Listen To Your Momma!
September 8, 2007 at 4:20 pm | In Coffee, Indianapolis, Kenneth Davids, Specialty Coffee, Stanton Coffee, cup of excellence | Leave a Comment
You know you’re in trouble when your Mom says “I’ve been looking at your blog for updates, and see nothings changed.”
I say, “Yeah Mom, but I talk to you usually once a week. What do you need to know on my Blog that I haven’t already told you?”
Well, with that being said; she’s right. I have all the valid excuses it the world. So let me share.
As most of you noticed our website is under construction and changing daily. We are slowly implementing our products. It is up and running and you can place an order on it. Our biggest hold up is getting the products graphic images to fill its box. These take a lot more time than I realize. Every image needs to be developed to fit correctly, correct resolution for the web and plenty of other stuff.
We are still working with our graphic designers to find that company logo that suits us. So the logo you see on the website now will even be changing again. It was one I actually developed. However, I have been told the star images have been way overdone. So I said how about flames! Flames are racy. Zoom.Zoom! You know me and my racing history. I’ve seen some roasters use flames, but not too much. I still want ours to be unique. The designers are worried about us looking too much like a Hot Sauce product. I’m just pulling my hair out about this. But as I know these processes take time. Of course we all want instant satisfaction and gratification.
We have a few projects that are in the works, but legal stuff has to be finalized before we can talk about it. I know its hard not to keep a secret that you want everyone to talk about. Arrg! The mental frustration.
So let’s talk about the things we can. As I’ve stated before, summer is suppose to be our slow time. Right?
We tied for first in the 2007 Karnataka Plantation Espresso Challenge. This challenge was to feature the use of Indian coffees. The minimum requirements were to utilize at least 70% of the issued Indian coffees. We submitted six entries. All were unique in composition, roast levels and coffees that would compliment an espresso extraction. I know I was really tweaked after tasting and manipulating the blends for this event. It was actually one of the blends that I really thought stood out to my pallet. Apparently the Judges pallet too! The coffee that really stood out to me in my cuppings was the Dewan Estate Coffee. I really enjoyed the Dewan Estate coffee; its is made up of the SLN 795 and SLN 9 cultivars which I always seem to gravitate toward in my cuppings. Four of my six entries consisted of a majority of these fantastic coffees. My blend was 100% Indian coffees. It consisted of the Dewan Estate, Mallali Estate, and Thogarihunkal Estate coffees. Each had its unique roast level were showcase itself for espresso extraction. We are trying to see if these coffees are still available to sell online and to our customers for a limited offering.
Speaking of limited offerings, we just received our Cup Of Excellence Coffee. I did a sample roast on Thursday. All I can say at the moment is Sweet! The coffee is so sweet; it’s perfect just black. I still need to do a few more roasts to find the profile that will showcase this excellent coffee. Look for it to appear on our website soon. Remember this is very limited, so act quick before it’s all gone.
Oh! One more thing before I forget. We are now officially able to utilize the Fair Trade Certified label from TransFair USA. We are committed to give the farmer his fair share and profit. We want them to succeed. Without them great coffees may never be grown. This is also a reason we also seek out Direct Trade relationships with farmers. We want to get these great coffees and offer them to you. In the process this will allow the farmer to have more money to do the maintenance and upgrade all aspects of their farm and still have an excellent standard of living. Look for more of these coffees to be offered soon.
Till next time…. Drink Up!
A Camel, Kenneth Davids and 22 + hours of driving
May 2, 2007 at 2:48 pm | In Indianapolis, Kenneth Davids, Praxis, Specialty Coffee, Stanton Coffee | Leave a Comment
Holy Cow! Or should I say Holy Camel!
I’m always amazed at what life brings and how much there is to live for.
It started off last Sunday when it was such a beautiful day. The weather was a perfect temperature for a motorcycle ride. I, like most Americans love the freedom of the road and traveling. Driving a motorcycle is my next best thing to flying an airplane due to the openness of how your environment surrounds you. It is a great way to free my mind and to start the week refreshed.
So where did the Camel come into play? I was cruising down SR 135 toward Nashville, Indiana when I had to do a double take. What! A Camel. Was I hallucinating from the exhaust fumes of the car in front of me? There was a tall Camel amongst a pack of Llamas. Ok. Llamas are different and a rarity, but a Camel? It’s not like I was cruising the highways of Kuwait. Off to the left there was an animal hospital that was out in farm land, another oddity. So that’s where it all started. Just Amazing.
As the week progressed… Wednesday I was doing a follow up call to Praxis International. I still call the company Praxis Werke for that German name (Werke) still sticks with me all these years. I have been investigating their Logfile control software for our next planned roaster project.
Joachim Eichner (chief Engineer at Praxis) has developed this system to control larger roasters for companies like Green Mountain Coffee. This software does more than just roasting coffee. It has functions for history notes, traceabilty and few more functions I’m looking for. He recently has been developing the Artsan Logofile software for smaller coffee roasters like us. It is meant to keep the craftsmanship (the artisan) for roastmasters by having more control in how the development of the roasting of the coffee and yet maintaining repeatability and consistency.
As we talked he asked if I couldn’t come there Friday with such short notice. He invited me to be part of the evaluation team they were doing with Kenneth Davids (know to all in our industry for the Coffee Review and being a Master Coffee Cupping Extraodinaire). He was going to be doing a cupping session on coffees roasted using the Artisan Logofile. There is much debate on profile roasting coffees, and Ken is going to put his taste buds to the test. I said wait a minute… I started clicking my mouse on my computer to scan my electronic brain for what meetings or appointments I had for the rest of the week. Move this, reschedule that and make a hotel reservation. Presto! Now the eleven plus hour drive to East Hanover, New Jersey.
On Friday I arrive at Praxis at 8:30am and I’m greeted by Rolfe Blogett. He’s a bit tired from pulling an all-nighter doing some PLC programming on another customers project. Joachim soon arrives and we were back out the door to pickup Kenneth Davids and Todd Curtis (Green Mountain Coffee Roasters). At 9:30 we start warming up the 5 Kilo Samiac coffee roaster. There were a couple other prototype coffee roasters there as well. Joachim and his fabrication crew show us some projects and capabilities his company are able to perform.
Josh (Vishwa Adluri) stopped by and introduced himself – He and Henry Schwartzberg just had the article “Heat Wave” published in the March/April edition of Roast Magazine. Then he was off to cook us a fantastic meal for the evening. I thought we were actually going out for a meal that night to his family’s restaurant. Somewhere I missed what someone told me. No surprise there, since I was really focused on the roasting and watching the Artisan Program.
We did a few batches of Papua New Guinea coffee to warm up the roaster and make sure the calibrations were in specifications. We brewed it up, very tasty. Ken had decided he wanted us to roast and cup the Kenya coffee. We started the process by starting with a “Learn Roast”. This is where you manually roast the coffee and the Artisan program learns the parameters you used. On the second roast, we then ran the “Learned Roast Profile”. The system worked as advertised. The program ran following the roast profile curve. This meant that it followed the bean temperature and controlled the environmental temperatures to achieve an exact duplicate of the first “Learned Roast”. We did evaluate the roast levels of the learned roast and the profiled roast on an Agtron Spectrometer. The Agtron unit uses the infrared light spectrum to compare roast levels. The wholebean and ground samples matched exactly. So far, so good. Impressive.
On our next roast we did a learn roast and roasted the coffee to a different roast curve. This type of curve was called a “J-Curve”. These different types of curves are done to achieve different roast taste characteristics, such as body or brightness. Unfortunately we had a problem. The Artisan program was following the curve, but it was delayed in time. Come to find out after troubleshooting with a few more coffee batches we had an exhaust fan issue. Due to using more of the Kenyan to troubleshoot, we came to a point where we were not going to be able to due three different roast comparisons. We shot ourselves in the foot on that one. We opted to call it a night to attend Josh’s’ home cooked meal and that Ken had to fly out at 4am the next day. So in the end we didn’t get to cup coffees with Ken. Bummer!
I too had to leave the next day, but I opted to try and work on the roaster to see if we were going to be able do a cupping comparison. We attempted to do a few batches of Panama Boquete, but the exhaust fan issue still plagued us. So 1pm came and I had to get on the road. Another eleven hour drive ahead of me.
I arrived home just a little after midnight. What a week. A Camel, Kenneth Davids and 1450 miles later… Whew! I’m ready for another vacation.
Mary, is it in the budget?
My Coffee Fest Chicago Diary 2007 Coffee Fest day…
March 1, 2007 at 7:19 pm | In Chicago, Coffee, Coffee Fest, Indianapolis, Specialty Coffee, Stanton Coffee | Leave a CommentMy Coffee Fest Chicago Diary 2007
Coffee Fest day #1
I feel like I just competed in a Marathon. Coffee Fest was 3 days of non stop action (4 including set up). It was fantastic to see what was new in coffee culture and to meet our fellow independent coffee owners.
We went to Chicago a day early so we could set up our booth. I’m glad we had the extra time – the show floor was a madhouse of forklifts, electricians, decorators and exhibitors. Our booth was designed to be a “do – it yourself”. So, we carried everything up from the garage – the escalators and elevators weren’t turned on. It took a little longer than we anticipated assembling everything and making sure it looked “just right”.
The folks at Bunn provided the brewing equipment you see in our booth – the Axiom brewer was sweet. It has a ton of brewing features. Yet, it was so simple to set up and I had it up and running in 5 minutes. We weren’t able to check the brew yet because the water jugs hadn’t been delivered since it was getting close to 5pm it looked like that would be an early morning project.
Day #2
I tossed and turned all night thinking about everything that needed to be done I hoped I hadn’t forgotten anything. Mary and I got to the show floor early. The first order of business was to finish setting up the brewing and grinding equipment.
I adjusted the amount of water flow for the Axiom to help achieve the “Perfect Cup” or Gold Cup Standard. I then setoff to adjust the proper grind on the Bunn LPG-2E grinder. Simple and super easy to set up, just a twist of the adjustment key and we were dialed in. This would be a nice grinder to use in a restaurant or café. It has two hoppers so you can do a decaf and a regular. It’s dummy proof for the employees. They can’t accidentally change the grind setting.
Once I achieved the proper bean weight to water ratio – I checked it with our scale to ensure this. Our delicious brew of Savona came to life. Smooth and Chocolaty with a touch of acidic zip to tempt the tip of my tongue.
The second order of business was getting that first good pot of coffee brewed into Mary’s hands. She’s almost as bad as I am if hadn’t had a cup early in the morning. She got a little calmer when she sipped her first tasted the Savona, The calming factor of it all coming together was settling in. After she slowly downed that first cup, it seemed like she broke a world record on her second cup. Thank goodness the Insulair cups she was using were very sturdy. Barista Works gave us a case of cups to use for samples at our booth. It was a really upscale looking cup. It definitely got a second look from the folks who stopped by our booth to try our coffee.
The exhibits opened at noon and the rest of the afternoon went by in a blur. It was really great meeting everyone who stopped by our booth. I brewed a lot of coffee and enjoyed talking the biz with seasoned owners and people just starting out.
Day #3
Wow, I woke up this morning in a ball of pain – I think everything was finally catching up with me. Luckily Mary brought a full bottle of Ibuprophin. First order of business was getting to the exhibit floor and brewing up a batch of coffee. Did I mention the water was provided by Cirqua? They are the top water filtration and customized water companies in the business. I was really impressed with the quality of the water they were able to provide us even at the trade show – props all the way to David Beemans’ group. It definitely enhanced our coffee. Good water is one of the basics of brewing a consistently excellent cup of coffee. We continually battled the water problem in Indianapolis. This is a system that I would recommend if I was setting up a retail coffee business.
Today we had help in our booth. Our friend Mary Anne, Rew and Meade showed up. We took turns working the booth and being “walking billboards”. A lot of people came up and said they could see our Safety Green t-shirts from across the exhibit floor. Good!! We wanted to be noticed. We were surprised later when my brother-in-law Tim and his girlfriend Dorie stopped by. They flew in from DC to help us with the show. Mary gave them some t-shirts and sent them out on the show floor.
It was another super busy day. We handed out a ton of Torani, Big Train, Cappuccine and our samples of coffee. It was fun talking to people and explaining our “coffee philosophy”. We are proud to be a “fresh roaster”. This basically means we don’t roast the coffee until you order it. Nothing is pulled off the shelf – so our customers get the freshest coffee available. We weren’t quite as exhausted at the end of the day – it definitely was nice to have some help in the booth.
Day #4
Time Flies! I can’t believe this is the last day of Coffee Fest. We took it easy today – went to the Billy Goat Tavern (Cheezborger, Cheezborger, Cheezborger. Pepsi No Coke!) for a “pre-show” lunch with Tim and Dorie. They are going to help us today. It was a little slower today at the booth. I think a lot of people were concerned about the winter storm warnings and either stayed home or left early. In a way it was nice. We were able to spend a little more time talking to people who stopped by our booth. We met a lot of baristas and a lot of really nice people. It is so energizing to be around them hearing what they have to share. Their passion for good coffee really gave me hope on the growth of the Specialty Coffee industry.
4 pm came way too soon. Tim and Dorie were real troopers and stuck around and helped us pack up or booth. It was a lot easier carrying the boxes downstairs this time around. We got home around 10 pm to find out Mary’s parents in Iowa were without electricity and had gone to her Aunt Irene’s to stay until the power could be restored. I guess the storm was a little harsher than we realized. Guess we got luck in Chicago.
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