What's In Your Cup?

Time passed since roast doesn’t always mean diminished freshness or flavor. It’s the weekend and you’ve made some time to pop into our cafe. You walk to the wall of beans and scan over your options; setting your eyes on the roast or region you like, you choose a bag. A roast date is present and, to your shock, this coffee was roasted about two weeks ago. Hesitantly, you put the bag down and instead find the one with the freshest roast date. Satisfied with something fresher, you make the purchase and go home to start brewing.  While scouting for freshness...

When you walk into your local coffee roaster or café, it may be confusing to see strawberry or s'mores listed as flavors on a bag of beans. Is someone adding marshmallows to the drum as these beans are roasted? In true specialty coffee, that is certainly not the case.

We see labels like “gourmet” and “premium” thrown around every end of the food and beverage industry. Customers become desensitized by these poor advertising attempts until well-defined indicators begin to lose their weight. The phrase “specialty coffee” is not just some cliché. So when used properly, what does it really mean?

The thousands of miles long supply chain from grower to roaster has quality assurance at every step ensuring that when you open your little bag, you’ve got a homogenous, harmonious little family of happy beans, who you will, of course, ritualistically grind and drown. The process of sorting beans is a mix of purpose-built machinery and a lot of manual labor. Much of this sorting for quality and size is achieved by industrial air sorters and sieves but a lot of sorting for defects is still done by hand. Generally this involves workers lining up on either side of a...