Our Roasting Philosophy
Coffee cultivation and processing are extremely labour-intensive.
Cup quality depends on the timely care and expert handling of many knowledgeable and specialized coffee growers and mill workers.
As roasters, our primary goal is to preserve the work already invested in the coffees we carefully select.
Upon receiving new arrivals at our roastery, the flavours and potential are already there, within the coffees we selected.
Our role is simply to reveal the unique tasting characteristics nurtured and crafted by growers, mill and fermentation workers and experts.
Our task is humble: one of transparency.
Our responsibility, as roasters, is to best represent the work and expertise coffee producers have invested in their crop.
It is their work and knowledge that we aim to showcase.
Our new Probat roaster, venting installation, roasting software and environmental control of our green coffee storage are now enabling us to further fine tune roasting profiles, based on correlations between our cupping notes, roasting curves and data recorded by our roasting software, as well as human observations recorded during the roasting process.
The same roasting software is then assisting us in replicating or fine tuning our favorite roasting profiles and achieving better quality consistency (based on repeated cupping). Our environmental control and machine warm up protocol is also key to the repeatability of those roasting profiles.
Roasting is both craft and science. It relies equally on intuition and knowledge, leaning heavily on sensory observations and skills.
Textures, colors, sounds, smells, timing and taste are all important cues to the roaster.
Affinities for the visual arts, music and culinary arts turned out to be great assets in developing roasting and tasting.
An interest in language also helps in learning to identify and name coffee attributes around the cupping table, and in sharing with peers and coffee lovers.
Focus, dedication, attention to details, a keen sense of observation, copious note taking and a capacity to problem solve are at the heart of the path to becoming a valuable coffee roaster.