Caffeine - November/December 2015

Like it or not, we’re hurtling towards the festive season faster than a Coca Cola truck – before you know it,
we’ll be joining the last-minute shopping throngs on Christmas Eve. We can’t bear the thought of you grabbing
any old bit of useless tat like it’s Black Friday, so we’re here to help with a gift guide (p30) that will thrill even the biggest coffee nerd in your life. Elsewhere this issue, best friend team The Curious Pear take us on a caffeinated
tour of the stylish cobbled streets of Stockholm (p22), while our roving reporter Brian Williams returns to his spiritual home and shows us Cardiff’s café hotspots (p34).
This December, you’ll be able to find the Caffeine team at La Marzocco’s Generation Coffee event in London. We’ll be hosting a Q&A panel expanding on this issue’s feature on crowdfunding and how it’s changing the coffee landscape (p26). While we’re there, we’ll be sure to catch the Coffee in Good Spirits final and the UK Latte Art Championships, just two competitions where you can see baristas going toe to toe in their chosen disciplines. You can read all about the latest competition, Coffee Masters, which takes place at the London Coffee Festival, on p16.
This issue we’re also getting (more) obsessed with Instagram. On p18 we ponder whether it’s a positive thing for speciality coffee or if it’s dumbing the whole scene down to beautifully curated squares