This week has seen the launch of our new Guatemalan lot from Buena Esperanza in La Democracia and the arrival of our sexy new tote bags (See Instagram for a special deal with both of them!).
New Lots are arriving tomorrow from Uganda, El Salvador and the long awaited Cascara (Villa Sarchi from La Julia mill in Costa Rica if you must know), keep your eyes peeled for them up on the site.
We've been slowly implementing a new green buying policy over the last 6 months not based on anything confirmed or factual, but just on subjective experience. Occasionally as a roaster you find an old (read months) bag of coffee you stashed in a box somewhere that may have been a little bit special but you forgot about. You are then extremely surprised to find that this coffee still tastes fantastic, with few of the flavours you'd associate with stale coffee. This same coffee roasted a few days ago doesn't taste as good, lacking sweetness or the acidity from the old bag. We put this hypothetically down to the ageing of the green coffee and have decided to buy smaller lots of fresh green and cycle through them more often. This does mean that many will come and go never to return, but hopefully only the best aspects of each coffee are presented. A trade off we are happy to make, let us know what you think.
I only mention this as recently the industry stalwart James Hoffman wrote a piece about this very topic, which in my mind all but confirms it. (Still we both agree more experiments are needed). Read his article here. Would you as consumers be interested in trying such an experiment with us?
-Brooke
This is absolutely fascinating (even mind-blowing considering all we’ve ever been told re freshness of roast) and something I have never considered! I roast very small amounts at a time for personal and (very,very small commercial) purposes and so I’m not sure whether it would work or not for me to experiment with this, but I’d certainly be up for giving it a whirl if we can find a way.
Neill Shaw on