About

Jan Robert Brinck

Freelance Coffee Consultant based in Italy, specialised in:

• Coffee Tasting
• Green Coffee Selection
• Roasting and Blending
• Coffee Equipment and Technologies

How it Started

During my studies in the University of Pisa I developed a passion for coffee and its related equipment, roasting my first Ethiopian coffees in a pan and in the oven and sharing the results with my flatmates (not very impressed..)

I discovered brewing methods that didn’t involve the traditional Bialetti Moka, starting with some cloth filters, the v60 and eventually buying a broken Gaggia Espresso from e-bay.

Once I got the machine running I learned that making a good espresso is one of the most difficult tasks you can start with and decided to enroll in a Barista Course to find answers

Coffee Courses

After my first encounter with the trainers of Espresso Academy in Florence I had the opportunity to assist them in many courses, allowing me to dive into the world of coffee surrounded by experts. 

Teaching foundation courses while working for the roasting company Torrefazione Mokaflor S.r.l. and reading books on the topic while experimenting with different roasting machines and coffee origins brought me where I am today.

Now I’m a full time partner of the school, where I teach many courses including roasting, tasting and the espresso machine technicians course.

Together we are growing the school into a franchise with more than 40 branches all over the world, a very good excuse to visit Kathmandu, Mexico, Cairo, Thailand and many more when we have time.

Bringing the course to your company

Our new project called howtotaste.coffee is the result of many requests for on-site private courses and consultancies, mainly coming from well established roasting companies but sometimes even startups.

In order to manage these requests I’ve dedicated this website first of all to informing clients what options there are, which topics can be covered, available certificates, number of participants, prices and so on.

As you can imagine, there are many unique situations, so in only a few pages it is not easy to cover everything. I strongly suggest reading through the options and then contacting me directly to find the ideal solution for you.

Lately the most common choice companies make is to invite me for a 3 day course, have 3 or 4 employees participate and during those days we have many opportunities to analyse and develop their products and quality control standards, discuss and test new equipment and a lot more depending on the company.

These are some of the projects I’ve been following in the last years:

• Green Coffee selection Workshops at the Coffee&Chocolate Fair in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. 
• Representing CaffeLab at Milano Host with Elektra Coffee Machines.
• On site courses for Mokaflor Coffee in Bahrain.
• On site courses for RedCherry and Espresso Academy in Kathmandu, Nepal.
• Tasting Event on Seabourn Odyssey Cruise Ship during Grand Prix 2018 in Monte Carlo (took a selfie with Jon Snow there) 
• On site roasting consultancy for “Ready Set Coffee” in Cleveland Ohio
• On site roasting consultancy for “Blend Coffee” in Cairo, Egypt.
• Roasting Courses and Consultancy for BigCup in Bangalore, India.
• On site tasting courses for the QC team in Julius Meinl
• Collaboration during events with La San Marco in Milano, Rimini, Bucharest, Chicago.. 
• And I once made a coffee for Sting and he didn’t say he didn’t like it.