Coffee, and coffee related stuff

A few odds and sods of coffee news today, to start with we return to last night.

Last night Erin and I attended our first Lawblaws Cooking demonstration, now this one was a lot more low key then there typical ones because it was more of a free product tasting then any actual cooking demo, but we were given instruction on the preparation of a good cup of coffee, so it wasn't completely uneducational.

The tasting was of two product lines, the first was the Van Houtte brand of coffee. We tried a number of different brews over the night, and I would have to say I liked the plain Columbian the best, but I'm really not a fan of flavoured coffees.

With our coffee we had sampled 5 different La Rocca cakes. This was certainly a rich and delectable experience. I won't say that they were all super fantastic, but at least two of them were, the Caramel Crunch, and this new WildBerry Yogurt Cake that was great! Their Strawberry Shortcake on the other hand was not good at all, the berries were over ripe, the cake was wet and spongy, and the icing cream was meh, I guess there isn't a real strawberry shortcake other then my grandma's, even when it doesn't look picture perfect.

At the end of the night they gave away a pile of door prizes, I think there were about 20 people there, and they gave out 3 cakes, two coffee bundles, and a grand prize that included different coffees, including whole bean coffee and a coffee grinder. With that many prizes, and so few people we actually stood a pretty decent chance of winning (decent when compared with the lottery.) As it happens we won the grinder, which I'm kind of excited about! So all and all a delicious, if fattening, night.

Like I said, there is a couple pieces of coffee news, and that was one of them. The other is the announcement of the retirement of Juan Valdez. I found it in the Toronto Star this morning. After nearly 40 years on the job he is retiring his poncho and hat and going to take up painting. The donkey will continue in his role as donkey, but will be joined by the new Juan Valdez soon. Juan really is an iconic figure for the coffee industry, I just never realized that he was more then just an actor in a few commercials.

Well thats my coffee news for the day, maybe I should go have coffee now.