We are looking for another coffee-loving individual who has some killer experience working in coffee bars. Excellent customer service skills are a must. Part time hours with weekends are available. If you’d like to learn lots about coffee and be part of an awesome community, apply in person.
First off, we would like to extend a warm thanks to all of our customers, staff, friends, and families for making 2011 such an amazing year here at Drumroaster. We can’t wait to see what 2012 brings!
Sometimes a coffee comes along and hits you out of left field when you’re not expecting it. Santa Ana did that to us. Sent to us through an unconventional channel, we were blown away with the sample of this coffee. Complex flavours of chocolate and nuts, with just a hint of fruit juice dominated the cup. It takes an enormous amount of care on the farmer’s side to produce a coffee with such a clean, yet memorable impression. So memorable in fact, that we bought the entire lot.
Also unconventional about this coffee is that it’s from southern Guatemala, Nuevo Viñas, in particular, around Volcano Tecuamburro. As far as I can recall, I’ve never tried a coffee from this region. In the past, we’ve bought coffees from Antigua or the northern region of Huehuetenango, which have vastly different flavour profiles respectively. It’s exciting experiencing coffees from new regions because you have no pre-conceived notions as to how the coffee *should* taste. What a surprise with the Santa Ana.
Roberto Diaz, the owner of Finca Santa Ana is an award winning coffee farmer. He has placed in the top 10 in many international competitions. Most recently Santa Ana won 4th place in the 2010 Cup of Excellence in Guatemala. We’re so excited to be able to offer it to you. We’d be happy to serve you a cup of it to drink or a pound of it for you to enjoy at home.
Here are some vitals on Santa Ana:
Harvest Period: February-April 2011
Varietal: Bourbon
Processing: Selectively picked, washed, and sundried
Altitude: 1770m
Region: Volcano Tecuamburro
Happy new year!
After a restful and food-filled holiday, we’re back up and running this morning with regular hours this week.
Hope you all had a great holiday weekend!
It’s the time of year where you’re thinking “What do I buy for this person??”
We have a perfect answer for you. Coffee!
This year we’re offering some world class coffees for you to give to your friends, loved ones, enemies, or to just savor over the holidays. These are coffees that roasters all over the world covet, and usually save for themselves to drink 
Gift Bags – A great way to enjoy our coffees over the holidays is with our coffee gift bags! Featuring two 230g bags of featured single origin coffees and one 230g bag of our Christmas Blend, you can sample a wide range of flavours, showcasing different growing regions’ characteristics. $22 each.
Kenya Kangocho AA – No question about it, this is the most exciting cup of coffee we’ve brewed this year. Kangocho screams with lively acidity, strawberry and sweet grapefruit aromas, and a deep, complex body. $19 for a 12oz bag.
Guatemala Finca Santa Ana – Our first direct trade micro-lot purchase! Santa Ana is a farm in the Tecuamburro region of Guatemala. It’s the most balanced and clean coffee in our offering list, featuring an intense chocolate sweetness and overtones of toasted nuts and red fruits. In 2010, this coffee was ranked #4 in all of Guatemala and rightfully so. It’s delicious. $17/lb.
Costa Rica Las Lajas Perla Negra Espresso – Las Lajas is a micro mill in the West Valley region of Costa Rica. We carried their coffee last year and it was delicious. This year we bought a specially prepared lot called Perla Negra. This dry-processed lot has a massive fruit-forward flavour profile, with a rich undertone of tobacco and chocolate. Roasted for espresso, it produces a thick, creamy, balanced shot. $17/lb.
Brew Classes – Our brew class for Saturday, Dec.17 is now fully booked. We’ll be posting the info for the next Home Brew Class in January. Stay tuned!
We’ve always used a batch brew tower in our cafe because, as delicious as a pour over coffee (which we love to make) is, not everyone has 5 minutes to wait for a great cup of coffee. .
We heart our Fetco brewer.
Here’s a great article from the dudes at Sprudge.com extolling the virtues of batch brew extractors
Comment on this post if you’d like to attend.
One of the comments we most frequently recieve in our cafe is, “why can’t I get my coffee at home to taste this good?”
Therefore, starting Saturday, December 3, we will be hosting the first of a series of Home Coffee Brewing classes with the aim of enabling our customers (or just any prudent coffee drinker) with brewing the best possible coffee at home. FOR FREE.
Included in these classes will be techniques for grinding, brewing, and tasting your coffees. Also, we’ll be talking about which brewers suit your needs and how to use them properly. Of course we’ll taste a bunch of coffees and get you all jacked up for the rest of the weekend.
We’ll be posting the times for these classes in the coming week. Looking forward to seeing you on the 3rd.
Roasting coffee is all about learning. We’re constantly learning new things about coffee, whether it be about processing at origin, shipping methods, roasting techniques or brewing methods.
Note the Pacamara beans on the left, roasted and unroasted, next to a Typica bean on the right, roasted and unroasted
One aspect we’ve been immersed in lately has been coffee varietals. Much like wine, where there are varietals like Cabernet Savignon, Syrah, or Pinot Gris, the genus coffea arabica is made of many different cultivar. Pacamara is a hybrid varietal comprised of Maragogype and Pacas. These two coffees are very different in characteristics; Maragogype, being referred to by many as the “elephant bean”, has a size that’s double than most others, and cups with a lower acidity and bigger body. Pacas is a natural mutation of Bourbon, a coffee brought from the island of Reunion, off the coast of East Africa. With the high yield of Maragogype and great flavour structure of Pacas, Pacamara was created.
Pacamara coffee was bred in El Salvador in the 1950s and was planted quite extensively throughout the country. It’s known for it’s high yields in the El Salvadorian climate and terroir, large physical bean size, tamed acidity, medium body, red fruit notes, and intense sweetness. It is however, a tricky to roast properly. Due to its large size, Pacamara beans have a lower density cell structure, making them less tolerant to an aggressive roast profile.
We were discouraged at first because our sample roasts came out tasting flat, or lacking that jump you expect from more exotic lots of coffee. After tweaking our roast curves, and using softer application of heat, the flavours we were expecting jumped off of the cupping table. It was quite exciting.
The resulting production roasts of both our El Salvador Batres Farms Pacamara and El Salvador Siberia Estate Pacamara have been nothing short of amazing. Although they are very different coffees, there are distinct similarities between the two. There is a common maple-like sweetness and a lack of malic acidity found in a lot of washed Central American coffees.
We hope to continue to roast both coffees until the end of 2011. Shipments of next year’s crop will arrive in April 2012. We always have at least one, if not both coffees available for brewing or whole bean purchase.
Thanks for reading!
Hello! We are open today. Come on down! 7-3!