The year is finally coming to an end, and even though it was full of challenges, we anticipate 2022 with excitement and positivity. We hope you and your families are well and can enjoy some time together during the winter holidays!
Thank you for your support, and we are glad to share great coffees with you all year round. We hope you continue your good habit in 2022, as we anticipate many exciting coffees and collaborations.
Picking our Holiday subscription box is always a tough one. This year we have selected what we consider to be a fantastic box from a company with so much dedication and passion for the whole coffee industry.
Please enjoy your coffee from Drop Coffee!
Tell us a bit about the team, your set up and what you love about your work...
Drop Coffee is made by our lovely team of 4 baristas Moe, Sasha, Sivert and Lennaert at the café, led by café manager Sergei, the amazing production team at the roastery Laura and Erik, our operational manager Lisa and owners Joanna and Stephen. We love working with coffee for many reasons; we get to meet so many people on our travels to origin, our lovely customers at the café and around the world. Learning how versatile and alive coffee as a product is, and ever evolving how we refine the beans by roasting, brewing and serving.
Running both a roastery and a café is so exciting for us. We have a full view of the chain from opening a bag of green beans to serving a freshly brewed cup of coffee. That helps us both with receiving invaluable information about the roasting process to the café, and a better understanding for our baristas when meeting the customers, and also returning feedback and brew recipes from the café to the roastery, which is then passed on to our wholesale customers. It is a very important step in our quality control.
The roastery is a well oiled machine and stepping in there during full production is true joy! The whole production is run by only two people who roast, pack by hand and ship our coffee to wholesale and web shop customers around the world.
The café is our heart and window to the world. Here we always serve our full range of coffees, and it is here our newest coffees land first, for the baristas to get to know and serve as well as they possibly can. We have between us many years of experiences and knowledge, and discussing coffee with our baristas is an everyday treat.
As fun and positive as the experience of running a business is, we face challenges every day. When we think we have seen it all, from electricity failure at the cafe, the roaster breaking down, or staff being snowed in, something new comes along for us to solve. But we have learned that everything can be fixed, and it is all thanks to our hard working staff. As many of us, we have been affected by Covid19, and that was a completely new challenge for us. Having to rethink most aspects of how we work, from keeping our staff and customers safe, to how peoples consuming behavior changed almost overnight.
This year we have produced our second edition of the Drop Coffee Advent Calendar. It is a lot of fun to be able to produce a seasonal, limited edition product which we hope will bring our customers brightness to the (at least in the north) darkest month of the year. But even though we have enjoyed the process, we are very happy to see the calendars leave the roastery, as it is a lot of hard work to make them. This year we found ourselves in a situation where we could offer a unique coffee for each of the 24 days. This is something that we are very proud of, and it showcases how coffee can span from fruity and sweet, chocolatey and nutty to juicy and acidic.
About the coffee:
All three coffees come from one farm and one producer, Los Andes run by our dear friend Ernesto Menéndez. Los Andes is exclusively Drop coffee, it is about 5 hectares which is a bigger size for us at the moment but we find it worth taking a little more of this coffee, for the clear cooperation between Drop Coffee and Los Andes. Ernesto holds a lot of knowledge and is always very communicative about how he is taking care of the farm, and how he is processing the coffee.
We have been buying coffee from Los Andes yearly, for many years. Ernesto started separating the SL28 from the Bourbon for us a few years ago for us, and since a couple of years he has been doing a natural process for us as well, limited to 345 kilo only. This means you can taste two very unique taste profiles from Los Andes, that have been grown side by side at the farm as well as the Bourbon in two different processing methods.
Los Andes has quite an interesting story: Almost 70 years ago, the previous owner of the farm planted SL28 seed on the farm, seeds which had been taken home to El Salvador from a hunting trip in Kenya. Normally the trees we buy coffee from are about 4-20 years old, not 60-70. The Bourbon varietal is growing right beside the SL28, and some of those trees are even older, coming up to 80 years.
Natural Bourbon:
Flavour description: A sweet and red berry-like aroma. The coffee has a medium intense sweetness and flavours of cacao and frozen strawberries, reminiscent of chocolate covered raspberries. The body is medium and the mouthfeel is smooth.
Producers: Ernesto Menéndez
Varietal: Bourbon
Location: Apaneca-Ilamatepec Mountain Range, Santa Ana
Harvested: March 2021
Altitude: 1720 masl
Process: Natural
Washed Bourbon:
Flavour description: A bright yet well balanced El Salvadorian style coffee . The coffee has a medium acidity of lime juice and flavour notes of red apples and almond cake, with an aftertaste of lime zest. The body is light and juicy.
Producers: Ernesto Menéndez
Varietal: Bourbon
Location: Apaneca-Ilamatepec Mountain Range, Santa Ana
Harvested: March 2021
Altitude: 1720 masl
Process: Fully washed.
Washed sl28
Flavour description: A nutty and caramel-like aroma cup. The coffee has a medium intense lime-like acidity with flavour notes black currant, caramel and rhubarb pie. It has a long-lasting aftertaste of hibiscus and a bit of a cooling sensation. The body is light to medium and the mouthfeel is juicy.
Producer: Ernesto Menéndez
Farm: Los Andes
Varietal: SL28/34
Process: Fully washed.
Location: Apaneca-Ilamatepec Mountain Range, Santa Ana
Altitude: 1720 masl
Harvested: March 2021
End Note:
We could write endlessly about coffee and everything around it, but most of all we would like to say a huge thank you for drinking our coffee!
