sitting in the doser for a while.
Yep, I know all about the 10 day rule. Again, a rule of thumb but it generally applies in most cases. None of my favoured cafes use dosers at all, and I would never use one either. That said if they have serious throughput then it is beneficial as a business to have one as it is sitting in the hopper for 2-3 minutes at most. My local Vittoria place up the road does a minimum 60kg per week, I think the highest in recent times was 73kg for the week. So yeah, it doesn't sit very long at all, in fact when I get there at 8am he is usually pouring in the 4th-5th bag of the day.. Delivered Tuesday and Friday.
I sat down with my local guy up the road, he was approached by another provider to switch to their beans instead. Now these are french-roasted beans - yes, roasted in France, then put into a container for a 6-week maturation on the Emma Maersk to Sydney. We tested the Vittoria beans against this new company's beans in a separate grinder, did a full clean of the machine (3 group heads, maintained separate heads for testing). I jumped behind the counter at 6am on a Saturday morning and we started cupping. Of each bean I pulled a short, a long, then 2 standard shots made to macchiato & latte which is their two biggest sellers. We cupped each one against the other and found that the Latte worked really well with the new beans with some of the fruitiness coming through - and a number of customers who are Latte/Cap people also liked it but not necessarily over the Vittoria. Otherwise, all the other cups were vastly outclassed by the Vittoria. I will come back to this below.
I agree that the Vittoria Espresso is over-roasted - I hate the stuff and will walk out of any shop selling it. My local uses the Oro and it is vastly superior in almost every way. It does pretty much everything well which is not easy to do. It's only the Dopio and Ristretto which it fails at.
Generally, the standard of people making coffee in Sydney has risen substantially in the last 5 years. Before moving down to Sydney I would have said no immigrant Asian has ever made a good coffee, now I cannot say that. Coffee Culture has really permeated the Asian (and more specifically, Chinese) community and while I see lots in GJ's & SB's and the like, there are plenty haunting the better cafe's now and I am seeing many more behind the counter with some very decent skills. Still not to Melbourne quality, but it's catching up for sure.
Once you learn to identify the taste difference between fresh and stale coffee, there is no going back. Stale coffee has a very distinctive taste to it. On top of that, most places that use Vittoria don't have particularly skilled barristers either, as they aren't that passionate about their coffee.
Yep, old coffee is horrible. I knew a couple distributing coffee around my local area before coming to Sydney, and they dropped into a cafe in a smaller town about 30 minutes away. They had a chat and left them a kilo of their standard bean to test out. About 30 minutes later they got a phone call - "Hey your beans have gone bad!" After asking some more questions on why they thought that to be the case, the answer came that there was this yellow stuff coming out of the machine. Turns out it was crema and the beans they had been using were so damn old they couldn't get any crema out of them - it was just black.
So yes, in some places there is absolutely a lack of care, detail, knowledge and passion. I find the bigger concern is the cleanliness of the machine. The number one issue I see is really badly cleaned steam wands, baskets & portafilters with oil scum all over them and barely able to pass water resulting in percolating and backflushing it further into the machine - just disgusting. I would hazard a guess that most of these 'bad' places have no idea what a backflush basket is, or if they even have one. You cannot taste a clean & well maintained machine but I sure as hell can taste a filthy machine.
Maybe I should take that lie down now. Bring me a Bex & and a short black while you are at it.
So anyway. I will clarify my previous statement about starting a cafe with Vittoria. You get a brand new machine & grinder, and regular maintenance and parts included. They usually send out new portafilters, baskets & screens every 6 months. If the machine breaks, they turn up within 3 hours with another one. So from that angle - peace of mind. You have reliable machines, reliable supply of beans, and consistent input product. You also get free Vittoria branded cups, saucers etc to serve it in, and discounted takeaway consumables including sugar tubes. All you have to do is order the beans & consumables, and milk from your milk vendor. Done.
New company came in to my local, offering $15K cash grant to change over (cash to replace machine & grinder that has to go back to Vittoria). Vittoria counter offered $30K cash to stay with them and offered to replace the not even 2-year old machine with a new one. When you spend $100K per year on beans alone (3.4 Tonnes p.a.), that is a significant saving. The new company kept upping their offer to try an match it but you end up with old beans (could sit there for up to 10 weeks here trying to maintain stock and it's already 6 weeks old at the dock) and inconsistent supply (shipping issues, customs clearance issues alone would see some unavailability). And then you would have to go and buy Vittoria again through retail/service and not at the contracted direct price.
So yes, I would only ever use Vittoria to start a cafe. After a couple of years (and some big cashbacks) I would have enough to buy my own equipment & chose my own supplier.
(Coffee has been a hobby of mine much longer than shaving has... Can you tell?
Yep, has been for me too. Worked in an Italian restaurant behind the machine (and bar) while at Uni. We were using Grinders then which was pretty decent - I believe there was some sort of family or village link between the restaurant and the Grinders guys.
