Our Roasting Philosophy
We're trying really hard to express coffees in the most unique way. A lot of the time, we're not looking at roasting coffees just so they're light, or to a particular color, or to a particular level of acidity or sweetness. We're generally buying coffees that have high acidity and high clarity — high separation and distinction of flavors — and then we're trying to buy complex coffees, coffees with lots of those distinct flavors.
Our roasting style reflects the coffees that we buy. In order to showcase them in the best way possible, and to make them stand out, we actually roast them so that they're really quite expressive. They're full of character — and full of character in the cleanest way.
How that differentiates us from other people is something I can't even say a lot of the time. But I find that when we're drinking coffees, we're looking for coffees that have their volume turned up and have very good flavor separation. We usually see that when there's a tendency towards enough sweetness being apparent, and enough mitigation of bad acids and green coffee flavors being minimized. That's when we start to see a clarity come through in a coffee.
If you roast a coffee to be just sweet and mild, though, you end up missing out on a lot of the unique vibrancy from acidity, and the general unique intensity of a coffee's flavor. So there are different ways we look at modulating that in the roasting process, and we manipulate that a lot through correct batch sizing and correct initial energy management.
The rest of it we find pretty simple. We're trying to find a roast degree that has a good mixture of clean, white-sugar kind of sweetness, but also has enough of the vegetal characteristics minimized — nothing where the sweetness starts to change into burnt sugars, or where the acids turn into an acetic, intense, vinegary kind of acid. They stay lively and light in the acidities, and the sweetnesses are never too developed or too caramelized. The rest of it is just making sure there's adequate internal development, and adequate breaking down of undesirable organic compounds — things like chlorogenic acid and trigonelline, primarily.
We usually focus on one roast profile for any brew method. It's not that we believe we're trying to do something in between filter and espresso — that's not what we're trying to do at all. We don't. I don't even believe that.
I believe you can roast a coffee that is balanced, and then you can pull an espresso that is balanced from that coffee, and you can pull a filter coffee that is balanced from that coffee. So I don't believe you need to compromise on the coffee by brewing it differently, or roasting something differently, for a different brew method.
You'll find that the equipment these days allows you to have extremely good extractions on very light roast coffee in espresso, as long as you're willing to brew coffees at decently long ratios in order to have some form of balance. Of course, coffees will be overly acidic if you pull short ristretto shots — but we always advocate for one-to-three ratios for our espressos, and the appropriate intensity is definitely there.
They are not watery espressos, because we roast for expression. We make sure we have a mixed, caramelised kind of perceived sweetness, so the coffees are balanced, and we develop enough structure and body that the acidities are not seedy. The acidities are actually bright and sparkly. We don't like sourness. We like formed acidity — acidity that is integrated with sweetness. That's what we're really focusing on.
Whenever we roast, we cup every single coffee we roast. And we purposely tweak coffees every single week. We're tweaking coffees mildly to explore a coffee's potential, and we do that all the time — we keep moving the needle bit by bit by bit by bit, until the coffee eventually runs out.
And then we wait to see it again next season. Which is half the fun of being able to go along on a coffee journey — being able to experience coffee season after season after season. It is the most fun.