Our Blends and Single Origin Selections, Roasted for Espresso
Some months ago when we introduced our regular roasted "coffee pairings" we stopped offering roasted espresso and roasted decaf. We think that the roasted coffee pairings are working out well; customers enjoy the differences between the two coffees, giving access to great small-lot coffees from around the world.
Now we are bringing back roasted espresso! We will offer one Espresso Workshop blend and one Standard blend for sale each week. Or maybe it will be a Single Origin espresso, or two Workshop blends – we'll see what strikes us. We plan to roast the coffee weekly and keep it in stock as an inventory item – so you can add the coffee to an existing order and it all ship together. Our reasoning is this: roasted espresso stays fresher longer, and the flavor will change as the coffee sits. Generally, even with the lighter roast style I am doing now on espresso, I will not get the most out of the coffee until the third or even fourth day out of the roaster. We will post the roast date on the coffee, and have enough fresh espresso on hand to fill orders as they come in.
Recently, we divided our green coffee blend offerings into Standards, blends we maintain and consistently offer, and new Espresso Workshop editions. These later "editions" are blends designed around specific lots; the blends will last only as long as their unique ingredients last, and then they are gone. Instead of maintaining the blend and making ingredient substitutions down the line, the Espresso Workshop editions follow the crop cycle of the coffee; they come and go. We also will insert specific unblended, Single Origin coffees in our espresso roast rotation.
Our roast style for espresso is light, what has come to be called West Coast Espresso in forums and blogs lately. These are roast levels that have not reached 2nd crack, and produce a clean, bright, lively cup, without the carbony, tarry flavors some people associate out of habit with espresso. So be forewarned! If you are accustomed to espresso roasts as black, shiny blobs of coal, you won't like our roast. If you are excited to see what other flavors are possible in espresso, then the Espresso Workshop selections might interest you.
If
you roast your own, you might want to cup your roasts versus those done
on the gas-fired German Probat with our profile tailored to espresso, and compare the "degree
of roast"
we have chosen for the specific coffees to your own. If you don't roast
at home, well ... here's the next best thing!
We have a new Sweet
Maria's Roasted Coffee Weblog where we discuss the why and
how of each week's selection ... and you can make comments too. It serves as an archive for previous roast sessions, so you can go back to review our comments, versus your findings.
If you're interested in roasted coffee for drip brewing, check out our Roasted Coffee Pairings.
Roasted espresso offerings:
Espresso Workshop #9 - Dénouemoi (roasted on 2010-03-16) - $12 (1# ship wgt)
Our most recent Workshop edition with incredible fruit and chocolate. Everyone around the warehouse just loves it! Very special coffees combined to create a truly stunning shot, cull out a few of the lightest beans before grinding. This batch was roasted to a very slow Full City level.
Sweet Maria's Espresso Monkey Blend (roasted on 2010-03-16) - $12 (1# ship wgt)
One of our longstanding blends, balanced with great body, chocolate, rustic fruit notes and suitable for straight shots or milk drinks. Roasted to Full City+ with a few snaps of second crack.
Espresso Workshop #9 - Dénouemoi
Having completely lost ourselves in naming schemes for our new espresso blends, I have decided to wander even further into the wilderness with our 9th Edition of the Espresso Workshop Blends. We started with geology, we went on to acoustics, we lost it completely with "Waw, Bukan Main!" (a local Indonesian exclamation). And now Dénouemoi. And good luck googling Dénouemoi BTW, because I just made it up and it is senseless. Well, not entirely: It's a mix of "dénouement" the critical moment in a story, the climax of a narrative, and MOI, meaning ME! So I guess in a fancy way, I just want to say that this is my favorite espresso blend that I have tested in the last 3 months, the denouement of my recent coffee extractions. Silly, no? I also want to warn you that this is a very "fruity" espresso, and one that has a few quakers in the roast because it has dry-processed Ethiopia coffee from a particular lot (no, of course I am not telling!) Quakers are from under-ripe coffee cherries and are the bane of the roasters existence on a large scale, unless you mechanically color-sort after roasting, which I don't believe is even possible. Yet coffees with a few quakers can also be amazing, and its not too much trouble for a home roaster to pick a few tan-color beans out of a batch. The reward in doing so is an amazing espresso. The aromatics are spicey and a little resiny and camphoric, but with bittering chocolate and a peach-apricot fruit aspect. The cup is intensely chocolaty; thick, waxy opaque, dense chocolate. The fruit is perhaps even more aggressive, dried peach and apricots in the lighter levels, turning toward mango and melon (even some traces of blackberry in the aftertaste). It straddles the sweet/bittersweet divide, first toward the later and then, ion the long aftertaste, fleshy fruit sweetness emerges. The mouthfeel is pure chocolate syrup. The cup is greatly improved by the aforementioned culling of the very light quakers, but don't overdo it. Slightly lighter beans are normal for dry-processed coffees, as is a larger variation in bean size.
This coffee is part of our direct trade Farm Gate
pricing transparency program.
Roast:This coffee works well at lighter and darker roast levels, anywhere from City+ to Full City+ or light Vienna. If you can handle the brightness of the lighter roast level, the fruits are amazing!
Compare to:It is a complex espresso with strong fruity character. If there are light "quaker" beans after roasting, pick them out before grinding. If you like super hoppy IPA beer, this is the coffee equivalent.
A longtime favorite espresso blend intended solely for pump and piston type espresso extraction. This is a sweet but punchy little cup, and roasted farly light it is a shock to the palette, but has great body and a smooth, sweet, stunning aftertaste. The joke behind the name: I imagine a fancy roaster charming a client in the cupping room, effusing about their "Master Roaster" and "Master Blender" and "Master Cupper", all in the trade for decades of course. Then I imagine the scene in their warehouse where hired apes rip open bags of green coffee and randomly hurl handfulls into the hopper for roasting. In other words, there's a lot of BS in the coffee trade, and blending is NOT really a noble art ...it's done to save cost and disguise coffee defects 80% of the time.
The Irony? I have never worked so hard to develop a blend as this one, designed to cup well at a full range of "espresso" roasts, and developed as a pre-blend (all coffees roasted together to same degree of roast). Am I going to tell you exactly what is in it? No! I am feeling a bit snobby today! Espresso Monkey has become our signature blend for some reason or other, perhaps because it is a true standard that we have sought to maintain for so long, and that we put such nice coffees into it. We blend this for body, balanced between high and low tones, chocolate roast flavors, and slightly rustic fruited accent notes. Those are our goals, that is the "spirit" behind the blend, and we check it to make sure it meets those targets. Our roast goal is in the beginning stages of 2nd crack ... we never "let it roll".
Intensity/Prime Attribute:Medium / Balance, complexity, fruit
Roast:I prefer Northern Italian style re: Illy's Normale blend. I like this blend best when the roast is stopped just as second crack becomes rapid, and shows no sign of slowing down. Actually, I like it a lot lighter than that too! I don't like this roasted to a dark, dark roast stage, Full French or Italian. This is because Brazilian coffees become ashy and began to bitter when roasted extremely dark. I believe strongly in a 36+ hour resting period before use for espresso extraction! It wont kill you to use it sooner... but you might notice sharp unpleasant notes.
Compare to:Darn fine espresso. This was cupped exclusively as espresso, not traditional cupping, so cupping numbers are omitted. I dont like it when brewed as filter coffee! Also see our article on Blending for more about espresso
Some months ago when we introduced our regular roasted "coffee pairings" we stopped offering roasted espresso and roasted decaf. We think that the roasted coffee pairings are working out well; customers enjoy the differences between the two coffees, giving access to great small-lot coffees from around the world.
