For love of coffee

2015 marks our 7th year offering up fresh roast and per cup.  While a lot has changed (see dwelltime, Cambridge Cold Brew), a lot of our core love of coffee is still there.  The weather is just dreadful right now but it's a great time to look back before we look forward to the rest of the year.

I started in coffee a decade ago at a time when there were nearly all dark roasts being offered at local cafes. Mystery blends without roast dates made it pretty hard to find great coffee.  That doesn't even cover the lack of good tools and equipment back then.  These days, things have changed a bit and the equipment is getting to be a non issue and it shows.  More coffee shops are doing latte art and the execution has become better in our scene.  These days, there are still mostly dark roast blends at coffee shops in town and while you hear and see 'single estate' used a lot, there isn't that much of it actually being served.  Shops and roasters are really laying into 'freshly roasted' but it is surprisingly hard to find whole bean that's less than ten days off roast.  The messaging has evolved but there is a lot of room to grow in terms of the quality.  Meanwhile, the national 'indie' coffee scene is obsessed with venture capital, acquisitions, aggressive expansion, and (quietly) exit strategies but those topics are less discussed locally.  It's easy to be overwhelmed by it all.

In some ways, I am back where I started when I founded this company.  I find myself asking some of the same questions.  How do we (continue to) do what we do in a community of shops where so many shop owners may be pulling in the opposite direction?  After a lot of thought, I realized that we just have to acknowledge that barismo is on a mission.  We love coffee and just happen to also be lucky enough to have found a community of coffee drinkers that let's us be a little nerdy and obsessed about great coffee.  We have a complex business and a bit of an uphill trek but sometimes you just have to focus on what matters.  So, here's a break down of what our core goals are for 2015:

Fresh Roast  We will continue to strive to be the only coffee brand you will consistently see on shelves locally that is delivering coffee 24 hours off roast. We want you to take it home and enjoy it in the first two weeks while it is fresh.

Fresh Brew  We will push for, wrangle up, and argue for the most attentive, detailed, and cared for brews we can muster.  We promise that while you may have to wait a little longer for a brew, it wasn't sitting around all day staling and waiting for you.

Transparency  We will never blend up a mystery bag or serve up a murky 'dark roast' that lacks farm identity.  We also promise to share as much as you can stand to listen to about our farm partners and their stories of quality improvement.  Without transparency, we'd be taking credit for their work and that's not very barismo.

Education  We promise to share our brew methods, offer up classes, organize farmer events, and host cuppings.

Value  We believe that value is built on everything from how the coffee was processed and stored to roasted and brewed.  We will do our best to make the case for what makes good coffee and why we invested in the farms we did.  We don't roast anything dark (nothing goes into second crack) and we will continue to avoid obscuring the quality farms have worked so hard to create. 

Redefine the Regular Coffee  People want to drink good coffee.  We don't assume you want to drink bad coffee.  If you come in our doors, we know you came looking for more and we will do our best to provide that cup.  We want the chance to make your regular everyday cup something special.

While we admit we're on a mission for great coffee, it is a labor of love.  We do all this and more because we think it matters and we hope you agree.  Sure, we might not be willing to compromise, but in the end, we hope you will see and appreciate the effort from seed to your cup.  We want you to enjoy the coffee while we say thank you for the support over the years.

Coffee tree tap handles!

Keep it local Camberville, MA: barismo's founder, Jaime van Schyndel gives a run down on some cool new tap handles at dwelltime.

Coldbrew on tap is the new big thing right now.  Cafes, offices, and restaurants are picking this as a new option for quick serve coffee.  There are pre-designed 'javarator' setups you can buy and even a reddit section dedicated to the kegging of iced coffee setups.  This is the next big thing in coffee!  

To celebrate the last two years of serving coldbrew on tap at dwelltime, I came up with a fun idea back in the spring:

While visiting El Bosque de Parramos in Guatemala this spring, I picked up a section of a coffee tree stump from a plot of the farm that had older plantings.  This was one of 5 branches coming off the main stump and was still alive.  Avelino himself cut the stump off and chose this particular piece of wood.

I brought the wood back and left it with our friends and Somerville neighbors at DGF.  After some curing and resting time, the wood was cut into three sections, sanded and prepped as tap handles for a kegged coldbrew setup.

One of the cool aspects of this old stump is that is was right along the pathway.  It has several scars along it's backside that came over the years.  Over time, different farm workers would sit roadside and have their lunch.  They would invariably leave their machete in the closest stump, to which this little tree was the victim a few times.  Kind of cool to think about how over the years, the scars tell a story.  

Coffee wood grows fast and is typically not good quality.  The older varietals that are less dwarfed can get to 20ft tall and this is the type of heirloom bourbon we ended up sawing off to make our handles.  This particular stump may have had 20 years on this branch to get to this size.  It's color is a bit like poplar but it has a slight tint of green to the bark and wood.  Needless to say, I am excited to see how it ages and colors with time.

While we can't guarantee coffee wood tap handles for your setup, we can help you with a no fuss install and consistent quality product if you are in the Boston/Cambridge area.  If you are interested in serving coldbrew on tap locally or having this in your office, let us know.  We have been refining the process and have a separate division dedicated to expanding this.  We already have offices and clients across the spectrum setup for coldbrew coffee and tea on tap but are looking for some exciting new places to get this concept into while it's still hot outside. 

  

NOW Roasted In Somerville

After some hurdles, we are now roasting in our new space! Our first full day of production roasting was on Monday. While we weren't planning on a few of the hurdles that set back the move until the last few days of June, the silver lining was that the majority of our 2014 crop coffees are just getting to port in the next 2 weeks, so we had to move just a quarter of the amount of coffee from 171 Mass Ave, Arlington to our new home at 14 Tyler Street, Somerville.

We took last Thursday to move over, and brought over some extra hands to help with moving bags of coffee. Among the many positives to our new roastery is the addition of a loading dock; many of our long time customers have seen us in the past having pallets of coffee dropped off on the sidewalk, then carrying them one at a time through the roastery and downstairs to our basement storage. Pallet jacks and forklifts are lightening the load quite a bit.

Along with the change in location, we've switched the actual roaster we use. Our trusty pair of 4 kilo roasters has served us well, but we had reached near maximum roasting capacity. Late last year we purchased a 12 kilo Probat coffee roaster and have been refurbishing it inside & out. We've been happy with the results so far, and you should expect a positive difference in our coffees going forward.

We're spending most of this week and next working out some of the logistics of our wholesale operation here. By the middle of the month we'll have updates with events & classes at the new space. While it's not a retail store or coffeebar, there'll be plenty of opportunity through the rest of the summer to get to see our new home.

Coffee Updates

We've released some new coffees over the past few weeks from this years crop of coffees out of Kenya & Ethiopia; in addition to Doppleganger (on our last blog update), we've released Homunculus (a 50/50 blend of coffees from two different mills in the same region of Ethiopia), and Kochere Grade 1 (one of the components of Homunculus). We have a second wave of coffees from Ethiopia & Kenya already lined up for later this summer.

We're expecting the boat carrying our coffees from Costa Rica to arrive at port in New Jersey on July 8th. It should take another week upon arrival to clear customs, then we'll be able to bring these coffees -- Jardin de Aromas & Bandera de Dota -- up to Somerville!
Confirming more good news & arrival details from Guatemala today; we'll have a further update for you next week!

Local innovation needs coffee, local coffee needs a little innovation: @Clypd #Somerville

Keep it local Somerville, MA: barismo's founder, Jaime van Schyndel gives a shout out to a local tech company that brought support for a local roasting company.

Caffeinate and innovate.  One of the great things about being nestled into this area is that we are surrounded by great ideas and forward thinking companies.  There are some seriously cool people doing the next big thing.  Sometimes, we get to play a tiny role in fueling that!

Over at Clypd in Somerville's Davis Sq., they have a full tap setup of Cambridge Coldbrew.  They started with cold coffee and quickly moved into adding our direct trade coldbrew tea as well.  We were surprised with how easy it was to install as they already had a small kegerator for beer.  The second surprise is how much they go through!  They were up and running in no time, we just had to put an extra keg out there for them.

We want to give a shout out to those folks for being the spark to get us moving on this project.  A big thanks to the folks over at Clypd for bringing us into their family and for tuning us into the ideas driven culture around us.

Stay Fresh Updates: Upcoming events, new coffee, and much more... Sign up to receive updates!

NEW COFFEE!!!  

Our much beloved and adored doppelganger espresso is back and fittingly it's to be one of our first Somerville production roasts.  It will appear online and on retail shelves this weekend!

A pairing of two Kenyas, this coffee is lightly roasted to get it to sing some delicious notes of fruit and floral.  It's juicy and sweet, great as espresso, coldbrew, or as a drip coffee.

TEDxCambridge : June 5th 5pm, 

We are a coffee sponsor!   If you were one of the lucky ones to have booked a ticket, we will be right there with you keeping your energy up with great coffee!  (Check out our new espresso cart at this event).

A huge thanks to the organizers of TEDxCambridge for letting us be there to support!  See TEDxCambridge for more details on their spring event.

Do you know #Cambridge #Coldbrew?

Keep it local 'Camberville': barismo's founder, Jaime van Schyndel updates you on our most popular side project, Cambridge Coldbrew.  As we enter iced coffee season, here's our preferred cold coffee.

Some of our local industry old timers complain about the obsession with cold brew (toddy) coffee and complain about it's many faults.   They protest that cold brew is a place to hide low quality blends that are often darkly roasted.  They gripe that cold brew is brewed at room temp to very strong strengths yet often tastes very under extracted.  They grumble that cold brew tasted oxidized, flat, and a bit off (like a merlot left out overnight).  Instead of joining the complaining about how it is, we decided to refine the method and search out what it could be.  We then set out to reinvent cold brew coffee. We sought something different, possibly better, more innovative, a new idea for brewing cold coffee.  We took the first step by bringing it back to the fundamental ideas of what makes quality coffee.  Then we brewed it again, from the beginning.

Enter the Cambridge Coldbrew

After a lot of refinement and what can only be described as a few years of distilling the process, we latched onto a method that delivered the farm flavors we wanted.  We began beta test serving in Cambridge where it then picked up steam and even got some national press mentions.  It was not until it was on tap a few years ago at dwelltime that we started to really get some clarity to our new method.  The Cambridge customers supported us and pressed us both into bottling growlers and scaling up our brewing to meet the demands.  The rapid volumes from the get go kept us busy but made us fixate on how to scale up with the quality we were chasing.  As of now, we have been scaling into some seriously large batch sizes we never could have imagined when this was merely a trending topic of summer coverage a few years back.  It has been the big challenge refining a better idea for cold brewed coffee. Brewed cold and clean filtered, this is no longer that same old tepid toddy!

Here's what makes it Cambridge Coldbrew:

• Stored cold and brewed cold - It's the only iced coffee locally you can buy that's cold all the way through. We keep it at the best temps to preserve it's flavors.
• Clean filtered - Cambridge Coldbrew goes through a multiple pass filtration to get a crisp and full taste.  Because we don't have the sediment, this allows us to avoid the under/over extraction and focus on the right extraction.
• Quality direct trade coffee - We use only quality traceable coffees from farms we have sourced directly.  You will not receive a low quality over roasted blend, you will get a single coffee estate with a distinct flavor and unique story.
• A different approach - We don't updose and under extract, this is not a 'concentrate', it's ready to drink and dialed in like a great hot coffee would be.

 How can you get Cambridge Coldbrew by the bottle (and by the keg)?

• We offer our single estate growlers for office and take home at dwelltime as well as our coffee bar 171 Mass ave, Arlington, MA.
• We now offer a 5 and 15 gallon keg service for offices, restaurants, and specialty stores (local delivery only).
• Join our waiting list for bottles in your store's cold case.

Why Cambridge Coldbrew?

• We want to fuel your ideas.  Most of our first keg customers were amazing tech companies that already have kegerator setups for beer.  Cambridge Coldbrew is innovative coffee for innovative companies.
• We hope to change restaurant coffee to be something truly special, not an afterthought.  Imagine fine dining and ending the meal with a single estate Cambridge Coldbrew off a nitrogen tap.  It's the exclamation point on a great meal!
• Most cold brewed blends are generic and lack identity.  We want to bring it back to focusing on what makes great individual coffees by highlighting the unique farms that produced them.  That means it tastes like great coffees should taste.

What's new with Cambridge Coldbrew?

Clypd's tap setup (art by Olya Rosenberg)

• Our direct trade Fulu Red Tea is now available iced and by the Coldbrew keg (currently only as 5 gal kegs).  
• dwelltime has Fulu Red iced tea on tap and is testing our new carbonated version!  (frequently available in seasonal mocktails that pair well with an espresso)
• We have partnered to offer kegerator installations for 'Coldbrew on Tap' setups, let's talk!

We set out to make Cambridge Coldbrew a product that speaks to our values of letting the coffee be the good it can be.  Transparent, directly sourced, quality brewed, and freshly roasted 'cold' coffee.  It took a little help from our friends, and major support from our amazing customers for this new idea about iced coffee to become a big favorite locally but it's definitely catching on.  For that, we thank the loyal support of our customers that allowed us to stay true to our brew!  We look forward to bringing these farms we love to new friends, restaurants, and even those innovative companies that inspire us!