We will be at the Boston Local food fest providing one more reason to get tickets and show up. We do however need a few extra hands for the event so we are hoping to wrangle a few local barista to collaborate with us for the event.
We have put a lot of thought into the concepts of local, sustainable, and why that matters in an industry that has coffees coming from all over the world. It makes sense that people lump sustainability solely into terms of anything that happens at the farm level or cafe level in coffee. Coffees come from all over the world so it seems like then shipping them across the country is not really that big a deal. Truth is, it really is kind of a big deal.
Here's something for you to think about next time you are in a cafe that talks about zero waste or sustainability, where does the coffee come from? Though coffees come from all over the world, maritime or cargo freight by sea has an extremely low cost (and carbon footprint) compared to truck and air freight. The argument can easily be made that coffees delivered by maritime freight to the closest port to a roaster and sold locally are easily the most sustainable model in our industry. Shipping roasted coffee cross country is one of the least common sense habits our industry has developed and adds a lot of costs to the final product.
What value could be added to ship a coffee across eight (or however many) states? What quality can be increased by shipping coffee a thousand (or more) miles from roaster to cafe? Short answer, none. Anyone who tells you they can't find a good quality coffee roaster in region or their local metro is not giving enough thought or research to it. There are so many new roasting operations starting up in every part of the country that the argument can be made we are in a renaissance for small batch micro roasters (or the beginning of one).
On a quality level, there are big arguments for local roasters like us to stay hyper local in our business model. Bags roasted within days (if not hours) showing up on shelves in locations that we can often bike to. Being able to train, teach, and share with those serving and buying our coffees. You can even easily meet the green buyer or roaster daily to talk about what is special about that farm or how that roast tastes in different methods.
Nevertheless, it's a complex topic that can ponder as you drop our booth the 7th for the Boston Local Food fest. It's going to be fun. Think 'local'.
updates and notes from the founder of barismo coffee roasters in Arlington/Cambridge, MA.
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
A Sustainable Pace
This turned into quite an eventful weekend for all of us at barismo as well as the entire dwelltime staff. Six pallets of coffees were delivered (Just about five TONS of green coffee) for the first time to our dwelltime location in Cambridge MA. We are now able to store many pallets of green coffee in our spacious basement. This will be an interesting logistical challenge for us as we figure out how often green coffee will need to be transported over to our roasting facility four miles down the road in East Arlington.
The dwelltime staff, including our baker, had a chance to pitch in hauling 160 pound bags of green coffee from pallet to basement. One of our bar staff was a little gung ho with hauling bags, jute sack versus bare knuckles, jute wins. This however is not a new activity for all of us lightweights down at the roastery. For almost four years now, as of (September 17!) barismo has been in the business of hauling bags of coffee into our cool basement and then carrying them back up small batch at a time to carefully roast and send out our front door.
As if that was not enough of a work out, we have just started sending out our local deliveries all along the Mass Ave corridor in Cambridge via our very own bicycle delivery cart. We made an appearance this past Saturday at the Somerville SPOKES bicycle festival to serve up Union Square's most sustainable and most meticulously handled coffee. Some might call us crazy, we like to call it sustainable.
As a four year old company we are out of the brand-new phase and into the growing years. We just opened up our beautiful cafe and lunch spot in Cambridge to an overwhelming reception from our friends and new neighbors. At the roastery we are on the verge of moving into a bigger, newer production/cafe/training space. Through all of these years we have successfully been able to grow in a very organic and responsible manner.
Our commitment to fostering a genuine connection to the product we handle has come full circle as one of our Direct Trade partner producers from Guatemala is visiting us in just a couple of weeks. I would encourage you to read up on story of how we connected with Gustavo Alfaro, and the leaps and bounds we have made with new micro lot projects at his farm, Hacienda Santa Rosa.
Sustainability for us is not some far away concept happening just at the farm level, it is apart of everything we do as a local business. Responsible direct sourcing, micro batch roasting, brewing and training resources, local sustainable delivery, and genuine community involvement. So, join us at one of our many community events to get involved! In specialty coffee, slow and steady is a sustainable pace.
Events:
Thursdays - Free public coffee cupping at dwelltime
barismo's green buyer, Silas Moulton, leads a very informative tasting each Thursday at 3pm at dwelltime.
Sundays through October - barismo at The Davis Flea
Serving up fresh hot coffee and cold brew each Sunday in Davis Square.
Monday, September 17th - Barismo Four Year Anniversary Celebration and Customer Appreciation Day. Free shots of Clockwork espresso at barismo all day long!
End of September - Producer Gustavo Alfaro of Hacienda Santa Rosa/Buena Esperanza Visits Cambridge
Stay tuned for details
Sunday, October 7th - Boston Local Food Festival
barismo your favorite Local Roaster will be serving up fresh hot coffee and cold brew (we will take a break from the davis flea that sunday)
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
La Fatima, Producer Carmen Duch Martinez
La Fatima is located along the Santa Ana volcano known as Ilamatepec in one of the premier coffee growing regions of El Salvador
Carmen Duch Martinez is a third generation coffee farmer who owns and manages the beautiful coffee estate, La Fatima, located in the Santa Ana mountain range in eastern El Salvador. Working together with her brothers Rafael and Juan (whose farms have also won cup of excellence) she has produced spectacular coffee for many years and placed in the Cup of Excellence competition four times earning third in 2009.La Fatima is located along the Santa Ana volcano, which is also known as Ilamatepec. In Nahuatl, a dialect of Aztec, Ilamatepec means “father hill” and is believed to watch over the crops grown on the hillsides. This is one of the premier coffee growing regions in El Salvador and certainly the most well known region. The weather conditions here are ideal for growing coffee with an average temperature of 21°C, 2.4 meters of annual rainfall, and a dry season with little rain which promotes even flowering and drying of the coffee.
Fatima is made up of mature bourbon trees covered by plenty of shade which is mostly ingas. There is also a small amount of Typica grown on the farm. Carmen prefers to aim for quality of growth instead of yield and avoids the use of chemical fertilizer and pesticides. The shade, older coffee trees, and infrequent use of chemical fertilizer leads to slower growth and does in fact cut yields quite a bit, but increases the concentration of the flavor as the tree puts more energy into fewer offspring.
I first cupped La Fatima at the Cuzcachapa Co-op mill in March of 2011. This large co-op dry mills and exports coffee for more than 1,400 member farms in the Santa Ana area. It was my favorite coffee I tasted that trip. After some shipping issues and a sharp drop in quality because of this, we were not able to offer this coffee last year. I went back to Cuzcachapa again this year and again it was my favorite coffee. I pushed for earlier ship dates and we are able to add this coffee to our menu unharmed.
-Silas Moulton, barismo green buyer
See more photos from La Fatima on our Flickr
Purchase La Fatima online and in person
Tuesday, July 03, 2012
2012 Costa Rica tasting at RJ Gourmet
Come check out our fresh crop Costa Rica coffees at RJ Gourmet on Thursday, July 5th from 6-8pm. This will be a good chance to taste the costas and hang out with Mike and Steve at RJ Gourmet, one of our favorite new shops! You'll see some of your old favorites like El Reposo, Los Lobos and La Loma, as well as Finca El Quizarra which we are excited to carry for the first time. Barismo's Coffee Buyer, Silas Moulton, will be on hand to talk about these coffees and answer questions.
RJ Gourmet Coffeeshop:
441 Cambridge St, Cambridge,
RJ Gourmet Coffeeshop:
441 Cambridge St, Cambridge,
Hope to see you there!
Friday, June 08, 2012
About starting dwelltime
Managing a small roasting operation that grew to be something much greater than we ever expected has been a wonderful and challenging experience. Full of a lot of ups and downs but coming into the end of our fourth year, there is a sense of happiness with the things we have accomplished, if not simply the great things we have lined up this year. The amount of work is something I would personally be very unlikely to sign up for again (unless we had a bigger starting budget). Starting out with as small a budget/staff/space as we did and to grow to where we have has been humbling.
We were at a turning point last year and many of us felt a pull to do something to change our direction. For me, it was a desire to get back to that original idea we had when opening barismo. Our first proposed location for barismo was down the street from where dwelltime currently is. It's a neighborhood we really wanted to be in. At the time though, we wanted to be a big island style coffee bar offering many different roasters. (Much like Cafe Grumpy in NYC became shortly thereafter, though they now roast their own). When that space fell through we regrouped and moved barismo to Arlington, MA to roast.
dwell presented this opportunity for many of us behind barismo to do something we loved and graft in great food to our model in a way we could not have early on. Signing onto this project of building restoration and then a cafe shortly afterwards was no easy feat. We essentially changed the investor group, management, and whole attitude of barismo as a company in the process of this other venture. Signing the lease on 364 Broadway was a real stress test.
What made the project great from the beginning was that our landlords at 364 are tremendous. They really cared about the project and getting the building back to a historical look as part of their vision. Now that they have gotten awards for the job done in remodeling and restoration, it's a bit easier to forget the hurdles over the last year of construction. A building that had water issues in the basement, a lack of any up to date plumbing or electrical, unique problems only faced with Cambridge regulations, and those were just the beginning of a long trying build out.
The unexpected part came from things outside our control. Neighbors and local groups who had opposition to everything from a sign, to the windows, to being able to play any music, to having any heating or cooling units that might make noise, any external lighting, and having any food service or trash removal was what shortly followed. It impacted every decision we made going into opening this space. Due to some of those interactions with a neighborhood group, we even compromised to shorten our weekend hours considerably under the impression the neighborhood was so quiet on weekends (a huge mistake that bit us quickly with unhappy neighbor-customers wondering why we got up so late and left so early).
I get that now. Living in Inman Sq. the last four years but working nearly 6 days a week in Arlington, I did not pick up on what was leading those concerns. Now, spending as much time as I do walking back and forth to Broadway, it began to clarify. There was possibly a fear we would be the shop that had the neon signs or that we'd be that shop with loud music blaring out onto the street. There was likely the expectation that coffee shops produce the multitude of paper cups that litter the neighborhood and bringing that to our neighborhood that had been quiet for so long -would be disruptive-. They were right, it would have if we were that kind of convenience store style coffee shop though nobody would know what we were until we opened. I now understand the resistance that existed and why people stood up to voice these concerns.
The real problems were not these issues being brought up, but the way it left us so flat footed to open the shop. Because of all the resistance we heard, we did not see the building anticipation in the neighborhood for our opening. We were unsure if we would be accepted and feared a painfully slow opening. We were not prepared for the support that literally poured into the shop from day one.
That first weekend, we ran out of everything. We even pulled an old barismo customer into the kitchen to help with dishes and a barista from another shop to help make drinks. The first two weeks, Hong and I personally worked every day open to close with most mornings being a stretch to eat or even to see our daughter. It was stressful and tiring. It reminded me how difficult the first years at barismo were. We survived and pulled through the first month but my desire to execute at a higher level with customer service that feels more like a bar/restaurant left me frustrated that we could not be who we wanted to be on day one much less the first month.
Things have calmed and dwell is staffed up, training up, and I'm getting a little rest as well. The last of the hurdles at dwell has been awaiting the seating expansion in late June which will allow the space to be complete. Filling that empty space will enable us to present our original design full and complete to our customers. That's a lot of work in a small amount of time.
This is probably the last barismo/dwelltime combo post I will be doing here as I have moved more to the dwell side of things as far as day to day work. There are new things to talk about including a new addition to our roasting team at barismo, new production staff coming in, and a change of the bar presentation are all happening at 169 Mass Ave shortly. That and the tremendous gains we've made in sourcing thanks to the work Silas has done leave the roasting operation ready to make some big moves. A few posts about those changes will follow.
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