What is our style of coffee roasting?
If there is one thing we have learned about coffee over the last 40 years, everybody has a different set of receptors for taste and preference.
I remember making takeaway coffees on espresso machines at various events we did as weekend gigs a couple of times a year, e.g. donating to charities at the local school fetes.
Preparing each coffee with exacting precision to ensure consistency, I was always amazed at the broad spectrum of responses received from the customers.
Delicious, a bit too strong, weak, not hot enough, too hot, need more chocolate, love the caramel, wanted something with nuts, have you got a fruity coffee?
So, it became a personal crusade to discover a "true centre" of espresso coffee beverages.
That elusive spot right in the middle where nobody could argue it wasn't delicious.
Finding the espresso epicentre has been a labour of love and arduous work. But like most things in life, once you find it, everything falls into place and becomes second nature and blatantly obvious.
Coffee needs to balance. There are too many forces at work - numerous acids, flavours, fruits, and sweet and sour elements that sometimes shift the cup in any direction.
There can be a fight or battle inside the cup for blended coffees, and it's essential to understand why and how that occurs.
Each bean deserves its unique treatment.
I roast all our coffees myself personally as the owner of the company. We have support staff that help maintain an incredible knowledge base on how each bean functions. We combine this with sophisticated Telemetrics that monitor what's happening inside the roasting chamber as the various coffees react differently to heat, time, and pressure.
With this combined experience, we craft profiles to ensure coffees are roasted to develop all available potential - within a range that is neither too dark nor too light but right in the optimal zone.
Dark roasted coffee is just lazy, and it's intended to mask the cheap and inferior quality raw ingredients.
There's only a little skill or finesse to roast dark because you have already traded off acidity, fruit complexity and most flavours for a homogenous result, lacking distinctive attributes.
Australian consumers desire sweetness, acidity and complexity in their coffee, and most also add milk or a dairy alternative.
Similarly, light roasted coffees that preserve the fruit elements can pose problems with sourness, thin body, and lack of cut-through in milk/dairy alternatives for espresso beverages.
Light-roasted coffees are best suited for various modern manual brew types and a limited range of espresso enthusiasts with the right skills and equipment.
Light-roasted coffees can extract unique flavours and clarity with top-shelf equipment and the right skills. But if you need the skills or equipment, the lack of solubility in a light-roasted coffee on espresso duty can be overwhelming and frustrating.
We roast to a medium depth where there is a balance and presence of all competing attributes - sweetness, body, flavour, complexity, acidity and persistent finish.
Our focus is to extract the most flavour from coffee beans without over-roasting.
It's neither rushed nor is it deliberately slow and baked.
It's important to point out that roasting a darker coffee does not produce a more robust coffee.
Darker roasted coffees also will not have more flavour. That's an invalid, old assumption.
Darker roasting destroys the "goodness" of a coffee as it disappears up the chimney having been "roasted out".
Scientists have also found that darker-roasted coffees possess less caffeine compared to medium or light-roasted coffees of the same type.
All of our coffees will be roasted to a specialty coffee standard using the precision of industrial PLC-controlled accuracy. There is no "human element" to guide the burners, fans or temperatures - that might be how small, micro-roasting brands operate, but that is not precise or accurate for us.
That means it's similar or superior to what's typically available in most premium or quality Australian cafes.
