The blog.

A lot is written on how to keep roasted coffee fresh.  Pretty much anyone with an interest knows that coffee is best enjoyed freshly roasted, and that the best way to do this is buy enough from a roaster to last a few weeks.  What hasn’t been so well documented is the storage of green unroasted coffee and how this might affect quality, and therefore the taste once roasted.  Most green coffee beans come out of sacks, some of which look pretty cool, but that’s about as far as it goes.  Hessian sacks (made from jute) have been used the world over since coffee was first commercially grown and exported, so why change…Or maybe it’s time for a change? Read-On

Pedro (our cast-iron roaster) micro-roasted a 10kg batch of a new espresso this week, destined for some serious coffee and surfing fans in Polzeath.  For our ‘design for life’ espresso project we were set a goal to design an espresso that best represents ‘time spent in the tube’ using only high-quality traceable arabica beans.  We started by returning to origin to see whether a single-estate bean might fit the bill, and whilst we tasted some great examples we came to the conclusion that combining these in a blend would better achieve our taste goal: an espresso with clean, crisp and bright acidity balanced by a mellow sweetness.  It had to be “mellow”, surfer dudes wouldn’t accept anything less (or more).  The outcome is an espresso that takes a bit of practice to knock on the head each time, but one that delivers a great taste experience when perfected – with or without milk. Read-On

Our ‘Design for Life’ project reached a stage where we needed to get blending…so for the past week we’ve been mixing things up at the roastery.  The only rule, as ever, was there wouldn’t be any robusta beans touching ‘Pedro’ our Joper roaster.  Whatever some might say to justify robusta beans being used in an espresso blend, we think they just taste cheap and nasty!  What made the blending and espresso construction more interesting for us is that we were given “time in the tube” as inspiration, so we then developed an end goal in terms of how we wanted this espresso to taste… Read-On

A friend recently said that when it comes to judging coffee the “cup never lies”.  It sounds a bit like the title of a James Bond movie, but he’s right.  The trouble is there are a lot of different tastes out there, so it can be hard to objectively judge a coffee when dealing with such a subjective thing as ‘taste’.  The cupping process attempts to introduce some objectivity to what might otherwise be an impossibly subjective process.  We’ve been on a cupping mission this week as part of our ‘design for life’ espresso project… Read-On

For the last couple of days the Hands-On Roastery has smelt of jute and green beans from four different continents! A new selection of beans is always exciting and not just because the coffee sacks all have something different to say…this time we have some extra special, but complicated, coffee beans. Read-On

When it comes to roasting coffee specifically intended for espresso, there are so many different factors to consider that it’s a bit like an engineering design project (minus the technical drawings).  The approach taken with Lusty Glaze was to decide on a style and taste as the goal, and then work back by finding the coffee beans and roast profile that could deliver this.  So when a customer asked if we could roast coffee to use as their unique espresso, it was the perfect excuse for a new design project.  Our ‘design for life’ project is in its early stages, so we thought it would be a good idea to chart the whole process via The Blog. Read-On