I have over the past few months noticed the significant increase in footfall to our Roastery during the working week, whether it is a thirsty friend in need of a quality cuppa to nurse back at his workplace or a fresh bean collector who happens to live conveniently within the locality and now has a taste for the good stuff and where it can be found.
Education is everything and what you don't know perhaps might eventually hurt you. We are told how physiologically good coffee is for our liver giving us a 40% reduction chance of liver cancer. This is a particularly relevant side effect if the coffee is of a speciality variety and has been small batch hand roasted, making sure of a light to medium roast process thus reducing or removing entirely the presence of the apparently carcinogenic chemical known as Acrylamide. This chemical is produced when performing a darker roasting process at high temperature, often occurring when using cheaper more commercial coffees. This should be the coffee of yesteryear when roasters would burn it to make it taste like we used to think coffee should taste and of course to disguise the fact that the coffee they were roasting was of such poor quality. In my experience you simply can't polish a turd or indeed make a silk purse out of a pigs ear! So next time you are buying a cup of Joe my advice would be to take a keen interest in whats in your cup and where it has come from. Should you be so fortunate to still have a sharp set of eyes, please take a quick glance at the hopper on top of the grinder you are about to receive your dose from and check if it contains a collection of oily black slugs purporting to be a safe consumable product as you might just be paying to poison yourself!
I like to think as a small business we make a significant effort to import where we can direct from farmer or from his representative partner who is sharing the profits equally with him. We try to be the real deal wherever possible and I have made several trips out to plantations in Central South America and South East Asia not realising at the time how much knowledge I was gleaning regarding the growing and harvesting process and learning about the many different more disease resistant varietals (hybrids) that are constantly emerging.
I am so thrilled to see the look of sheer surprise on a new customers face when they come into our roastery and taste a good quality single origin coffee that I have carefully manipulated through the roasting process and then lovingly poured over the filter. This is how coffee should taste and can taste, and there is nothing more satisfying to me than sending a new friend on a upward spiral of well being addiction, insisting in the future on sourcing the best quality caffeine after I have given them some clear instruction on how best to go about administering the brew.
I'm confident that our product is strong and that our coffee displays all the characteristics in the cup you would come to expect with small batch hand roasted with passion. We are also about the freshness in the cup which creates the strength of great flavour I am so often asked about.
I look forward to seeing you all soon.
G
