Last week I was invited to come over to London and make some coffee for the Hilton hotels.
Douwe Egberts UK does deliver the coffee in all of the UK Hilton hotel’s and has been asked to make the coffee during a very special event.
Every year there is a meeting for the General Managers from Hilton all over the world.
This year the London Hilton Metropole hotel was the host.
Being host of this event is really serious business. Big prestige because of all of the Hilton people in the house. My colleagues from the UK did a perfect job. They prepared it very well with new bars and machines.
Together with my international barista colleagues Jaroslav and Jan from Czech Republic and Iwan from Hungary and Giovanni from the UK we had to deliver 450 coffees in 15 minutes.
And because of the good organization we did it and we are very proud on that. Of course it isn’t to hard to do that amount of coffee’s is 15 minutes but 90% of the ordered coffee was milk based an it was a big opportunity to show the international Hilton top that we can do top quality latte arts under pressure.
And although they were all managers with a long time experience in the hotel business, most of them were very surprised to see a latte art. And most of them never saw it before.
So it was an other chance to promote our passion and profession to the world.
Jeroen
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Last week there was a hutch event in Amsterdam.
A lot of the world’s biggest tall ships came to Amsterdam for the SAIL 2005 event.
Douwe Egberts hired some sail ships and invited a lot 150 guest with a lot of captains of industries. Together with Onno http://www.onnobarista.blogspot.com/ we made some espresso and cappuccino in the morning.
Early in the evening we made those wonderful espresso martini’s. This 
cocktail is really coming up now in the better cocktails bars. I will tell you more about that in a new topic.
After diner we served some more coffee and finally we stepped on the boat to go for a tour and see those big boys from near by.
Thousands of small boats on the water. Everybody drinking champagne and eating good food. What a great event it was.
Jeroen
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My ‘ice’ special in the 2004 final
The Dutch milk-cooperation Friesche Vlag organizes the Dutch latte art competition for the 3rd time on November 7th this year.
It’s a great competition. The atmosphere is totally different as in the Barista competitions. The location is always a very trendy club. And there is always a DJ and a lot of multimedia effects.
But it’s good to see that the rules are very serious. It’s not a Mickey Mouse competition. Four traditional caps, four latte arts and two specials. The specials are changing every year. We had the ‘ice’ theme, and this year it’s ‘etching’ time. So the two specials have got to do something with etching.
Please have a look on the site http://www.latteart.nl/ and see the promotional movie on this link http://www.latteart.nl/img/LatteArt_film_001.wmv
Jeroen
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I’m on vacation to France till end August.
Of course I will order some espresso in France.
Even I already know that the France espresso culture isn’t big yet. France has a coffee history. Some of their colonies are coffee nations. But history teaches us that they reserved their good quality coffee for export (thanx) and they used the bad quality (robusta) for own usage. That’s why France people drink “cafe au lait” and a “bowl” (400 ml weak drip coffee with a lot of milk).
They putt a lot of milk in their coffe to make it drinkable.
But I’m sure I will find a good espresso some where.
I will publish a France espresso report as soon as I’m back.
Enjoy your summer…
Jeroen
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Last week I was invited to come over to London and make some coffee for the Hilton hotels.
