By Rachel Beebe
When you walk into our cafe or go online to buy our beans you’ll usually find six coffees plus a decaf available. We rotate our smaller lots every eight weeks or so, and our bigger ones between three to four times a year. That means that every year Steampunk releases over 25 different coffees. In other words, a lot of what we do every week is the work of getting new coffees ready to sell. For this post we’re skipping over the process of buying the green coffee; we’re planning to write more about that later on. (In the meantime have a look at this interview with our Head of Coffee about seasonality.)
We typically buy coffee based on a preshipment sample that has been sent from origin before the main shipment of the harvest. So, the first step in launching a new coffee is tasting and approving the landed sample, which is a sample of the coffee we bought once it has landed in the UK (or sometimes Europe). We’re checking that the coffee matches the preshipment sample: that it’s the same coffee (mixups rarely happen, but they’re possible) and that the quality is the same (defects can be introduced to the coffee during processing and shipping). We use a little 50g electric roaster to do these mini roasts and then taste the coffee in a standardized process called cupping.
Roasting a sample roast on our Ikawa
Once approved, the coffee comes to us in jute sacks lined with plastic or, if it’s really fancy, vacuum sealed inside boxes. We want to roast the freshest coffee so we aim to get the shipment from the warehouse as soon as possible after it lands there from origin. The work that goes into managing the timing and logistics of this tetris puzzle is massive. Ludwika, our Head of Coffee, is constantly assessing our green coffee inventory, how quickly it’s selling, when certain origins are landing and planning the release calendar.
The pallet arrives and after sending the driver away with his gratis latte we get pumped for some heavy lifting and move the sacks into our green storage: an old shipping container parked on our patio.
Then we start roasting. First, we do another 50g sample roast with coffee from one of the sacks to confirm again that the coffee is what we’re expecting. This cupping is also when we start identifying potential tasting notes and thinking through how we want to roast it in the big roaster.
When we roast coffee we use what’s known as a profile, which is a graph showing time and temperature data. Deciding how we’re going to roast each coffee is called profiling. We usually start with a profile from a previous coffee that’s similar (in origin, process and/or variety) to the one we’re working on. Then comes the fun part: we do a first production roast and see what happens. There are a lot of ways to get coffee from green to brown. Our first goal is to find the range within which the coffee tastes well developed. Too fast in the beginning and it can taste green and vegetal, too slow and it can lack body, too hot at the end and it’ll be over caramelized (aka: burnt), too long and it’ll lose too much natural acidity.
Being a good roaster means knowing how to make the coffee do what you want it to in the roasting machine, but more than that, it means being able to taste how what you do during the roast impacts the flavours in the cup. So, to be a good roaster you have to be a good taster. Small differences between roasts (a few seconds here, a few degrees there) can have a huge impact on flavour.
Once we know generally how to approach the coffee, we finetune to find the best possible roast. We taste each roast multiple times to see how the flavour changes in the days after roasting. We cup, take notes, adjust our profile, and recup until we’re totally happy with the result. Usually we get it within three or four roasts. If it’s a coffee we’re planning to use in the shop as an espresso we ask our baristas to dial it in and we taste it black and with milk. At the same time we’re finishing the tasting notes to explain what customers can expect when they brew the coffee at home. (I’ve collected all the “flavour words” I encounter into a document to help when we’re writing tasting notes. A few fun ones: unctuous, piquant, racy, dulcet.)
While roasting the coffee is arguably the most important item on the new release to-do list there’s a lot of other stuff to get ready, too. Ludwika and our founder, Cath work out the retail and trade prices. And we think about what we want to communicate to our customers about the coffee. For each new coffee we ask ourselves: Why did we buy this coffee? What’s exciting about it? What’s the bigger context in terms of the supply chain, farm or coop? Is there important history or any new developments in the country of origin? Is there anything noteworthy about the variety or how the coffee was grown or processed?
We get information about each coffee from the importers with whom we work, but often I do a little extra research to answer some of these questions. Occasionally we talk to the best source of information for any coffee: the producers themselves. I write it all up and our designer, Rachel Seago, transforms these notes into beautiful labels and cards and orders those. She also does the work of uploading all the information and photos along with the prices to our retail and trade sites.
Throughout the process (stretching all the way back to the original buying decision, actually) we ask our baristas to taste the coffee and tell us what they think. We’re lucky to have them as built-in market research subjects! They often contribute to tasting notes and we have regular staff cuppings where everyone tastes the new coffees together.
Of course, we have to tell all of our beautiful customers about our delicious new coffee. Michael, our marketing and sales guru, posts on the socials and Cath announces the release in our weekly newsletter. Finally, Torin in operations packs the first tins, puts them on the shelf and it’s ready to buy!
