October 2020 and this is the month we featured Frukt, as our roaster subscription. This is the web version of our interview Samuli, so that means there is more content for you, than the leaflet we send out with our boxes! Hope you enjoy this and also the coffee!
How are the fresh, seasonal offerings looking this year? Any you are particularly excited about?
This year, despite a difficult one for all of us, has been a really interesting one for us. We have a great relationship with La Real Expedición Botánica in Colombia and this year we got some really great coffee from them. Two of which we are sharing with you all.
We have started to work more closely with another favorite origin of ours - Honduras. We recently got in touch with Benjamin Paz from San Vicente and look forward to more delicious coffee from Santa Barbara, Honduras this year!
It's times like these that really put emphasis on relationships. Very much looking forward to the new crop in both of these countries soon arriving in Europe.
Your packaging and branding looks amazing. Very clean and stands out.
Thanks! We wanted to have a great looking brand that would be unique and have clear style and aesthetics. Clean and carefree. All the visuals are created by our talented designer Tomi Leppänen.
What pushes you to label a coffee either Fun or Exciting?
When starting out we had two things in mind. First of all, we wanted to establish a Specialty Coffee roastery in a local market that was pretty unfamiliar with Specialty Coffee. We wanted to be known for great coffees, transparent both in sourcing and flavor. Second thing was to be approachable to the uninitiated.
We felt like the best way to talk about flavor profiles in coffee would be to just have two different options Fun and Exciting. Fun stands for balanced and approachable, easy coffees while Exciting can be anything but. I think the two Colombians this month make a good example of just that.
Keeping it simple is the key. We will have nano lots of special preparations coming up in the near future. As well as some Geisha from Colombia that we might release as something extraordinary.
How do you source new green coffee or select partners / producers to work with?
We started working with Collaborative Coffee Source when we started in 2018. We have since worked with Primavera and Nordic Approach as well. For a small roaster these quality focused importers are very good partners. Reliable sources for good coffee and most often quite open about the numbers as well.
However, it has been a goal for us to find more direct ways of buying green coffee. Since we got in touch with La Real Expedición Botánica and met Herbert and Ana (producer of El Crucero) at World Of Coffee in Berlin (2019) we wanted to build a relationship with them and have all our Colombian coffee from them. Since then we've focused more and more on their offering and will continue to do so in the future.
We are very happy to have made such a good connection with our friends in Colombia. Also very much looking forward to building a relationship with San Vicente in Honduras. Small steps but very meaningful indeed. There is a lot of good coffee available on spot lists of different importers. For us it was clear from the beginning that we start to take steps early on to move into a more relationship focused way of buying coffee. More commitment than only the cup score.
Great selection for this month, tell us a bit about them
La Quinta is a very clean and good washed Colombian. It has a complex apple like acidity, red apple sweetness and some almond / pecan style notes to balance it out. Very sweet coffee. and an easy one to drink. Very nice!
El Crucero is a wild and bold coffee with some funk and very crazy candy like sweetness. Real berry bomb. This is what Ana (the producer and director of La Reb) refers to as fed-batch washed process. The cherries are picked every day for three days and thrown into a fermentation tank and left to ferment in layers. Every new days picking is a new layer that is more sugars and fuel for the fermentation process. After that the coffee is pulped and washed and dried.
What's interesting is that both coffees are Castillo variety.
Gerardo Moreno is a super clean coffee from Santa Barbara, Honduras. Clean, sweet and balanced yet complex profile. Super easy to drink but definitely not your typical coffee. I personally really enjoy this flavor profile. Subtle complexity. This coffee is Pacas variety.
Any brew recommendations: recipes you would like to share
Simple recipes are what we usually go for. Most often I work with 60g/l or 1:16 brew ratio. The one thing we have been experimenting with is aging or resting the beans before use. I usually pick a 4 weeks old bag for home brewing. Coffee roasted on a Loring seems to have a longer shelf life. Sometimes the coffee is too fresh for longer periods of time.
Any words of wisdom or hope to share with our subscribers at this time
I think it's worth mentioning the fact that every small thing counts. Supporting business and people who believe in what they do and keep moving forward is ever so valuable. Let the people you look up to or feel inspired by know.
