Recent Projects

5 February, 2012

Several interesting things have been happening here recently.

There are some new coffees that have come in recently. This includes the return of Sulawesi Toraja which I have found to take a dark roast very well. Smooth, sweet, and excellent with both drip and espresso preparations.

You may have noticed that we have a new coffee roaster. I expect this to be hooked up and operational later this month. This does not replace any of our other coffee roasters. Rather, it's a one kilo lab roaster. I want to wait until after I have more experience using it before I write more about that and how we'll be using it, but it's a neat little machine.

We've never been particularly secretive in how we operate. If someone comes in and asks how I'm roasting a given coffee I'm happy to print off a copy of a roast profile. If someone wants to know what's in a blend, I'll let them know which coffees and what proportions I'm using. That also applies within the industry. We go to industry events and talk to other companies about how we do things. Software that we've developed for our own use gets released as open source software that other firms are free to adopt. This year I've been working with others in the industry to help develop a new roasting class and I plan to help teach that class at the next SCAA conference. I'll be making a couple trips to Portland over the next couple months to work on this.

I've also recently finished putting together a video on roast profile development. This briefly covers the methodology we apply when deciding how to roast each of the coffees we bring in. You can watch that below.