The Making of a Master Roast

What is a "Master" roast? Or Artisanal roast? To some coffee companies it simply means they take a single-origin coffee and take care to find the optimal roast level for it (to their tastes) and perhaps are super-selective on the bean size and quality. We feel they should do this for every roast!

For us, a Master Roast should give the consumer something they can't normally get. So, we start with a single-origin base that we really love, then add 1-2 "balancing" coffees to create what we feel is a perfect blend guaranteed to tickle every palate, not just coffee drinkers who happen to hit the button with the single-origin base coffee alone. In this case we were eager to try all three of our super-special Robustas in one blend.

Then, unlike standard roasting practice, we roast each of these three coffees at its own peak level, testing to find the right level for each... and then we put them together after the roast.

This month we are featuring "Robusta Dream". Robusta appeals mostly to people who are "back-palate" oriented, who like low acidity, high body/crema, and good persistence in the memory (retention). Because low-altitude Robustas get a bad rap from people who are not really coffee experts, there are extremely few good Robustas on the market and not one Robusta blend that we know of. But we love being first!

So, we roasted the beans together in the ratio we wanted - 50% Vietnamese screen 16, 25% Peaberry Dalat, and 25% Bantai super-high altitude Robusta. Then we poured out the beans and see how that temperature point treated each type. Note in the picture that the peaberry (round, unsplit beans) look burnt, while the other sources were two different shades of medium roast. We theorized that the higher sugar content of the Peaberry was causing a burnt sugar effect.

Next we brewed two lots, one run a little darker than the other, which actually gives us 6 points of reference. We definitely preferred the lighter of the two roasts, where more of the creamy, buttery mouthfeel of the Robusta was better preserved, and the overall taste had more dimensional appeal. The darker roast seemed a little "flat".

So, by comparing the three color levels and the taste profiles, we determined that it would be good to roast the Peaberry at 15 degrees less, and the other two should be 5 degrees apart (+10, +15) to achieve the best taste on this blend. The result: Robusta Dream. A coffee even the non-Robusta fans really loved. We hope you enjoy this recap of our Robusta Dream Master Roast coffee for this month!

Click here to shop for this coffee on our Exclusive Offers page.

Bach Coffee - new from Vietnam

We are excited to bring new brands from Vietnam to our offerings. While nobody can argue that Trung Nguyen corners the market with their wonderful Creative Coffee series of coffees, they specialize in vacuum-packed, nitrogen-flushed ground coffees that stay super fresh in their packages, but they refuse to export whole bean to us directly. They simply don't believe whole bean is "necessary", and there is no consumer market for it in Asia. So we have to buy our whole bean from them through our agent in the coffee shop distribution channel in Vietnam. That is not working out very well for us, and there is a cost differential because of the extra transactions involved.

Enter a new generation of fresh coffee companies from Vietnam. The first we will be featuring is Bach Coffee. (No, it's not named after the composer, but a region in Vietnam). They are proud to offer whole bean coffees and are very cooperative to work with. To distinguish themselves, they have adopted a more Western-style air roasting, solving two of the problems we have with the Trung Nguyen whole bean.

Trung Nguyen whole bean is "wet-roasted", meaning they apply what they call "butter oil" and a little sugar to the roasting pans, because it is needed to make the beans roll properly as they tumble and roast. It also creates the distinctive Vietnamese buttery taste. Oddly enough, they often use lecithin or oil that is not butter-based, but it is still referred to as butter roast. Now, that causes two issues. Vegans can't drink this coffee because it might have butter in it, and the beans wind up being stickier in most grinders and can cause clogging issues. We do get a number of calls on that.

Bach beans are drier and will work in any grinder and are suitable for vegans.

But we drink coffee for taste. How good are the Bach coffees? When you pour out the beans from a Bach bag, the first thing you notice is how 100% sound and ripe that are. While a certain percentage of less-than-ripe beans do not ruin the taste of a cup (contrary to a highly publicized myth), 100% ripe beans does make a difference. In general, people have been amazed at how good the Bach coffees are. My personal favorite is the Moc 1, their 100% high-altitude Robusta. This is Vietnamese Robusta at its best, the type of Robusta Italian coffee companies have been secretly sourcing for their top espressos for decades.

Arabica fans will enjoy the multi-source Arabica (Moc 2) that has Bourbon Arabica sourced from Buon Me Thuot and high-altitude Laotian farms.

We invite you to try the new Bach coffees and we have obtained a limited number of small 100-gram "trial-size" bags so you can sample more of them without breaking the bank. Bach coffees are numbered 1, 2 and 3, but we call them simply Robusta (100%), Arabica (100%), and Arabica/Robusta Blend (50/50). Amazingly delicious!

Current coffee crop status

We just received our first Liberica shipment for 2012. The season for the new crop in the Philippines usually begins around the first week of February, but continuous torrential rains have really delayed the crop and the drying of the beans this year. We have found also that if we are going to have enough supply of Liberica through the year, we need to reserve over a ton of green beans from the start. This is a lot of coffee... when you consider that we only purchased about 100 kilos our first year!

The new crop is fabulous. They've done a great job on the green beans... we also can't wait until we can get our new crop of Excelsa green beans so we can add the Liberica Blend back to the lineup. Liberica is a very unusual coffee, and while we have hundreds of people who as addicted to it as we are, many enjoy the blend with Excelsa as a well-rounded cup with the great tones of each.

The Liberica can be found here:

Liberica coffee from the Philippines


Excelsa:  For years we have believed the coffee advisers who have told us that Excelsa is such a sharp and aggressive-tasting coffee that it does not play well as a single-source coffee. But when we tested the Excelsa green beans supplied to us from Vietnam by our friends at Indochine Estates, we fell in love with it as is. It looks like one more coffee myth will fall - that Excelsa is a mixing coffee only. As we have been testing it on focus groups everybody is saying "It's different and unusual, but this is really good!" They all said they would have considered it a great discover if it had popped up at their favorite coffee shop. So we will be offering Excelsa not only in blends this year but as a single-source coffee with two origins - Dalat (Vietnam) and the Philippines.

Shade-grown organic Robusta from the Philippines:  We have been eagerly awaiting the new crop for three months! We have been told that a courier package with 25 kilos of green beans is on the way to us. We're hoping it will arrive this week (last week of March) and that we will have it back up on the site as roasted coffee by the end of the month.