Coffea Roasterie

I am thrilled to announce that the Oro Dominicano Estate in the Dominican Republic is preparing a special 100% Bourbon micro-lot for us this year (right now actually)!  

Our Dominican Republic Las Lagunas, from the Oro Dominicano estate, tied for the top score on Coffee Review this month, with a 92 point rating!

Join us for a crash course in the basics of coffee that will explain the life of a coffee bean from the time it is harvested until the time it ends up in your mug. Discover where coffee comes from, how it is roasted, the best ways to brew, and finally be able to tell the difference between a cappuccino and a latte! This course is sure to enrich your coffee knowledge and will allow you to personally taste the difference with hands on activities in every class.

In the past few weeks we've introduced three excellent new coffees; the Kenya Akiba peaberry, the Ethiopia Yirgacheffe Gebeya, and the Guatemala Finca La Providencia.

The new kenya was sort of a surprise find. We were cupping a sample of a really generic sounding Kenya (The name was something like "Kenya Stock Lot 147592"), with no specific information telling us anything about the location, cultivars, etc., and were surprised to find a wonderful cup with sweet, juicy blackberry and currant. This one has a ton of the Kenya character we look for, and a very interesting acidity/sweetness profile. At first, it doesn't seem as acidic as many great Kenyas, but the acidity is there; just balanced by a lot of sweetness. Since "Kenya Stock Lot 147592" didn't sound very appealing, we chose the name "Kenya Akiba." Akiba is Swahili for stock, supply, or reserve.

Two exciting new coffees are in transit to us as I write this, and we'll be roasting the first batches early next week.

We've been talking the first one up for a couple of weeks now, the Costa Rica Helsar de Zarcero. This was a surprising find for us. To be honest, we've had a bit of a bias against Costa Rican coffees in the past couple of years. Plenty of good, untainted samples have made it in, but nothing that had the abundance of character we were after, and I had begun to doubt we would find a special Costa anytime soon. This lot from Helsar de Zarcero was a different story.

About a year ago, I took three samples of a very nice Guat, and put them into storage three different ways. One sample was held in a cloth bag, along with a piece of burlap, and put into the bottom file cabinet drawer in the office. The second sample was also put into this drawer, but was sealed inside an air tight mylar bag. The third sample was held in the freezer, inside of the same type of mylar bag. For a bit more info, check out the blog post from a few weeks ago.

I opened the samples up yesterday, and the first thing I did was to take a close look at the green. I expected to see paler color in the burlap sample, but there was no difference that I could notice. We also tracked down a small amount of the same coffee, Finca Agua Tibia from Fraijanes, from this year's harvest. There were some significant differences in appearance between the '08 and '09 lots.

Cupping is probably my favorite way to taste coffee, but it is far from ideal for enjoying a cup in the morning. French Press is great, but it can lack clarity and I don't like the sediment. Plastic manual drip cones (Melitta) do a decent job, but it is difficult to get a really great cup out of them. It is tough to find a simpler, more consistent way to make an awesome, clean cup than the Chemex, which is why it is the method I most commonly recommend for brewing at home.

I just made a few consecutive french presses of a sample we received a week or so ago, the Colombia Cauca, La Sierra. I love this coffee.

In a few words, it is powerful, very complex, and very characterful. The sample is almost gone, and I'm afraid we won't be tasting it again until the full shipment arrives from Colombia in about a month. When it comes in, we'll taste another sample to make sure nothing detrimental happened in shipping, and then we'll be sure to pick some up.

I can't wait to get this one in.

-Jon

About a year ago, we started putting a good portion of our green coffee into air tight mylar bags. We were sick of coffees losing character and liveliness after a few months, and we knew getting them out of burlap was one of the best things we could do to prevent this. We're now doing it with all of our coffees. We go through each lot pretty quick, usually within about four months, but the bags still make a tremendous difference.

On July 18th of '08, I bagged up some coffee for an experiment. I took our Guatemala Finca Agua Tibia, and stored a sample sized amount three different ways. First, I put a half pound in a cloth drawstring bag, along with a piece of a coffee bag, to simulate traditional storage in jute. A second sample was stored in an air tight bag. Both of these went into the bottom drawer of our file cabinet.

Training staff is a big part of my job at Coffea. On their first day, I try to always ask new hires what they know about coffee and espresso, and they usually give pretty similar answers, especially if they've worked in coffee before. Almost without fail, we stumble upon a few common misconceptions. They often have to do with very absolute statements (x is better than y), which are seldom safe in the world of coffee.

Coffea is open, and the word is out. We've been serving drinks in the cafe for a little over a month now, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive. Our customers have really been enjoying the menu, our coffees, and the atmosphere, and it feels great to see everything received so well.

We also just got back from our first time exhibiting at the SCAA trade show in Atlanta, where we cupped our coffees with like-minded coffee fanatics from all over the world. Inquiries have been coming in from cafes throughout the U.S. (and a few from elsewhere), and it looks like our coffees will soon be on the menu in a number of quality oriented shops outside our area.



If you've been following the updates on the Coffea News section of the site, you already know that the building is really taking shape. We're expecting the arrival of our custom bar early next week, which has all of us excited. We decided on dark stained ash mill work with a beautiful black granite top.

Blue Devil Creative has been building us some very cool furniture as well; everything from bar stools, to tables, to our menu board. I've only seen sketches thus far, so it should be a lot of fun to see the finished pieces. Everything in the building is moving at a rapid pace now, and its exciting to see all of our planning finally take shape. For a while there, it was feeling like March would never come.

A few months ago Jon got an email from Kaelin McCowan asking if he could stop by our shop (Great Plains Coffee at the time) as he was driving through South Dakota on his way to Toronto with a Deidrich IR12 coffee roaster that he picked up in Seattle. He's opening a quality focused roasterie called Detour Coffee Roasters. We had a great time chatting with him (as we do with any like-minded coffee lover), and wish him success in his new venture.

He wrote an article about the businesses he visited along the way, and he had some very kind words to say about our humble cafe. Here is a pdf copy of the article - reprinted by permission from Barista Magazine. (The section about us is on the second page.)

We've been putting a lot of thought into how we'll decide what coffees will make it on to the bean menu at any given time. At Great Plains Coffee, the menu was fairly static. I don't think we ever found ourselves without a Colombia, Sumatra Mandheling, or Kenya, despite some close calls, and we always maintained a list of about 10 - 15 coffees.

Maintaining this type of menu served a definite purpose; we had lots of customers that liked being able to purchase the "same" coffee every time they came in, and the large variety seemed to have something that appealed to everyone, but there were a few major downfalls as well:

1) Every coffee is unique. Just because a coffee comes from the Huila region in Colombia, doesn't necessarily mean it will it will approximate the flavor profile of another Huila. A certain origin or region name on a bag label should not be seen as a guarantee of what flavors and aromas are to be found inside.

We just found the best El Salvador we've ever tasted. Finca Suiza. This coffee is grown by Francisco Menéndez in the Santa Ana region. It consists of an interesting blend of varietals: 60% Bourbon, 30% Pacamara, 10% Catimor.

The Pacamara contributes to a particularly interesting fruity flavor profile. It's not funky-fruity like a Harrar or natural Sidamo, but dignified and clean. Cupping and french press show lots of berry and stone fruits, and drip brewing shows more apple and cinnamon than anything else. The body is thick contributing to a long sweet finish.