Category Archives for Retail

Roasting coffee for black or with milk.

I have recently decided to change our approach to roasting coffee, and want to relate it specifically to whether it is going to be drunk black or with milk.

I want to bring out the best flavour in each origin but it seems clear to me now that you want very different flavours in the coffee, depending on whether it has milk or not.

Black coffee I want the flavours to be fruity sweetness– like the coffee cherry looks like it might taste. But these flavours turn sour when combined with milk, so I want caramelised sweetness to work with milk.

This mindset covers soft brewing and espresso, and I am currently developing (june2012) new roast profiles for each origin: but on the whole the Americas will be both black and white, but some Africans may be black only.

This will be presented on our new retail bags as, recommended Black, recommended White.

During June July we are now receiving our fresh harvest of most origins. These will be tasting extra good while they are fresh, and I will use these as a conduit to roll out the new roast profiles, as they will all be tasting good and this will hopfully help customers with the transition.

The first question to ask someone is buying retail bags is “do you take milk with that?”, (where it used to be “is it for plunger or stove top…”) and lead people towards origins based on white/black, then we can better explane flavours, and encourage customers to be looking for fruit sweetness in acidity for black, and bitter sweet choc for milk etc.

This partly came from knowing our coffees make great espresso, and most of our business is espresso, but trying to make single origins really good with milk and black is not poss with many origins.

What this means is we will be doing Single Origin Espresso light roasts, which (for me) is a very exciting new flavour experience which works very well with most of our coffees!!

The Don and Taddesse roasts are the lightest they have ever been (just enter second crack) and we might find it usefull to mainly recommend blends to people who like the big bold “coffee” flavour, as these taste awse with milk!!

This enables me to bring out more interesting flavours for the black coffee roasts, not having to worry if about it being drunk with milk and customer thinking we don’t produce a great product.

I will still try to keep a spread of available flavour thru our origins, bringing out certain characteristics in each origin to get a good spread, but it is a move towards emphasising fruitiness in black coffee.

René