We recently purchased a moisture meter and have been monitoring the moisture content of our coffees. Our aim is to add a quantitative measure of the quality of our green beans. It has also thrown up a few surprises.
Tag: coffee
Water continued
My previous post outlined some of the problems we face with the quality of water at our Roastery. In short, water can influence how a coffee brews and tastes. This in turn makes it difficult to determine whether the characteristics of a coffee are due to the influence of the roasting or the water. Having…
A post about water
I’ve long been interested in the quality of the water we use both at the Roastery, and also that used by our customers. I wrote a post back in 2012 where I tried to sum up the issues we faced and another shortly afterwards which compared the water we have to the ‘good’ coffee water. I’ve…
The Price of Milk: Should we be concerned?
This weekend we’ve seen protests across Cumbria in response to yet another drop in the price being paid to farmers for their milk. Should the coffee community be more aware of this and can we help?
Relaxing with a cup of coffee
This Christmas, due in part to my desire not to visit the Roastery for a few days, I have broken one of my own rules when it comes to making coffee at home – I’ve set up an espresso machine in the kitchen. Aside from a brief dabble in my early days as a barista,…
Stages in Roasting
We though it might be a nice idea to outline the coffee roasting process, giving you an idea of how the bean changes throughout the roast. We begin by charging the roasting drum – in other words we heat it to our desired starting temperature. We have a digital probe inside our roasting drum and…
Sourcing coffee
We often get asked how we source our coffee, whether or not we source directly from farms or whether our coffee is Fairtrade. The following post aims to outline the process we go through when selecting coffees. We can probably condense the decision making process down to four key questions: 1. Is the coffee in…
Flavour perception
Last week we held an event at our Roastery for some of our wholesale customers. We’re just launching new components for our espresso blend and we wanted our customers to become familiar with the product they were selling. We also wanted to help them perceive the flavours in our coffee . . . Part 1…
On Coffee Cups
One of the most common questions we get asked when taking on a new customer is ‘What cup size should I use?’. The expectation is that we ‘frown upon’ large cup sizes and favour smaller cups. There is an element of truth in this but we have a clear rationale for this preference. Firstly I’d…
Coffee Cupping
When we set about choosing some new coffees, we will ‘cup’ a number of samples beforehand. The cupping process is a standardised method of tasting coffee, used throughout the coffee world from farm to an ever increasing number of baristas. The aim is treat each coffee the same, giving each one a fair opportunity to…