Look away now if you don't like coffee!

Last Saturday was an exciting trip out for us and here we are all heading to Staffordshire to the Has Bean Coffee Roastery. The purpose of our trip was an espresso training course and you see above that Bob took a new bunny friend. We made this red and white bunny as a gift for Has Bean because red is their corporate colour and you'll see why when we get inside the building.

The Has Van was outside the building as we arrived.

Once inside you start to notice all the red bits and bobs. The roastery was brilliant, even one of the roasters was bright red (unfortunately I didn't seem to get any snaps of the roasters), they have a table tennis table in the office! Looks like a great place to work and Macs on all the desks too.

The big beast of an espresso machine which we had looked forward to seeing and trying out was this, it's called a Slayer.

They are handmade in Seattle and kind of the Rolls Royce of coffee machines, very much a thing of beauty with its walnut handles and can be customised to your choice of finish.

This is a 3 group head and you can see a shot coming through after pre-infusion.

Our training was done by one of the UKBC 2012 finalists, Dale, and his Has Bean assistant Chris. The big boss, Steve, made an appearance and gave us a roastery tour, it's fascinating. These guys are passionate about coffee and really know their stuff.

We purposely pulled bad espresso shots to look at whether the extraction timing was wrong, the coffee grind size, the quantities used etc., all for the purpose of moving forward with pulling good shots and understanding why.

Here are some views around the training area.

I think this was some sort of water and weighing device.

The four hour session passed very quickly, it was great to have this experience and certainly would be good to go on another course at the roastery, maybe cupping or a brewing course. Thanks to all who made it a great day.