School's In

Nicholas Hollier. Teacher of coffee passion and wisdom. Nicholas is a partner and roaster at Settlement Coffee Roasters and Cafe in uptown Waterloo. A few weekends ago I went to their coffee Sunday school to get a refresher on some of the basics and learn a few things about brewing techniques I do not normally use.

The curriculum consisted of the following topics:

• The coffee plant (species -> varities)

• Harvesting

• Pre-roast processes

• Flavour traits of the pre-roast processes

• Roasting process and degrees of roast

• Flavour traits of the roasting degrees

• Storage of coffee

• Brewing techniques were demonstrated and sampled for:

• Pour over

• French press

• Chemex

• And the class notes we received also gave clear instructions for

• V60

• Aeropress, and

• Clever

It wouldn't be right for me to share the class notes in full because this is Nick's collection of knowledge and it is not my place to put it out there but obviously there is another way to get the info: go take the class. He is a cheerful person and really seems to enjoy sharing his love of coffee with you.

My classmates ranged from casual drinkers, to people who have traveled to coffee growing countries, to SERIOUSpeople like me ;), to people with a wine making background. While Nick stepped out to grab an additional prop he felt inspired to show us, the group took on a bit of an AA meeting style except the chorus of confession was more along the line of "I go to starbucks" rather than the real struggles normally discussed in such a meeting.

For me this was the first time I did something like this and I am glad I did. I would love to take the next level course (if there is one) and, since I am nonpartisan when it comes to KWBUZZ places, I would like to experience what other cafes have to offer too. I think that while the KW cafes are competing against each other, they realize that they are working together to impress the masses away from Tim Hortons etc and, when it comes to coffee schools in KW, the feeling is mutual- the more the merrier.