Free family fun at Vancouver’s 1st annual Festival de la Poutine
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Karen Hamilton
November 18, 2011
Yes, you heard right…Vancouver’s got a Festival de la Poutine!
Are you as excited as I am about this?! Imagine yourself this Saturday, spending 4 hours of your afternoon feasting around at Vancouver’s top poutine spots, or having a full all-you-can-eat poutine dinner card while the live band churns out Francophonic tunes.
Having just returned from an epic, coffee-fuelled adventure in Montreal, you’d think I’d be sick of poutine…but I only had the chance to go once, despite 4am attempts to find late-night poutine near our home base. What I am sick of is the flu: it’s been with me off-and-on since Sunday, oblivious to my prior committment to being one of the judges for the Poutine Contest. Hopefully my ability to eat solid foods returns to me overnight, because I cannot. miss. this. event.
Free, poutine-filled family activities at the Hellenic Community Centre
The afternoon Poutine Crawl and evening Poutine Contest are both sold out, but families need not despair. Between noon and 5:30pm, Festival access to Hellenic Community Centre is free and family-friendly, with activities including a temp tattoo station, a battle of the bands, and a dedicated kids’ section. Sounds like a great plan to keep the little ones occupied while elders indulge in affordable bowls of poutine.
With backing from the Province of Quebec and the Festival in Drummondville and a sponsor like La Belle Patate, the nosh is sure to be authentic, ample, and delicious.
Stand by for a late-night poutine drop-in
Despite the sold-out status of the evening, the Festival still wants you to have a chance to hang out with them. So check in close to 11pm and see whether you can drop by as the dinner crowd retires. Live band action, Francophone karaoke, and hopefully some remaining poutine should ensure that late-night arrivals will be bien amusés.
Festival de la Poutine de Vancouver
Saturday, November 19, 2011
Hellenic Community Center, 4500 Arbutus Street, Vancouver
Family Fair: noon – 5:30pm, FREE
Poutine Crawl: noon – 4pm, $20 (sold out)
Poutine Contest: 6pm – late, $20 (sold out)
Late-night Access: 11pm – late
Bruce’s coffee adventures at the 2011 Canadian Coffee & Tea Show
Leave a Comment Bruce NguyenNovember 7, 2011
I like coffee.
But I’m far from a coffee snob. Yes, I have a Hario hand-cracked burr grinder at home. And yes, I’ve been known to bring my own french press to the office. But I’ll order a small black from Timmy’s with the rest of my Canadian brethren, and I’ve voluntarily drunk instant coffee multiple times this year alone.
While I hardly have the most discerning taste in coffee, it’s a large part of my life. So when the Canadian Coffee & Tea Show came to town, there was no question where I was going to be.
My three highlights of that weekend involved coffee cupping, comparing brew methods, and a compelling round of the Canadian Cup Tasters Championship.
Coffee Cupping Basics Workshop
Karen and I cupped two flights of coffee to better understand two factors that affect the taste of your brew: processing method and terroir.
The first flight demonstrated processing method and consisted of three cups: an Ethiopian bean processed naturally, a semi-washed coffee from Indonesia, and a wet-processed coffee from El Salvador. One of the main distinctions is based on how much of the cherry is left on the coffee bean as it dries. The natural method leaves the cherry intact around the bean; wet processing removes most of the cherry pulp from the bean before drying; the semi-washed method falls somewhere in between.
The impact of the coffee fruit on the final brewed product was readily apparent on the tongue. The naturally processed cup contained citrus notes more akin to tea than to any coffee I’m used to. The semi-washed coffee gave off its characteristic earthy musk. We were able to pick up on these differences just from smelling the coffee grinds that formed a crust atop the coffee liquor.
The wet-processed El Salvador was the cleanest tasting and expressed the most brightness. One person at our table described its marked acidity as sour, but our seminar hosts from JJ Bean were quick to correct her, saying that sourness is a state used in the coffee world to specifically refer to flaws: “We never say a good coffee is sour.”
I understand that sour can be thought of as rancid, but having grown up on sour soup and pickled vegetables, I feel that there’s nothing wrong with calling something sour–as long as it’s done lovingly. And let’s face it: Acidic Patch Kids would never have taken off.
The second flight of coffees were all wet-processed, though each were grown in different parts of the world. The differences here were subtle, and I had a lot more difficulty picking out the individual nuances, which meant I had to keep sampling more and more coffee.
I was okay with this.
Coffee brewing showdown: Chemix vs V60 vs AeroPress vs French Press
The next seminar I attended covered open brew methods, with plenty of air time for the perfect 60 degree ‘v’ shaped cone of the Hario V60 pour-over dripper (oh, that’s where the name comes from). While I sincerely love a good infographic and number crunch session – especially when on a caffeine high - my head was brimming with industry stats and acronyms when I was simply seeking a taste comparison.
And I found it, making my way through the trade show floor, arriving at booth hosted by Cafe Gabana. They delivered samples of their coffee made in a Hario V60 drip cone, a Chemex coffeemaker, an AeroPress, and a French Press. Unfortunately, Karen was busy at the Tea Sommelier 101 course, so no visuals of this highly educational demo.
Everyone else was going gaga over the V60 and the over the laboratory-like elegance of the Chemex, but I found that I am still–and probably will always be–a greater fan of the oily, sediment-rich brew that the paperless French Press gives.
Canadian Cup Taster Championship
To finish off the day, we watched a round of the Canadian Cup Tasters Championship. It’s a test of palette. It’s a test of focus. And I also thought it would be a test of my patience. How wrong was I! While I’m still not entirely sure what I witnessed, by golly was it compelling!
Eight sets of three coffee cups. In each set, one coffee is subtly different from the other two. Competitors race against each other to pick the odd one out as quickly as possible.
It starts out as a cacophony of loud slurping and sniffing. All of a sudden, a hand is thrust in the air as one competitor is done. A minute and 20 seconds?! Surely all eight can’t be correct; the average time for the last two heats was nearly three minutes. Another hand is raised and the two remaining competitors in this heat start to feel the pressure. Suspense builds as results are tallied aloud one by one.
By the end of the two-day competition, Melody Lu of Phil & Sebastian Coffee Roasters had slurped her way to victory, with a final-round time of 2:57 and 6 of 8 cups correct. She’ll head to the Netherlands next June to represent Canada in the 2012 World Cup Tasters Championship. The rest will have wait for next year’s competition for another chance. And to that end, they will continue their daily training regimen, one coffee cup at a time.
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