Quite a bit has been going on here lately. First, the last of the decaffeinated Kenyan has been roasted. We asked our supplier about newly available lots but the coffee available would not have met our standards. This coffee was 10% of our decaffeinated espresso blend, so this has been adjusted. The new blend is not as dark and is more heavily weighted toward coffees from islands in the Pacific.
I've figured out how to roast the Fair Trade Certified Papua New Guinea and the most recent lot of Sumatra Gayoland. Papua New Guinea roasts exactly the same as the previous two lots of New Guinea coffee and while the flavor is similar, it is not identical and it does not behave quite the same in blends. This means that changes are needed for Big Island Blend and Wilson's House Blend. The new Big Island Blend has already been developed. This will be a Fair Trade Certified coffee once again. I should have the new version of House Blend ready tomorrow.
We needed to replace a part on the roaster. The front drum bearing recently stopped accepting grease. This did not cause any downtime aside from the time spent replacing the bearing once the new one arrived, but by the last batch of coffee roasted before the new bearing arrived, the old bearing became loud. The new bearing is quiet and working normally. This is only the second part I've needed to replace in four years.
We have been spending quite a bit of time with reporters lately between an article on the business in today's Milwaukee Journal Sentinal and an article on West Racine that will probably be published next week or the Sunday after that. Today's article by Mary McIntryre was well-intentioned and positive in tone, but nearly every paragraph has an error in it. For those of you who have read the article, here are some corrections:
I don't really know if others in the business consider us to be control freaks or perfectionists. We consider ourselves such, but this really gets to the fact that some ways of doing things are better than others, and this view is fairly common at establishments that can have genuine pride in providing excellent coffee. Racine just is not the best place to find many such businesses.
The quote about coffee farming does not appear with a very sensible context. The quote is correct, but would have been better farther into the article.
The article makes a digression into one of the methods by which coffee is processed. In that digression, it claims that we specifically look for coffees processed in that way. In reality, we buy both wet and dry processed coffees and coffees that are sun dried or mechanically dried. What we really care about is how the coffee tastes, and if mistakes are made at any stage of the processing, this will be displayed by defects characteristic of whatever mistake was made. This is true at every stage of coffee production from the care of the plant before coffee cherries develop all the way through brewing the coffee. Also, the parchment layer around the coffee beans does not just fall off, as claimed in the article.
While fruity and citric notes are common in East African coffees, not all East African coffees have such characteristics.
There is a bit that describes Costa Rican coffee as a blend of African and Indonesian coffees, but Costa Rican coffee is coffee grown in Costa Rica. This confusion likely came from an explaination that African coffees tend to taste most like other African coffees, coffees grown in and around Indonesia (from India to Australia) tend to taste most like other coffees from that region, and likewise for Central and South America. La Minita coffee is grown entirely in Costa Rica, not "primarily" grown in Costa Rica, though we do currently buy our Guatemalan, Colombian, and one of our Sumatran coffees through Hacienda La Minita.
My father, Robin Wilson, does not have the roasting experience necessary to properly roast samples of coffees we are considering. The samples are too small to treat like an ordinary batch and, as I have a better sensory memory from thousands of roasts I've done, I do the sample roasting.
The article goes on to discuss Fair Trade, but confuses the issues connected with Fair Trade Certification with issues connected with Coffee Kids, and presents both approaches under Transfair's Fair Trade label. Coffee Kids is the organization we discussed that deals with promoting economic diversification in coffee growing communities. Fair Trade is about increasing the amount of money farmers get for the coffee. It is safe to ignore anything about processing in the Fair Trade section of the article.
The article suggests that Robin and Diane quit nursing to open Wilson's Coffee & Tea. Both kept nursing jobs until the business could support them.
While we are currently the oldest coffee shop in Racine, we were not the first. We were working on getting open at the same time as Center City Espresso, and they managed to open a few months before we did. Had the last set of owners not made some very bad decisions, they would still be around. As it is we probably are the only ones who take coffee seriously in Racine, if the quality of the coffee and ownership churn frequency is anything to go by. It always amazes us when we find out that a business claiming to be a coffee shop is buying really good coffee and serving something not worth drinking.
The piece is not all bad. There are a few good photographs. Two feature me and the captions are all correct. David Joles must have taken better notes.
Some might read this and think that I have the illusion that journalism is easy or that putting together a lengthy, coherent news piece free of errors is trivial. I entertain no such thoughts, but to have serious errors in 12 out of 30 paragraphs should be absurd for a professional. Unfortunately, this seems to be a normal and acceptable error rate in the news industry.