Tuesday 23 July 2013

Coffee to slow!


 

I clearly had my slow experience  the other day tasting, smelling, feeling a cold slow coffee brewed in 6 hours at Café Frühling, the first  "slow Café" in Basel opened just 2 weeks ago in a central location of town.

I sat with Benjamin Hohlmann, the manager and "slow coffee" specialist talking about the slow coffee concept and what it means for him to be slow. It was  a similar experience to a wine tasting event trying to feel the different tastes and smell of fruit, but this time coming from coffee beans!
Slow coffee is a notion that is gaining awareness all over the world, cultivating the high quality
and  lifestyle experience that high end coffee drinking can provide. In Northern Europe many slow coffee shops have opened in the last 5-6 years, while in Germany since 2 years and now Switzerland. 
 


What makes a coffee SLOW?
The approach of  connection and special  care of the whole process of producing, picking the coffee beans, direct delivery, high quality roasting,  connecting emloyees to the process by continuos training, brewing, paying attention to the ingrediants of  water, considering the time as an important element of production and service.

Benjamin Hohlmann found his coffee  producers himself during his several months long  stay in South America and by visiting other production regions, so he himself controls the quality, and specialness of the beans. He pays attention to  working with the best Baristas for best roasting quality and by training the employees, by being a member of the service team and among the customers this  Café brings a quality that  makes a distinguished taste and a difference to coffee drinking.



Slow coffee making methodology at the Café Frühling is  a key feature. Brewing is done with special equipment.
The "über boiler" regulates the ratio between water, coffee and contact
time. Another dripping equipment makes the slowest existing coffee that takes 6 hours dripping time until it is consumable.

The philosophy and  lifestyle experience of drinking the  high quality slow coffee just depends on our mind set now.


 


Are you ready to deepen and enlarge the database of smell, taste and feeling in your brain of a "slow coffee experience"? 

Good luck and enjoy!
 



Let me know your experience if you go and try it out !






How slow to go?



As we engage in an everyday routine, jump to our TO – DO list, put more on the schedule, set objectives to do things quicker not to missout anything, we get hectic and may lose contact to the tasks at hand,  run by the details without enjoying what we do.  Is  this  familiar?   

What is more, we measure ourselves only on how much we have done or achieved and concentrate  less on what and how. We want to do everything very well, which we are used to  managing, then take up more until we can still manage, but then suddenly  we feel too much pressure and perhaps   things are actually getting too much to handle. 

Parallel to the acceleration of technology and output development in  the economy our mind set has changed to value speed and perfection.
Take an old James Bond movie with e.g. Sean Connery!   Dr. No from 1958  e.g. is certainly slow compared to say Skyfall.  The audience did enjoy it however in the 1950s, I am sure.            

What has this speed acceleration brought us and the world?  Better service?
We have so many "speedy" around us  - speedy boarding, speed dialing, speed check on the internet,  fast food, fast learning, instant coffee  -  we catch ourselves each moment hurrying, and we expect everything to happen at once and fast . 

Changing our mindset to a slower pace gives us the time to think and maybe act on  balancing  quality and quantity.  We may  then  allow ourselves  to be more natural and authentic.

In the recent past,  the  growing  World Slow Movement has been addressing these questions from  various perspectives. The movement has emerged to be a counterweight  to valuing fast above all, calling attention to slow down and connect to ourselves, to others, our environment, to notice the details, the beauty, the nature,  the present moment....
    
It is exciting to explore the different aspects of the movement and how  it is evolving.

Slowing down does not mean to be slow all the time. Just jump out of fast now and again. Pull the "parachute out" string and slowly land on a quiet field of peace and calmness. However it is done, it does not matter. Meditate, sit in a Café, read a book in a park and discuss it with someone, climb a tree and look into the distance, watch the full Moon or the stars, play cards with friends, look for treasure in the forest with the kids. ..( www.geocaching.com), daydream  or do anything  else  that  is relaxing.         
   
An  interpretation of  “slow” is  a mindset to aspire for quality more than quantity, peace of mind, a balance of mind, heart  and body.  

Instead of asking :“what have I achieved today?”, how about asking  " how slow was I today?”   


So how slow where you today?

Monday 8 July 2013

Pleasures of less choice !






I drove through Bottmingen  recently,  the village where we first lived after arriving to Switzerland. I had nearly forgotten one of my first surprise experiences about  "slow life" at the "cut your own flowers" field  in the town beside the road.

I love flowers.  There was a wild red rose bush  in the garden at my parent's house; my father regularly brought in the house a collection from this bush for all of us to enjoy. Whoever we visited,  we rarely went without buying them flowers, so it is normal for me to buy flowers for all kinds of occasions and people, teachers, family and myself.  The wide variety of flowers in flower shops, the  wall sized display full of colourful  ribbons,  many different decorating accessories were always lovely to play around with.  

In Baselland  a financially and personally rewarding way to get a bouquet of flowers is from the "cut your own flower"field, which probably exists all over Switzerland.



These fields are owned by local communities or privat families and they keep the fields productive, maintained  by planting each season flowers for the public to cut, pay at  the "honesty pay box",  and take home. The flowers are cheaper of course than in shops, and there is                                   an  on the spot "service unit" to prepare your own bouquet.





In Bottmingen this is organised  in a very professional way. You arrive, put on an available clean plastic shoe cover to protect and prevent your shoes from getting dirty or muddy, take the always available and clean garden shears  and enter the rows of flowerbeds to explore, enjoy and freely make your choice of the seasonal actual variety of colourful flowers. When you have spent the amount of time you liked picking your flowers, you go to the service unit again, cut off excess green leaves,  you bind together your bouquet with the thread that is there for you protected from the rain, take off your shoe protection, put it in the dirty box, you throw the calculated amount of money into the cashier box, and you are ready to take home your wonderful, fresh seasonal  actual bouquet.  I am always happy with this natural bouquet  as if it came from my own garden and I didn' t even have to do all the gardening work in advance. 


At the same time, if  I go into Coop, Migros or a local flower shop to buy flowers, even after 5 years living in Switzerland  I can't avoid  missing a larger variety of flowers, the bigger choice of size and colour of ribbons and wrapping paper, the richness of decoration that my brain links to the expression "flower shop". 

My mindset  of choice starts working,  I start spending  time figuring out how my perfect  bouquet will look like.  Then I suddenly bump into the problem of not seeing enough yellow or orange or  whatever colour of flowers I would like to compose from, not enough types of ribbons, and too  few types of  anything else to decorate. The feeling  of  "not  enough" takes over and the potential satisfaction coming from an imagined picture of leaving the shop with a perfect bouquet of flowers dissolve.  As we step out of the simple and  natural, there  seems  to remain a constant better solution we are inclined to search for.

Beside the flowerbed I happily  accept the natural choice given by the seasonal variety, and it is a joy to make my own simple bunch.  But after  having tried out  the different combinations of the  many choices in a flower shop, there is a feeling  that there might still be an even better choice than the one we have already made.

Can it be,  that, above a certain amount of choices, we  can’t get  satisfied with whatever we do regardless of the choice we made?

Have you ever had  this feeling before ?   

Of course I slowed down , turned into the parking  of the “selbst pflücken Blumen”  field and  got my flowers that I am still enjoying.



Where do you get your flowers from?