Blacksmithing : Copper and Stainless Coffee Scoop - The Forge

Yeah, I think originally we were going to call the film Sketching in Steel, weren't we? Because that's kind of what we do. I think it was a kind of exercise in design really, wasn't it? That was the sort of main starting point. Partly that we wanted to kind of combine two bits of the film, so the process of making the tooling, the process of making the product, and then actually going to go and visit Sean up at Broadoak to kind of go and give it purpose. So I think quite a lot of the stuff I've been writing about on Instagram recently is that, you know, all the stuff we make, it's just bits of metal until it's given the purpose. I think that's part of what we're trying to do in the film, which is to show the process of making, but also what happens to it after something's been made. But we couldn't forge these spoon swages on our own. No. We couldn't, so it would have had to have taken two of us, and in this instance we sort of rotated a little bit. And I think I was striking for your spoon swage and you were striking for mine, so you'd have a little bit of a break in between. It's quite hard work. You wouldn't physically be able to do it on your own, I don't think. You couldn't hold the block, hold the tooling, and strike with a sledgehammer. I'm sure you could find a way to do it, but it would take you a hell of a long time. So for us, you know, you've got two pieces pinching up in the forges, you've got one person ready to strike, one person ready to lead, and you rotate and, you know, that way it makes it much more efficient. You get a much better end result. And that is the traditional way of making swages. Mostly they're cast, I mean, so the big swage blocks are cast, and you can get spoon swages that are cast, cast steel, cast iron. But these we made specifically for this particular item. Smith and Striker is the old-fashioned power hammer. It was a job in and of itself in the days before you had big machinery, and you'd have a long line of smiths working at anvils, and there'd be just a team of strikers sitting down with their sledgehammers, waiting for a call from the smith, and then they'd get the call, they'd run over, do whatever they were told, and then run back and sit down again. It was a job in and of itself, and it's a way to get more power, a heavier strike, and to get a higher strike rate, because you've got two people striking in sequence, or more than two. This is the first time that we've made a film that we haven't made the product before, so this was, in a sense, it's a new film, but it's also a new product, and part of the film is showing that creative process from start to finish. No, we forged out the spoon swages. That must have taken us four hours, I suppose, did it? Something like that, and done it all just with sledge and smith and striker. Then, I think, after lunch, we sat down and thought, OK, well, we'll make some of the copper bowls now, and they just didn't work, and it just shows that you can plan something out in your mind, and you think, right, well, we've made all these tools, and obviously it's going to work first time, and I think it must have been three or four or five attempts, just to get the tooling right, just so we could get it into the perfect shape that we wanted. So, yeah, not everything goes right first time. I mean, a lot of the process that Joe and I go through of making a new product is a basic concept. I'll give you the basic concept. You might forge the original piece. I might then reforge it or not, or I might forge a piece and then give it to you, and you might alter it. So, it's a very sort of collaborative process. I'm much better with a hammer than I am with a pen, so it's a lot easier for me, instead of trying to explain something to the drawing, it's easier for me to just make it, and then you can see it, you can feel it, you know the weight and the dimensions, and instead of trying to draw something in 3D to show you all the different dimensions, it's a lot easier for me to just make it. Yeah, just go straight into the material, and I think that's what we enjoy, especially as the smiths, kind of straight into the hot steel, you can see how it reacts, you can see, well certainly for something like this, you can see how the pieces fit together, so a sketch is really easy to draw, it's basically a handle with a half sphere, but actually fitting a half sphere of copper to a handle of stainless steel, the fit has to be absolutely perfect. Now, when you draw it, obviously it looks perfect, because you've just drawn some lines, but I think what we found during the, you know, especially making this prototype, is that actually it's quite a tricky thing to do, there's some things you can't explain on paper, or on a computer screen or whatever, you have to get into the material and then just get on with it. And also you've changed the way that we produce things, because of making this, you changed from using round stock for making handles, to square stock, because we didn't like the profile of the handle, so you thought, well we'll use a different stock, we then worked out that actually you can produce a handle quicker, and nicely using a different type of stock, but that has kind of ripples and repercussions for the rest of the production, so now we're changing the way we're making the pan handles, so we're using a different type of stock, which means we can make them more efficiently. So, you know, we're constantly sort of, in a way, bouncing off our own creativity, or our own way of looking for more efficient ways of making things, but without losing the essence of the product. We've got a long process, and then the final process is faceting the outside, so we've got this lovely texture on, and that's the kind of, that's the point of it, in a sense, like I said earlier, if we were just to get them spun, A, they would be machine made, I mean they'd be a lot cheaper and a lot easier for us, and we could make more of them, but you can't replicate this texture in any way, and each piece will be completely different. They'll look basically the same, but each one will have its own character, each one will have its own marks, the inside of the bowls have this beautiful texture that you can't replicate any other way than by actually making it the way that we make it. I think actually, as you said, I didn't know anything at all about coffee making, when we turned up at Sean's, and actually I left definitely with a new appreciation for coffee, and for how it's made, but also the process of brewing coffee, and, you know, not buying cheap crap coffee, by understanding the processes, and by understanding what work goes into it, and where the product comes from, and the kind of care and attention that goes into making this lovely product, you come away thinking, well actually you want to give that produce a little bit more respect. There's something really honest, I think, about the results you get from a very kind of low-fi, hands-on approach, compared to something that's been designed for expedience, or convenience, or whatever, you know, you get the results. It's that Venn diagram of like fast, easy, cheap, isn't it? It's like you can't have all three, and the good stuff, especially in coffee, just takes time. I'd rather take half an hour, and really appreciate a cup of coffee, than take five minutes in it, not two seconds, you know. So yeah, because of the differences in between each individual coffee, you know, you've got things like moisture content, density, size of the beans, all of those sort of elements make a difference to when it's roasted. So each coffee has its own individual roast profile, which tells you like a starting temperature, so that the temperature that the coffee drum is, when you drop the room temperature green coffee into the drum, the drum then cools quite considerably with that temperature change. As the roast goes on, the first maybe 50% or so is the coffee drying out, moisture being released, and we control airflow, and the, because it's a gas roaster, the gas input to control temperature. As the coffee starts to darken up, caramelise, you get these really lovely aromas that are suddenly released as the coffee beans start to turn brown. And then you get to what they call first crack, which is an actual audible crack you hear as some moisture is being released from the coffee beans. Then you're really developing the flavours of those coffees right past that point. So you're talking about maybe a minute and a half to three minutes, perhaps past that point, depending on whether you want like a darker, richer full-bodied espresso roast, or a lighter, cleaner filter roast. And then you drop the coffee into the cooling tray out of the drum, and that is cooling down to stop the roasting process, just like baking and putting something in an ice bath or something like that. I mean, yeah, your favourite coffee shop might stock the coffee that they use, and they might have other coffees potentially that they think you might like, or might be a guest option or a filter option or whatever, but chances are the barista will be able to tell you, recommend things you might like. Despite the kind of odd circumstances that we're doing at the moment, more people than ever are brewing from home because they're at home. So yeah, if we can supply them with great coffee that we think is great, then yeah, the more the better, like it's a real opportunity to show people what coffee's out there, what specialty coffee is. When we make a good product, we want to, it goes back to what you were saying about, you know, a thing only becomes a thing when it's used, and if we're going to do that, we might as well use the best products that we can find locally. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's kind of where the whole business is moving and what we're excited about. A, we're excited about making new products, new processes. You know, copper's not a new material for us, but we are starting to use it in a slightly newer way. But we're also excited about meeting new producers, you know, getting into different parts of the whole food world, so whether it's food and drink and, you know, different aspects of it, and more and more specialist. I mean, for me, I think the design process, you know, what we did in that process of having a concept going all the way through the tooling to the end product and then going to see Sean with the coffee, that's what, you know, you can see the hairs stand up on my arm. That's what excites me about the business. That's what I want to do. People do often ask, you know, what's your motivation? What do you like doing? Why do you do this? And that is the reason, because we get excited about what we're making and we get excited about being able to go and use them.