Short one to close out the summer. The Colombia Huila is back in stock after a few weeks off the shelf, and we’ve picked up a small lot of natural Brazil that we’re still deciding what to do with — probably next year’s blend.
Cafe hours are unchanged going into autumn. See the contact page if you want to get in touch about wholesale or a roastery visit.
A quick one. We’ve had a few people ask recently whether they can come and look around the roastery, so: yes, mostly.
The roaster is in the same room as the cafe, so any time we’re open you can watch a roast happen if the timing works out — mornings are your best bet, Tuesday to Thursday. If you want a proper walk-through, where we talk you through green coffee, the profiles, and do a little cupping, we run those occasionally for small groups. Send us a message through the contact form and we’ll let you know when the next one is.
It’s free. Bring a friend.
It’s been a busy few weeks at the roastery and we’re a bit behind on posting, but we wanted to let everyone know the new Winter Blend is on.
It’s a mix of a natural Brazil and a washed Colombia this year, roasted a touch darker than our usual. Think dark chocolate, roasted hazelnut, brown sugar. It’s built for milk and it makes a really comforting flat white, but it’s still clean enough to drink black if that’s your thing. Bags are on the menu page and it’s the house espresso in the cafe until spring.
We serve both in the cafe and people sometimes ask which is “better”, which isn’t really the right question — they’re different drinks that happen to both be made of coffee.
Turkish coffee is very finely ground, almost like flour, and it’s simmered with the water (and usually sugar) in a cezve until it foams up. Nothing is filtered out, so the grounds settle in the bottom of the cup and you stop drinking before you get to them. It’s intense, thick, a bit syrupy, and it’s as much about the ritual as the flavour. The grind is the thing most people can’t do at home because a normal grinder won’t go fine enough.
Filter coffee — V60, Chemex, batch brew — uses a coarser grind and passes hot water through a paper or metal filter once. The paper takes out the oils and all the fine particles, so the cup is cleaner and lighter, and you can taste more of the specific character of the bean: the fruit, the acidity, where it’s from.
Roughly: Turkish coffee shows off the preparation, filter coffee shows off the coffee. We drink both.
We cup every new lot before it goes on the menu, and a few people have asked what that actually involves, so here’s the short version.
Cupping is just a standardised way of tasting coffee so you can compare lots fairly. Same grind, same water temperature, same steep time, no filter — you smell it, break the crust, skim the grounds off the top, then slurp it loudly off a spoon so it aerates across your whole palate. It looks strange if you’ve never seen it done.
We do it with whoever’s around that morning, not just whoever roasted it, because it’s easy to talk yourself into liking something you’ve just spent an hour dialling in. If two or three of us land on the same notes independently, we trust it.
Every roaster’s website has a page about this and most of them say the same things, so we’ll try to be honest about where we actually are with it.
“Direct trade” isn’t a certified term. Anyone can put it on a bag. For us it means that for a handful of the coffees we buy each year, we have a direct relationship with the producer or the co-op — we’ve visited, we know what we paid, and the money went to them rather than through several hands. Right now that’s true for our Ethiopia and for one of the Colombians. For the rest, we buy through importers, and the good importers are transparent about farmgate prices and we choose them for that.
The reason we bother is partly quality — if a farmer knows you’ll come back next year and pay properly for the good stuff, they’ll do the extra work at the mill. And partly it’s just that the alternative, buying purely on price through a broker, pushes all the risk downhill onto the people with the least ability to carry it.
We’re a small company and we can’t do this for everything. But we’re trying to move more of our buying that way each year.
A lot of people pick up a V60 and then find the coffee comes out weak or sour and give up on it, which is a shame, because it’s a great little brewer once it clicks.
Here’s roughly how we do it. Fifteen grams of coffee to two hundred and forty grams of water is a good place to start, ground medium, a bit finer than you’d think, somewhere around table salt. Rinse the paper filter with hot water first and tip that water away. Put the grounds in, give the dripper a shake to level the bed.
Start your timer and pour just enough water to wet all the grounds, maybe forty or fifty grams, and leave it for thirty to forty-five seconds. This is the bloom and it lets gas escape so the rest of the brew is even. Then pour the rest in slow steady circles, keeping the water level up but not right to the brim, and try to be done pouring by about a minute forty-five. The whole thing should finish draining somewhere around two minutes thirty to three minutes.
If it’s sour and watery, grind finer. If it’s bitter and takes forever to drain, grind coarser. That’s most of it. Water matters more than people think too — if your tap water tastes bad the coffee will taste bad.
This is one we get asked about a lot behind the bar, so it seemed worth writing down.
The Yirgacheffe we’re on at the moment is a washed lot from the Gedeb area, and it’s a delicate coffee — lots of jasmine and bergamot, a bit of stone fruit, quite tea-like in the cup. The whole job when roasting something like this is to not get in its way. It’s very easy to flatten all of that out with too much heat.
We run it on a fairly gentle profile. Charge temperature a little lower than our house filter roasts, a steady climb through the drying phase, and we’re watching the time between first crack and drop closely — we keep that window short so it stays bright. It comes off the roaster maybe fifteen to twenty seconds after first crack really gets going, a light-to-medium colour, no oil on the beans at all.
We rest it four or five days before we brew it. Straight off the roaster it’s a bit closed up. By day five the aromatics have opened right out and that’s when we put it on as the filter option in the cafe.
If you buy a bag, brew it as filter, not espresso. A 1:16 ratio, water just off the boil, and don’t over-agitate it.
First post of the year, and a small change: we’ve swapped the house filter over to the Ethiopia Yirgacheffe we’re running at the moment.
The Kenya we ran through most of last year finally ran out over the holidays and rather than reorder we thought we’d try something different for a while. So far the response has been good — a few regulars asked for “the usual” and got a surprise, but nobody’s complained yet.
Bags are on the shop page if you want to try it at home. More soon.