Dear people of coffee,
The blog is back. Peter Mark here. We have been back and forth on the utility of keeping a company blog, as we keep our Instagram and Twitter updated regularly. I thought this could be a place to flesh out updates out a bit more, talk through ideas that come up during the roasting week. So let’s begin with a recap since we last talked.
In the winter of 2013, we moved from the old roastery space in Bellevue to our current space in Interbay, the industrial creaky heart of Seattle.This is a space that we were able to design to our needs, give a fresh coat of paint, and most importantly built out for our brand new roaster, the Loring Kestrel 35k. We called it a day on our old Probat L12. It was a great starter machine, and definitely gave us many months of great coffee. But Mark grew tired of fighting fires with that beast, more literally than figuratively. It broke and caught fire a lot. The Loring is a thing of beauty (see instagram for pics of it over the months): American made, state of the art, highly energy efficient, and most importantly allows us to repeatedly get excellent results in our batches. Maybe I can get Mark to give you a full report on the glories of our new roaster some day here :)
We have grown a lot since our last post too. We have built more relationships around Seattle and beyond, and we are proud to have our coffee served in some of the country’s finest cafes, from LA to Portland to St Louis to Providence.
We have also been making the time to really focus our quality oriented approach to buying green coffee. We have kept our relationships with producers in Guatemala, Panama and El Salvador, while working more widely with importers to select the best green out there, to put it simply. We roast hundreds of samples every year, cup again and again, roast more, cup more…it’s a lot of work. But the reward is so sweet, when we can offer coffees that we know we didn't settle for, and know can contend with anything out there. Seasonality of offerings is a big part of our buying program as well, and this year I think we did a pretty good job at it. We keep our offerings moving, allowing us to keep only fresh coffees in stock. This requires virtually endless sourcing and evaluating, but we all enjoy it and think its worthwhile in the end.
We have also added a new member to our team, Corey Autobee! (Again, check Instagram for pics of his shining face) Corey started part time with us, while also holding shifts at the cafe Milstead & Co. We grew to really need a full time person during this time, so after over a year of straddling both side of the coffee biz, Corey joined our production team full time in May 2015. He has brought strength, humor and critical thinking to the team and we are glad to have him.
We are hoping to keep frequent updates here, letting you know what we are working on, what we are arguing about in the roastery, etc.
-PM
