The SCAA Expo came to town last month, bringing with it the US Barista Championship. Below is Devon Chapman using a wine aerator in a performance that took him to the finals.

Since my last visit, Matt and Jim have been building up the largest portfolio of single-origin coffees available in Montana. They’ve remained the only light-roast choice for coffee enthusiasts in Missoula, rolling out a natural process blend called BLOOM, pulling in a Cup of Excellence from El Salvador, and topping it all off with their lightest roast yet: a Rwandan from the Musasa Cooperative.

Unlike the roasters in Portland and elsewhere, Jim and Matt aren’t roasting everything to a relatively similar level. They’re selling light brown beans as well as slick black beans. So when I visit Jim Chapman on a cold sunny day, we talk about how they determine a roast profile for each coffee and how the lighter roasts have been received by their customers.

But this isn’t just another conversation about light roast vs. dark roast. Black Coffee Roasting Company is in the unique position of introducing lighter-roasted coffees to a market that hasn’t seen anything like it. This is first contact, so they’ve had to offer the dark blends alongside the lighter single-origins in order to retrain the palates of the coffee-drinking community. Going a step further, their Black & Tan blends a light Brazil roast with a darker roast of the same bean, giving their customers a gradual step toward the single origins.

Tell me about the Black & Tan’s conception. How did you discover that you needed a darker Brazil roast, and how did you decide to blend a dark and light roast?

We came up with the Black & Tan when cupping a spectrum of light and dark roasted Brazil. Brazil is an interesting bean because it has unique characteristics on both ends of the spectrum. As of opening here in Missoula, Montanans were accustomed to dark roasts, period. We had a lot of requests early on for roasts darker than what we were offering, so we wanted to find a bean that could go that direction. Blending the lighter and darker style of the same bean felt as natural as blending coffees from different origins, because the light and dark roasts taste considerably different than one another but compliment each other nicely.  And so, Black & Tan was born, and people seem to love it.

And the Rwanda is on the other side of the spectrum as far as bean development. Would you prefer to be roasting everything lighter?

We do not really see ourselves as ever limiting our roast style to one end of the spectrum or another. We test every bean we get on a full scale of the spectrum. A crop can be different year to year, and we will roast them according to that crop’s characteristics. This Rwanda is fantastic on the lighter side and we have a few others that seem to do great on that end of the spectrum as well. We have had to explain why we roast the way we do to this market, but people have been very receptive and are excited about the concept of tasting the differences that a lighter roast can highlight in coffee beans. Looking across the spectrum of our coffees I would say the majority of our coffees’ roasts fall in the middle, somewhere between light and dark.

How do your wholesale accounts and end-consumer effect how your roast?

There have been a few coffees in the past that we thought were terrific with a very light roast but would be fairly unapproachable to the masses, and so we took it just a little further. People loved them. One was from Bolivia, another from El Salvador. They were great the way we profiled them, but if it was just for ourselves we might have gone a touch lighter. Matt and I share very similar palates, and often blindly choose the same coffees when cupping. This has made bean development quite easy in terms of agreeing on which direction we are taking a coffee.

But for the most part Matt and I get more excited about the dynamics of lighter to medium roasted beans, where nuance and complexity are more front and center. We want to roast coffee for both the coffee geeks and for those that do not want to think about it. We want coffee to be approachable and simple, but we ourselves delve so far into this we can’t help but focus on the complexity. We want to serve simple cups, but we also want to highlight all the various and unique characteristics. Do those two objectives collide? Maybe. But at least they collide in the same cup.

We do custom roasts for several accounts in which we work with them to find the specific style of coffee they are looking for and that their customers are looking for. This level of development is what we love about the coffee world, because everyone notices different things about coffee and takes different things from it. This keeps our days dynamic, and our palates in motion. We get to highlight different coffee characteristics for each unique account’s needs.

Last summer Sterling Coffee filled half gallon growlers that donned a griffin logo with cold brew concentrate. This summer, Barista on Alberta is serving their cold brew outside from a coffee cart because their coffee house is still fire-ravaged.

But the cube ice, walnut bar from Goby, and house-made cookie pictured above are from Courier. The coffee is a wash process Ethiopian Yirgacheffe Biloya that arrived in August. Joel says “it has grapefruit qualities and citrus, still has jasmine on the high notes, but it has a bitter grapefruit quality too.”

Dave Beach is roasting on the 12 Kilo Diedrich when I arrive at Backporch Coffee Roasters, and Tony Querio is brewing a batch of cold brew. It’s hot, so I buy a cold brew and to my surprise it comes in a 325mL bottle. Dave says the idea came from seeing Stumptown bottle it’s brew. Bottled cold brew seems like a product that’s here to stay; I first saw it last summer with Sterling Coffee Roasters filling customers’ growlers with concentrate, and I noticed it more recently when growler sized bottles began to be bottled in Brooklyn with impressive bottle design and great press exposure.

Backporch’s cold brews are made using the Filtron system that’s been modified to use paper filters instead of wool felt. It’s brewed 10 feet from the roaster in the back half of their cafe. The concentrate is cut with water, poured into bottles, and the crown caps are clamped on by hand. Tony Querio created the labels. He runs his own photo and design firm in addition to working at Backporch. I ask him about the cold brew bottle design and how well they’ve been received by customers:

Did you base the bottle design off other beverage designs or did you find inspiration anywhere else?

“The bottle design was based on rough versions of our new packaging. I had a dirrection in mind from other pieces I had done for Backporch, trying to pull all the visual elements together into a uniform package. The key elements of that are the solid white and black horizontal lines. I was going for a modern take on an antique medicine bottle. I’ve seen so much coffee packaging that emphasizes the packaging and the brand. I was looking to highlight the product and coffee itself and build the brand around that. So much packaging is complex, so our well-designed minimalism stands out on the shelf.”

I know you sell the bottles at the farmers market. How do they go over with customers? Do you have many repeat costumers?

“We do sell them at our Farmer’s Market and generally they sell pretty well. The Bend Farmer’s Market we attend is not generally very strong for on sales for any coffee company due to the fact that it starts at 3:00 in the afternoon. We’re there primarily for the exposure and the opportunity to sample our coffee to people who would never make it into our shop.”

What about wholesale?

“There have been customers interested in seeing us sell it on a retail basis, however we are nearly maxing out our current production capabilities. The brew process requires 4 pounds to be soaked for a minimum of 18 hours and then cut with taste and hand bottled, so we literally do the whole process ourselves during shop hours.”

What’s different about your cold brew than from Stumptown’s and others?

“More and more roasteries are entering the cold bottled world, but ours stands out in that it is always made with our Direct Trade El Salvador Fina Las Delicias. We have a far more consistent flavor because of this an are able to tell the story of the Menendez brothers and their farm on the side of the bottle.”

“Also, we reuse our bottles. We started bottling so we would not continually be using a cup, lid, straw, ect. Many customers who take the bottles home, return them for reuse. The label is weatherproof so it can withstand repeat refrigeration and high-temp sanitation.”

What’s next?

“One of our customers, who daily orders an espresso and 2 bottles, owns our favorite restaurant Jackson’s Corner. There’s a cocktail in the works featuring our cold brew called The Cafe Racer.”

See also:

Able Brewing Equipment’s New Packaging & Stumptown Cold Brew

Matt Higgins and Keith Gehrke unveiled a new packaging design for their stainless steel Disk filter for the Aeropress. The design is minimal, sleek, and industrial. My attention is immediately drawn to the icons on the front of the package and on the instruction card. There is an icon for the Disk filter, the Aeropress, and for each step in the brewing process. They convey the simplicity of brewing a good cup of coffee with the filter, and the icons will be used consistently throughout the Disk, Kone and One-Cup packaging.

Josh Kenyon & Colby Nichols at Jolby & Friends created the design. Their past work shows a pattern of creating memorable and distinctly modern imagery for clients. I ask them a few questions about the Able designs:

You have a foundation in illustration. How did this affect the design?

“Both Josh and I have a passion for design as much as illustration and tend to live between both worlds at all times. For this packaging, we wanted to use strictly design and let the small things tell the story. Although a bit of our illustration aesthetic comes through in the icons (we couldn’t help it).”

How did you come up with the icons for the directions and the custom icons for each product?

“We wanted to keep the icons very simple, clear, and really easy to digest at a glance. They ended up having a very instructional and minimal look which works perfectly for the product. Able really wanted the wording to be minimal, so that the icons and design had to drive the packaging. We added emboss to a few areas (and some hidden ones) that feel great when you’re holding the envelope.”

Anything else you can tell me about the project?

“Our main inspiration were old Americana products like oil cans, machinery boxes, factory parts, bags of grain; the real simple but powerful bits of design from back then. We liked the idea of how that stuff hit you in the face with “this is exactly what’s inside, no frills”. A big thing for Able is that all of their products are made in the USA and we wanted the design to reflect that. Being inspired by that era was the easy part, but adding a modern twist was the most challenging. The design system that we came up with for the Disk packaging is being rolled-out through other products and its been fun playing with and pushing this style forward for Able. They are doing big things this year!”

There are details to the design that are very subtle, so I hope you are able to get your hands on an Able Disk.

I should also note that Coava Coffee Roasters and Able Brewing Equipment are now completely separate. The Disk, the One-Cup, and the Kone filters are now Able Brewing Equipment products, while roasted coffee and the cafe will always be branded under Coava Coffee Roasters. Below is a list of Coava and Able coverage on MARROW, beginning with the original Kone posting:

Coava Coffee Roaster – The Kone Filter

Coava Update & Packaging

Matt Higgins – Growing Coffee Plants

The Coava Disk – Stainless Steel Filter for Aeropress

NW Regional Competition With the Coava Kone

Able One-Cup Coffee Filter – A Sneak Preview

I’m sitting at Sterling Coffee Roasters. They recently put chairs and tables along their sidewalk so customers can stay and take advantage of the warmer days. They also have new stamped packaging for their coffee bags. The tracking applied to the second and, less so, third lines results in a geometric logo that looks like it was printed on letterpress.

Keith Gehrke continues his pursuit of the perfect cup with the introduction of the Able One-Cup, a metal coffee filter that aims to brew a single cup of coffee as cleanly as possible without compromising flavors. We discuss the new filter in their Coava Coffee tasting room on Grand Ave as cars roar by outside and I take photographs as evening sunlight spills into their bamboo-lined concrete industrial space. The filter is the first new item to be released this summer under the Able Brewing Equipment umbrella. “Able Brewing Equipment is not just filters,” Keith says, “it’s the complete system, and the One-Cup is part of a kit that brews coffee directly into a cup.”

The second piece is a thick glass holder called the One-Cup Glass Funnel, which holds the filter and is suspended above a cup by a third unreleased piece that will be included in the proprietary kit. The One-Cup Filter fits into a Hario Dripper making the glass funnel an optional piece. The filter alone will also be sold independently for $40.

In most respects the filter is similar to the newest version of the Coava Kone which sports a new matted finish, flexible steel for dent resistance, and thinner material resulting in more accurate, smaller holes.

Creating a cleaner cup of coffee has been a two-step process:

First, Keith recently redesigned the Kone’s hole pattern to slow down brewing and allow less sediment in to the cup. Keith explains, “We didn’t sell the Kone right away and originally designed it to be used only in our tasting room where we could control the ground size and train our baristas on good pouring technique. But our feedback showed that people couldn’t get as clean of a cup as they were getting at our shop. People were getting more sediment and cloudiness because their ground size was different. As a result, we re-designed the Kone’s filter pattern. The new pattern controls the extraction and produces a cup with less fines in the brew.”

Second, Keith created the One-Cup as a shorter filter that reduces the distance between the water kettle and coffee bed.  ”The Kone was made to fit into a Chemex, but when you’re only making one cup at a time it’s not ideal because there is less ground coffee in the filter and a large space between the water spout and the coffee bed. The Able One-Cup holds enough ground coffee but also lets you shorten the distance between the kettle and grounds, creating less agitation. It gives the water a gentler approach to the coffee bed, and a cleaner cup of coffee.”

The One-Cup still fits into the Chemex like the Kone, but the glass funnel allows you to cut down on the distance to the ground coffee and allows you to brew directly into the cup. The glass funnel is made of thick glass and is created by a scientific glass maker in the Bay Area, continuing Coava and Able’s commitment to manufacturing their products entirely in the USA.

Above, the Able One-Cup and companion Funnel hold 18g of ground coffee. Below are the new Able One-Cup and companion Able Glass One-Cup Funnel alongside their father-filter, the Coava Kone with Chemex.

Again, the filter and funnel will be suspended over a cup by an additional and yet-unreleased piece of the kit. The tentative price for the One-Cup Filter on its own is $40 and it will be released by August.

See also:

The Coava Kone & The Coava Disk

Portland Street Style & Tanner Goods Portland Ore. & Reveille Portland

The Coava Kone is currently sold out, but more units are on their way. So far, 4,000 Kones have been sold and 6,000 Disks. Coava’s one-year anniversary party is on July 8th. “It’s also our grand opening,” Keith points out, “we never had an official opening.”

See also:

The Coava Kone & The Coava Disk & Able One-Cup Filter

Colombian Cupping at Heart Roasters & Matt Higgins – Growing Coffee

Cellar Door Coffee celebrates their third year anniversary by showcasing the signature drinks used by their two barista competitors in the 2011 NW Regional Barista Competition in Tacoma.

To make his signature drink, first Thomas steeps two types of hops in a vac pot resulting in a hop tea, then he pours a homemade vanilla syrup into the bottom of  glasses and the hop tea is poured over, dissolving and mixing the syrup, and, as that portion rests, he finally pulls shots of espresso and pours them into the glasses.

He successfully achieves what he set out to do; combine his love for coffee and beer into one drink. The drink at the same time sweet and savory.

Kelly’s signature drink is a good example of the straightfowardly sweet signature drink that is more common in competition. Filling one glass with huckleberry creme anglaise topped with small droplets of creme fraiche and a second glass of espresso, Kelly serves the drink in two parts and the recipient alternates sips between the two glasses. On the one hand the cold, milkshake-like blend in the first glass contrasts with the warm espresso, but on the other hand the berry flavors in the first glass are similar to, and highlight, the fruity flavors in the natural process coffee.

Photographs and notes courtesy of Kevin Fish

heir caffe has been open for several months, but Caffe Vita’s Portland location has a 22 kilo Probat en route and will start roasting for Portland area wholesale accounts as early as May.

I walk in as Jared Durham measures the new bar. “The roaster will be here in a few weeks but we don’t know exactly when. It’s a refurbished 22 kilo Probat. We know a guy who could rebuild an old roaster so that’s what we had him do. The drum is new, and the seasoning process will take some time when we first receive it. Basically to season the drum we roast batches for long periods of time at higher temperatures, and then we will have a technician come and dial in the roaster to how we want it.”

Jared was originally from Portland before going to Seattle to work for Vita for several years. Now he is back and will be roasting in their Alberta hub. “We are happy to be across the street from the Alberta Rose Theater because it draws a lot of people, but Alberta is still developing. We definitely need more traffic but that will happen when we get the roaster and second bar set up. Those things are a draw for people.”

See also:

Able One-Cup Filter

Stumptown released their cold brew coffee last week. The bottles are the same 11oz. stubby bottles that Full Sail uses for their Session beers. The coffee is cold brewed in the “Toddy” style. The shelf life for these little guys is 11 days and they are available for $3.50. This isn’t the concentrate that comes directly from cold brewing, as the bottle I tried tasted pre-diluted.

See also:

3sixteen, Generic Surplus, and Farm Tactics & Portland Street Style

Open Season Portland Mercury Fashion Show 2011

The Coava Kone & Able One-Cup Filter

Wille Yli-Luoma at Heart Coffee Roasters uses 40g of coffee, 640g water, and a grind size of 8 to create the perfect cup of coffee with the Karlsbad coffee machine. “They have been around for almost 100 years,” Wille tells me. His machine came from Walküre’s procelain factory in Germany. “I first saw the machine at a cupping class in San Francisco with Willem Boot, he had a small version of the machine.”

The “coffee machine” features two sections that stack and make a tower. The grounds are poured into the top portion and water is poured over the grounds. The unit is 100% porcelain, including the hash-mark-like slits that act as a filter. The filter is part of the upper section, which is removed after brewing. The bottom section is used to serve the coffee at tableside. Although Walküre has released a more modern design, Wille uses the traditional “Karlsbad” version.

The Karlsbad coffee machine is part of a movement at Heart’s coffeehouse toward offering customers several brew methods. “The a brew from the coffee machine serves two people and costs $8. Right now you have to ask the barista about it specifically, but we will soon have a menu featuring Vacuum, Chemex with a paper filter, Aeropress, and the Walküre coffee machine.” You can also purchase a machine directly from Heart’s website.

See also:

Heart Roasters – Coffee Roaster Cupping

The Coava Kone & The Coava Disk – Aeropress Filter

There’s nothing groundbreaking here, but there’s still something to it. Perhaps how Courier’s glass mason jars are perfect for their iced drinks, and a drink like this reminds me of summer. And maybe also the ritual of watching Tyler melt the Cacao-sourced dark chocolate and stir it into my drink while I wait.

“It was a sweep”, Keith says as I wait for Sam to finish up with a customer. Two trophies adorn the shelf above Devin Chapman and Sam Purvis, who won the first place titles at the NW Regional Barista Competition held in Tacoma over the weekend.

I first met Sam when he worked at Coffee House Five, then he jumped to Barista on Alberta and now he’s at Coava with Matt and Keith.  Sam won the Northwest Regional Barista Competition portion of the event. “My signature drink was composed of raspberry and goji berry condensed in water, poured over chocolate, with milk and six shots of espresso. That made four servings, one for each judge, and then each cup was dusted with raspberry powder.”

Devin took first place for the new Brewers Cup competition, pitting competitors against each other in a first round of blind tasting in which one coffee is used by everyone, and then a second round where competitors choose their own coffee and give a presentation. “I used 24g of Honduras Benjamin Miranda and 400g of water. I took first place and brewed with the Coava Kone, and the runner up competitors used a Hario V60 and a Clever.  It’s good for the Kone because it has received mixed reviews. Some people love the Kone and some people hate it, but this shows that it produces results, and you can’t argue with that.”

Devin’s 1 year of barista experience made him the new guy compared to his competition, but he and Sam have been practicing each night after business hours at Coava’s Grand Avenue location. Along with their titles they also receive a fully-paid trip to the 2011 SCAA Expo in Houston to compete for the national titles. Devin stays modest as he points to Matt and Keith who are running a batch of beans through the roaster, “these guys have been working the hardest since this place opened. We are standing on their shoulders, if you know what I mean.”

See also:

The Coava Kone & The Coava Disk

Colombian Cupping at Heart Roasters & Matt Higgins – Growing Coffee

I’m in Missoula, and when I’m done comprehending how this small town has exactly one incredibly skilled purveyor for every need — Le Petit Outre for a palmier, Kettle House Brewery for a scotch ale, Posh Chocolat for a cayenne truffle, Betty’s Divine for suitable clothing, and Break Espresso for a homemade Chai latte — I will publish the secret in a book. But on this visit I add Black Coffee Roasting Company to my list for an excellent pour over of a coffee they call the AM blend.

This near-paragon of coffee roasting recently set up a shop on Russel Street. Matt McQuilkin shows me around. He and Jim Chapman started roasting earlier in 2010. Their 12-Kilo Diedrich Roaster sits in the corner of a large warehouse-like room that shares a wall with the building material re-use center Home ReSource. The bar is graced with a small coffee plant and several 140lb bags of green beans line the wall. They purchase one palate of coffee at a time, and Matt tells me “most of our coffee is roaster to second crack, but not all.”

Wholesale currently accounts for 95% of business, which means their showcase cafe is also a practical workspace, with desks in the corner covered with paperwork and long tables where coffee is weighed and bagged. A pour over bar holds ceramic drip cones with paper filters, and a Chemex sits idly beside.

The AM blend, the Red Room blend, and the Snowdrift winter blend all line the shelves at Le Petit Outre, Pattee Creek Market, and Good Food Store. “Most coffee shops can be, well, a little pretentious. But people in Missoula just want coffee. They want a good blend and don’t necessarily care about getting espresso shots of single-origin coffee,” says Matt. But they do single-origin, too.

See also:

The Coava Kone & The Coava Disk

Portland Street Style & Tanner Goods Portland Ore. & Reveille Portland

I drop in on Augusto Dias Carneiro and Sarah as they perform another public cupping. This time at Cafe au Play in SE Portland. Augusto weaves his way through the parents and children at this children-friendly neighborhood cafe as he pours steaming water and tells his company’s history.

What are the three family farms that you source from?

Diogo Carvalho Dias is my third cousin and he runs Fazenda Recreio. We also source from Fazenda Cachoeira which is run by Gabriel Carvalho Dias, my 2nd cousin who was at the cupping at the Armory. Fazenda Sao Francisco is run by Ernesto Carvalho Dias who is my grandpa and we named our espresso in honor of him.

What are the ratios?

There is no exact formula, it depends on the harvest and the profile of each coffee. Historically we’ve bought approximately 60% from Fazenda Cachoeira, 30% from Recreio and 10% from Sao Francisco

How often do you receive shipments? Do you source from non-family farms?

Currently we are receiving shipments of green (unroasted coffee beans) once every 4-5 months.  We source all our organic coffee from neighboring farms as my family hasn’t gone fully organic yet.

Do you have any idea how soon you will start roasting yourself on the Kobos roaster, or will you buy your own?

We will be roasting our own coffee within the next year. I am currently researching roasting equipment and keeping an eye out for classic refurbished Probats. I am also looking at the Kestrel S35 by Loring, manufactured here in the US. It is a newer design and ultra energy efficient which is a huge factor for Nossa Familia. In an ideal world we’ll be having a roaster all set up by September of this year.

See also:

The Coava Kone & The Coava Disk

Portland Street Style & Tanner Goods Portland Ore. & Reveille Portland

I’m in line at Coava’s shop on Grand Ave and I spot a few coffee plants in their upper sill. Matt tells me he has fifty more plants growing in his basement. Coava Coffee Roasters is testament to the fact that Matt Higgins explores his curiosities in a very refined way, so his coffee plant growing operation becomes my next pilgrimage.

I descend into the basement of Matt’s North Portland house. The plants are in a small room directly under his living room. “I excavated this room last year. Before that it was just a wall of dirt.” Germination of his initial batch of beans was unexpectedly successful, and now he has an unsustainable forest of seedlings. With limited light and room, most of his plants are starved for sunlight and root space. However, after recently installing two Sun Blaze T5 overhead lamps equipped with 8 48″ florescent bulbs each, Matt is ready to remove the weakest of his current crop and focus on increasing the size and health of a select few plants.

It’s mostly Caturra varietal. Matt brought 1,300 freshly picked Caturra cherries through customs on his way back from visiting Arnold Paz in Honduras. “I think germination was so easy because I brought them back as fresh cherries. Germination rate is much lower with dried green coffee, and especially low if the bean has been hulled and is missing its parchment.” The seedlings are held in bins and grow bags, and receive 10 hours of photo time from the lights.

I watch as Matt pours water from a gallon milk jug onto certain plants. He has an eye out for the healthy plants he will keep and the plants that are already too far behind. Matt pulls two plants out and compares their roots. “This one has bigger roots because it has had more room. This other one hasn’t received enough light during it’s early stages and I won’t keep it.” He points to a few other plants that have wrinkled leaves from lack of light. It’s an exercise in survival of the fittest, and Matt is learning how to spot the healthy plants and favor them.

He bends down and mixes various liquids together. “It’s a cocktail of beneficial microorganisms, nitrogen, bat guano, worm castings, and the root biostimulant mycorrhiza. Everything mixed together supports healthy root grown and ultimately better nitrogen uptake. Mostly everything is organic.”

We go upstairs to leather chairs in the lamp-lit living room where we talk about the point of it all. Matt’s not growing coffee plants in order to harvest beans for roasting. “It’s not feasible for me to grow coffee plants and produce green beans. This isn’t the Napa wine country.”  The roots die at 40 degrees F and the ideal humidity is 60%. To recreate those conditions would require an artificial environment and a very large amount of capital.

Matt confesses, “It’s all about the green. A roaster can’t produce good coffee without being able to source high quality green beans. Period.” This is at the heart of why Matt is growing coffee. The growing experiment downstairs may help him develop strong green buying practices.

Matt’s plants will teach him how to spot nitrogen deficiencies, crowded farming, and other flaws. “I’m trying to understand the correlation between farming practices and growing regions, atmospheric variables, and weather conditions. I’m trying to learn more about the biology of the plants.” The experience will hopefully allow Matt to source better green beans by understanding the various varietals and by understanding the growing process.

As I sit at Matt’s dining room table he unpacks bags of green beans of different varietals: Dilla Alghe, Montecristo, Geisha, Purpurascens, Erecta, Villa Sarchi. He’s going to germinate the beans, choose the healthiest 5 plants, and let them teach him something about each varietal. All this from the owner one of the most exciting coffee roasters in the world, a 29-year-old who graduated from the University of Oregon with a degree in German. Our last stop is his garage where he shows me some of the motorcycles he’s flipped. “Some of the better money I have earned has come from buying, repairing and selling motorcycles. I love machines.”

See also:

The Coava Kone & The Coava Disk – Aeropress Filter

Colombian Cupping at Heart Roasters & Nossa Familia Public Cupping

With last night’s release of the Coava Disk, Coava Coffee Roasters has made a name for itself as the maker of stainless steel filters for coffee makers that previously relied on disposable paper filters. The Coava Disk has the same trappings as the Coava Kone: steel sourced from Ohio, reusable design, photochemical etched holes, and a crispness of appearance. The Coava Disk pairs with the Aeropress and costs $15 at Coava’s website.

Coava’s counters are lined with boxes of Kones waiting to be shipped. “We have definitely seen a flurry of orders before Christmas” says Keith. Then he eagerly shows me the Coava Disk. “Someone asked me to make it, so I did.” I watch as he loads the disk smoothly into his Aeropress and brews a cup. He takes me over to the sink to see how easily it cleans out. “Normally you have to try to peel a paper filter out, but this just pops out and rinses off.”

He explains how he originally cut Disks out of prototype Kone filters that he had lying around. The disks fit nicely into the Aeropress, it adequately filtered out the dregs, and so he had the disks custom manufactured. He tells me this as he lets the coffee fall out of the Aeropress without pushing in the plunger. “If you let gravity move the coffee out of the Aeropress then there is less sediment in the cup.”

See also:

The Coava Kone & Coava Kone Update – Portland’s Iconic Brewing Method

Coava Barista Wins 2011 USBC NW Regional Brewers Cup Using Kone Filter

Colombian Cupping at Heart Roasters & Matt Higgins – Growing Coffee

Gabriel Carvalho Dias leads a public cupping of two Nossa Familia coffees in the lobby of the Armory. I arrive as he presents the process of growing, harvesting, and preparing beans for roasting at their farm in Brazil. A slide show lights up the wall above the front door.  After some questions and answers, twenty five eager participants and I are corralled around tables of cups that contain medium and dark roasts by Nossa Familia Coffee.

Due to the size of the event there is a bit of healthy chaos: the gentleman next to me lifts his cup up and sips as he says into his phone “buy five more shares”, the woman behind me stirs up her cup with her spoon as it cools, and there is some last minute desperation to ensure everyone performs an overtly loud slurp. Nonetheless, every participant is introduced to how the industry evaluates coffee and checks for flaws, and the event ends when Nossa Familia unveils their new packaging to much delight of the crowd who receive a complimentary bag of coffee.

I first cupped at the Stumptown Annex, and have subsequently enjoyed the regularly scheduled cuppings at Coffee House Five and CBI’s Public Domain. The most memorable cupping I’ve been a part of was with Zoka’s baristas and owner Jeff Babcock in Seattle. Customers who have cupped appreciate the fact that not all green coffee is of the same quality, and this understanding gives roasters who buy quality coffee leverage to demand higher prices, rewarding those who are most fastidious in the buying process and ultimately the farmers who opt for quality versus tonnage per acre.

See also:

Nossa Familia’s latest Cupping & Colombian Cupping at Heart Roasters

The Coava Kone & Coava Kone – Portland’s Iconic Brewing Method

A handful of Portland’s top micro-roasters attended an industry-only cupping last week, one of the first of it’s kind for roasters who mostly keep to themselves. Alejandro Renjifo of Fairfield Trading provided 16 pre-Spot Colombia coffees. The group huddled around a map of Colombia as Alejandro distinguished the farming regions by weather, geography, and harvest frequency.

Tim Wendelboe introduced Wille Yli-Luoma to Alejandro, and since then Wille received samples from Alejandro until he decided to cup the stock pile all at one time and invite the majority of roasters in Portland. “I have no problem sharing with other roasters. We can learn a lot from each other,” says Wille.

Everyone had a favorite in the line up. Adam raved about two coffees in the first set, and the other roasters diligently tasted each cup several times as they cooled. Below, Aric Miller used a heat press to put the Sterling logo on his cuff. That’s Pete Miller in the background, owner of Caravan Coffee, one of Newberg’s three noteworthy roasters:

There was talk of joining together and purchasing a container directly from Alejandro and the Colombian farms. There were also roasters who wanted exclusivity and approached Alejandro directly to purchase the entire supply of coffees that they liked the most. From near to far: Adam McGovern of Sterling who just won the Seattle 2010 Coffee Fest latte art championship, Wille Yli-Luoma of Heart, and Chris Brady of Extracto.

See also:

The Coava Kone & The Coava Disk & Able One-Cup Filter

Colombian Cupping at Heart Roasters & Matt Higgins – Growing Coffee