From our gallery years in Wells

“Best coffee we’ve had since we came to Canada!”
– Fire Emergency New Zealand team (Whakaratonga Iwi), August, 2017 on a break from fighting the Plateau Fire near Hanceville.

Cappuccino in demitasse.

We started serving organic fair trade espresso and cappuccino etc. when we opened Amazing Space in 1996. For 25 years we used a totally manual Faema Family machine and grinder. When it reached the end of its life, we replaced it with a Solis Barista Perfetta Plus which has a thermoblock instead of a boiler. It’s very fast!

Here’s how it looks and sounds making a double shot in real time.

We use medium-dark espresso beans from Level Ground almost exclusively. Once in a while, on hot summer days we make affogato – espresso on ice cream – or iced coffees.

Periodically we have espresso cups & demitasses available for sale that are hand made by Burt Cohen using traditional Shino, Tenmouku and ash glazes. He modeled the demitasses on cups made at the Bernard Leach Pottery in the 1950s. Burt is the executive director of Potters Without Borders and operator of the Northfire pottery studio at the O’Keefe Ranch.

Quality Coffee Systems (QCS) helped keep our Faema running in recent years, as did Niko at Espresso Medic. QCS is our source for the Solis machine.

Short YouTube clip of our espresso & its variations ~ since 1997. This now includes vintage footage of the Faema Family in action!

Coffee harvest art

We picked coffee at the UPE La Pintada near Matagalpa, Nicaragua for a couple of weeks in 1986 as part of a brigade from the Asociación Sandinista de Trabajadores de la Cultura and the National Art School.  We weren’t very good pickers, but we had the good fortunate of meeting Boanerges Cerrato, a painter, muralist and instructor at the art school, and Amalie von Schintling who was a German cooperant working at the National Library and Archives. After the harvest, the four of us gathered a number of times to share our skills in book binding, paper making, drawing, etc., as well as socialize. Sadly, Boanerges passed away in 1990.