Wow, it’s been a whole month since I last wrote you on the happenings in the coffee lab? Well, we have acquired many samples and roasted many coffees. It is always a joy to receive samples from all over the world to try, so if you have coffee you want to send us, feel free! We will give you honest feedback. I would say the highlight of our month was a sample of Panama Bambito Estate, which was fruity, smooth and sweet; that one is a definite possibility for us to carry. We also had to do a search for a new naturally-processed Ethiopian Sidamo. After a long exhausting search with many weeks of sample roasting and tasting, we decided to go with a coffee from the Bushwick Seed Company from Brooklyn. Not only does this Sidamo have the berry sweetness we were looking for, but it is also sustainable; this coffee helps the village of Kellensoo where it is grown and processed to provide funding to build a library and create a computer lab. The Sidamo is available as a single origin, and is also an important component in both our Smart Blend and our Nordico Espresso. We have also released our spring seasonal Aurora, which is available now! Aurora has notes of citrus, a sweet aftertaste, and is light bodied and smooth. Well folks, that’s all for this week. Look for the Lab notes to make a comeback to weekly status next week.

Good day and Good coffee,

Woody!

So there was last week…. We did a lot of coffee tastings and espresso tweaking. Sadly as time goes by some coffees start to lose their oomph; this is the case with a lot of fruity natural coffees, such as the Ethiopian Natural Sidamo which we use in several blends. For that reason, we are experimenting with some new coffees and working on the blends. Be on the lookout for a new blend coming your way soon, and for some possible news regarding current blends. We may also be bringing on a single origin as our special spring seasonal.

Last week we had a short week in the lab due to a bit of a crazy schedule, but we did get to sample the Sumatra Gayo Linge. Let’s just say right now it’s shining on our pour-over bar (30 grams of coffee and 500 ml of water for about 3.20 minutes) and it is oh so good. We got flavors of cocoa, roasted almonds, with a creamy mouthfeel and a raspberry sweetness in the finish.

Thanks for stopping by the blog today, good luck and great coffee!

Woody

Welcome to another week of lab notes, this week we sampled our experimental espressos, tasted production coffees and worked on dialing in our current espresso blends. If you will remember form last week we were going for fruity with a cocoa background. 2 of the three ended up tasting the way we liked but we still think we have some tweaking to do, the most promising was a 2 coffee blend of Bali and Timor, it had the cocoa and the berry fruitiness we were going for but the roast level needs to be tweaked, which i will be doing this week. In our tasting sessions the Colombia Valle de Cauca was the standout for the week, scoring high on both sweetness and flavor. Dialing in espresso is always a fun and daunting task, i mostly worked on dialing in the Brightside and let me tell you it is singing, Orange, biscuit like, malty and oh so sweet! We are currently enjoying at 18 grams with a 24 second pull resulting in about 1.8 oz finished shot.

In our next report we have 3 coffees we received from e-cafe Chiapas in Mexico to taste and review as well as reworked espresso blending and some in detail comparative brewing tasting.

This is to be the first in a series of public updates, keeping you updated as the the goings on here in the coffee lab with QC, Sample roasting, tastings cuppings etc.

This week we worked on a few new experimental espresso blends using Bali Kintamani Natural as the foundational flavor, this will be a limited production espresso as we are on the last half bag or so of the Bali. The goal with this espresso is to highlight the sweet watermelon candy\strawberry flavors found in the Bali. We roasted 3 different blends trying to highlight the fruitiness and balance it with smooth creamy cocoa tones. One of the things we do here at OVC as part of our Quality Control program is we brew up our coffees regularly using several different methods including manual pourover, chemex, batch brew, aeropress, french press, and cuppings. We do this to maintain their integrity of the coffees so that when they arrive to the customer they will remain consistently good. One of the focus coffees this week was our Winter Comfort Blend, which is smokey, sweet and full of warm spice and it’s only here for the winter season so if that sounds good to you make sure you pick some up soon.

Thats it for this weeks update see you next week for the tasting notes on the espresso blends.