The store and webshop will be closed from Thursday 1st April until Monday 5th April. Normal hours from Tuesday 6th April.

Have a great break everyone!

We are seeking a Part Time Barista, with experience and an interest in coffee. They will be required to work a few days during the week and weekends. Their focus will be serving great drinks, customer service and packing coffee.

Please send CV and cover letter to Tim Varney.

We are finally starting to sell the coffee we found on our Brazil trip a couple of months ago.

Fazenda Santa Barbara is the name of the farm producing this wonderful coffee. You can find more info here.

We have finally started roasting our last 2009 Cup of excellence coffee from Guatemala.

For more info about the coffee go here.

We now have a new espresso blend for sale in the store.

It consists of:

55 % Suaza, Huila, Colombia. Wet processed.
35 % Fazenda Primavera, Brazil. Wet processed.
10 % San Antonio, Guatemala CoE. Wet processed.

Go here to read more about it.

While enjoying an excellent Bourgogne, Tim and I noticed the simple, elegant label. It was uncluttered, modern and timeless, and without any gimmicky design elements. Conversation erupted over our own coffee bag labels and those of others. Over the 3 years, we haven’t developed or changed the bag labels much at all, and while they have had plenty of information, we thought perhaps there was too much. Altitude information for instance now seems a little irrelevant and meaningless, however harvest dates and roast dates are essential. We don’t want the labels to appear cryptic like some French wine labels, and we also don’t want an overload of pointless information, keeping them clean and easy on the eye.

So here are our new coffee bag labels which we will start introducing over the next couple of weeks. To make it easy to understand and interpret, here is the label broken down.

1. The name of the coffee

Fairly self explanatory, could refer to the name of the farm, the locality, the mill or the cooperative.

2. The name of the producer

This is often the owner of the farm or estate, it may also refer to the cooperative or the collective of farms or small holders.

3. The origin

Basically, town, region and country.

4. The varietal

The type of coffee plant, or subspecies of the Arabica varietal. This is just like the grape varietal in wine.

5. Taste description

The tasting notes have been derived from several cuppings, they are flavours and aromas we have found and are a broad evaluation of the characteristics of the coffee. Aroma, acidity, mouthfeel, aftertaste, etc are some of the criteria for the taste description. You will, however, find varying aromas and flavours.

6. Harvest date/degassing time

On our regular roasted coffees designed for filter style brewing, we have included the harvest date on the coffee, this will tell you the month and year the coffee was picked and processed. However, on the espresso roasted coffee bags, the degassing time is included. This is very important to take into account when brewing espresso, as espresso roasted needs time to rest and leave behind any flavours and aromas from the roast process. We would normally let espresso rest for a week, however this may change from coffee to coffee.

7. Roast and batch date

One of the most important indictors on a coffee bag, as we recommend to use the coffee within 3 weeks of the roast date. The batch number is for our reference, to ensure we can source all the information from that particular roast.

More in depth information will still be available here, in the Resources section of the website.