When I finally got a sample I was left very confused, here’s why:

Pro

• VIA tastes and smells almost identical to Starbucks brewed coffee.
• It’s better than any other Instant.
• It’s 100% bean, unlike the content of Instant

Con

• VIA tastes and smells almost identical to Starbucks brewed coffee. Not exactly a good starting point, if the production process for VIA was used on high quality fresh beans, I wonder how they would turn out.
• It’s NOT freshly brewed coffee. No Instant, Starbucks or otherwise will ever beat a properly prepared cup of freshly roasted, freshly ground coffee.
• This is where it get’s weird, because it is actually real coffee, it’s susceptible to problems with roasting, so one batch can be darker than another. This seems to be the case with the 3 and 12 pack Colombian. The 3 pack (with best before Nov 2010) tastes burnt, but less fresh (best before April 2010) 12 pack is actually mild and quite drinkable.

This last point surprises me and hints to a possible lack of quality control, unusual for a company synonymous with producing homogenous products; at least it assures you that it’s real coffee.

Another issue, brought up on Saturday at Open Coffee Banbridge, was that VIA is not Fairtrade; despite Starbucks’ promotion last year, that all their coffee is now Fairtrade. Another apparent contradiction to their existing message. I’ve already written about Fairtrade’s strengths and weaknesses. Yes it’s good for consumers to buy Fairtrade, providing they realise that it is not the only or even best way to give farmers a fair price; for companies it’s a completely different matter. Too often used as ready-made promotion, Fairtrade is the bare minimum that a business can and should do to be ethically responsible. The Bible says that “all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags.” This isn’t the correct exegetical interpretation, but when a business switches to Fairtrade for the wrong reasons, it is nothing more than filthy rags, a front, which I hope the customer can see past. Through the release of VIA without it being Fairtrade, is it possible that this is the case with Starbucks?

Taste and Fairtrade aside, the real VIA challenge however, is to convince the UK public to spend 50 pence on an individual sachet of coffee!

Started one year ago, and held on alternative Friday mornings, the Open Coffee Lisburn branch has proven to be a huge success, drawing in techies, bloggers, entrepreneurs and more. Most importantly this random, free and open networking group has, for a lot of us, created real-world friendships.

The openness and social nature of Open Coffee, compared to the strict regimented structure of other business networking groups, such as BNI means that we can try different things. So on Saturday 16 January, we’ll be having our first Open Coffee Lisburn outside of Lisburn, in Banbridge. “On Tour” as I like to call it, we’ll be meeting at 9:30AM in Starbucks at The Outlet. With most attendees being married and with kids, we encourage you to bring the family along too, it’ll be a great social event.

If you’ve never been along to an Open Coffee meeting, this is the perfect opportunity to come along and meet the group.

You can contact us on twitter through http://twitter.com/oclisburn
The majority of us are on Google Wave and if you add me, I can invite you to the group – andrewgribben.com@googlewave.com
And finally, you can keep up with our events by subscribing to our iCal

Psalm 100:5 – For the LORD is good; his mercy is everlasting; and his truth endureth to all generations.

Happy New Year!

Many, many versions already exist around the web, but either have hideously formatted text or are far too unwieldy to fit into typical usage patterns for the Bible. Of course others have been working on this problem, Osnova has produced several Bibles and developed a jump to verse technique using the search function of the device. Type ge.1.10 and find and the reader will jump to the Genesis chapter 1 verse 10.

I’ve used a similar technique, by hiding a code for chapter using white coloured text (doesn’t show on the device but is still searchable) you can enter Gen.1, Matt.1 etc and the reader leaps to the correct chapter. As far as the reading experience goes, each verse flow into one another, with verse numbers showing in a smaller font.

Very soon I’ll have an Open Bible Project website up and running, hosting the scriptures and various reference books online. Each user of the website will be able to annotate, highlight and link text across books of the Bible and the reference library. This customised version of the Bible will be available (freely) as a download for use on your reader, bringing those highlights, notes and links with it.

An awesome coffee, that I’m finding tastes amazing in the stovetop/moka pot! This “6 cup” Bialetti (from M&S Home) works great with 30g of ground coffee and you only want to produce about 2fl oz (about 2 espresso shots) worth of liquid; once the coffee starts up the spout take it off the heat and you’re sorted!

Calibre is a free, open source, cross-platform ebook management software. It’s like iTunes (the way it used to be) for books, but kinda uglier. Looks may not be it’s strong point, but it is great for managing your library, converting formats (DRM free of course), renaming books and meta information individually or en masse. One feature I hadn’t made use of, was it’s ability to generate a newspaper from an RSS feed. What surprised me even further was that on the DX, the newspaper displayed in the exact same way, with a section list etc, as the newspapers from Amazon. Very nice when the blog or news site you use doesn’t have and issue to buy on Amazon, even nicer when you’re in the UK and Amazon have blocked purchases from outside the US.

But wait, it doesn’t stop there, Calibre goes as far as to contain “recipes” which are used to scrape text from certain websites. Web page scraping might be a controversial feature, but if you want a newspaper created from BBC News or a your unread Google Reader articles, then there’s a recipe for that. It’s even possible to customise your recipe by adding new feeds, so my BBC Newspaper now contains a section for news in Northern Ireland just after the headlines. You can see how it turns out, below.

The Obel Tower is a building currently under construction in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Costing £85 million and measuring 80.5 metres (265 ft) in height, the tower when completed is set to dominate the Belfast skyline. It will overtake the current tallest skyscraper in Ireland, Windsor House (80 m), also in Belfast. Developed by the Karl Group, the Obel Tower is located on Donegall Quay on the River Lagan beside the Lagan Weir.

My brother, Mark, an architecture student at UUJ, recently got a look around inside, here are a few of his photos. Just look at how small the other buildings are and he wasn’t even at the top!

Following up from the success of last months Guest Coffee (HasBean’s Bolivia Machacamarca) we’re very happy to announce our next Guest Coffee is Ristretto’s Espresso Blend.

Ristretto are a speciality coffee roaster from Banbridge, Co Down and supply coffee to cafes and consumers throughout Northern Ireland and beyond. The blend we will be using has received a prestigious 2 Star Gold award in this year’s Great Taste Awards. In their own words their Espresso blend is:

A very special and individual blend, ethically sourced from respected family run estates in Latin America. Each component of the blend brings its own unique flavours to the final cup. The Central and South American coffees taste like chocolate and caramel – beautiful with velvety milk in a cappuccino. A very special Asian coffee adds a delicate sweetness – can you taste the hint of grapefruit?
Each component is individually roasted and then blended to create just the right balance of flavours in the cup.

Having tried this before on several occasions, I can assure you it’s a wonderfully sweet, balanced blend and I can’t wait to be serving it up beside our own coffee on Saturday.

As always we’ll have bags of Beans, and coffee brewing equipment on sale and of course will always have time to answer any coffee questions you may have, or just have a good chat.