London Coffee Festival 2014

Until I went to Thailand I have always been a tea girl, never really embracing the whole coffee thing. But then, with my first sip of Black Canyon iced coffee I was hooked. Not on the caffeine (although that helped) but on the intense flavour like nothing I have tasted before.

Everyone has their own way to drink coffee. In Thailand I liked strong, sugary and with a heap of creamer. However in England I prefer milky (never say no to sugar or a dirty latte), with my fave being a smooth flat white. I have to say I will never view instant the same way now I have coffee shop hopped within London.

So it was with a caffeine induced spring in my step on 3^rd April I headed to Milk and Sugar’s The London Coffee Festival, hosted at one of my favourite London venues – The Truman Brewery.

It was coffee galore. Free samples (I have to admit I was shaking by the end of it, I’m a coffee lightweight) not only of coffee but tea, drinking fudge, chai latte, chocolate, juices and more. It was ace! I may have passed the Lindt stand a few times, scoffed some Green & Blacks ice cream, samples Divines dark cherry chocolate and ogled at ‘coffee fertilizer’ for a while. I even had a nice chat with the @nutshot chaps about their new line of peanut butter, it was genuinely amazing on how much more the London coffee scene encompasses than just, well, coffee.

After I’d mooched for a while it was time to watch the Barista championships, there’s a real art to it! I thought those groovy patterns on top of your latte were created by a barista shaking from too much caffeine, but no that’s really artistic! There is soft pressure and hard pressure, and when there are two baristas working together they have to be in sync, haha I’m still learning the lingo. There were some pretty awesome coffee patterns too!

It was however upon my last wander round that I hit gold. Iced coffee with cream at the hands of Mokasirs. Like liquid bliss, and with that I left on a high.

The one that I will really take away from my visit is it seems coffee is more of a lifestyle than a drink. It holds a whole sort of cool Hipster feel and it’s really cool how anyone involved is really passionate about the potent brown stuff. I met squash champions turned roasters, financial sector inhabitants turned coffee shop owners and even a coffee cup cosy entrepreneur. But yet again, it’s an industry where people love what they do, and that in itself made the visit well worth it. Well that and the free coffee