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.”

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

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

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

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

]]> http://marrowmag.com/coffee/cellar-door-coffee-3-year-anniversar/feed/ 0 http://marrowmag.com/coffee/caffe-vita-roasting-portland/ http://marrowmag.com/coffee/caffe-vita-roasting-portland/#comments Thu, 07 Apr 2011 05:55:53 +0000 admin http://marrowmag.com/?p=1480 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