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We are proud to add a new roaster to our all-star lineup of office coffees: Counter Culture Coffees! Counter Culture delivers directly from the farmers to give coffee lovers handcrafted goodness and "the most delicious and exciting coffees in the world." It also happens to be one of the "Big 3" Third Wave Coffee Roasters along with Stumptown and Intelligentsia. It's basically a huge deal. :)
By agreement with Counter Culture, we can only offer these great beans in five-pound bags, unground.
Espresso Toscano: Sweet dark-chocolate and buttery caramel
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Honduras Finca El Puente: Called in 2005 the “Purple Princess” this coffee has an astounding cup of lavander, grape and plum
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And Number 46: a European-style blend and crowd pleaser
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Counter Culture office coffee is also awesome because of their coffee education program called Counter Intelligence (the name is a little Counter intuitive - ha!). They have training centers in NYC, North Carolina, Atlanta, and D.C. to educate those who are interested in how to craft the tastiest coffee!! And considering over 54% of Americans over the age of 18 drink coffee every morning, it wouldn't hurt to know how to make it well.
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So there's Counter Culture office coffee for you and hopefully it ends up on your counter!
What do you call a cow who's just given birth?
...De-calf-inated!
A Joyride Coffee Tasting FAQ
The way we like to introduce potential customers to our products is through a free in-office tasting.
Tasting at Knewton
But what exactly a tasting is, is a bit of a mystery to most people. The norm in the coffee industry is a cupping, but to be honest, while these give the clearest understanding of a coffee, they don't really give people a taste of how their coffee will go down on a day-to-day basis. So then what is a tasting? For this, I think an FAQ format is best.
What Coffee will we try at a tasting? How will it be prepared?
In terms of the coffee, a tasting will consist of three different roasts; one from each of our roasters. We will usually have a Latin, an African and a blend. For example, recently we have been doing a Dallis Brothers Sertao Yellow Bourbon from Brazil, a Stumptown Ethiopian Mordecofe and a Blue Bottle Bella Donovan blend. These coffees are prepared on a Chemex pour-over. We use Chemexes because they allow us to get a very clean cup, and they mimic the way that coffee is brewed when prepared with our office equipment. In the summer months, we also bring a sample of our in-house cold brew. Cold-brew carries all the potency of coffee, with a fraction of the acidity. We'll give tasting notes on the coffees, and describe what traits makes them special, such as different single-origin coffees, single-varietal coffees and Direct trade coffee sourcing. We'll also go into the process of how coffee goes from being a little red cherry on a plant in Latin America, to a delicious brown liquid in an office in New York.
What Equipment options do you offer?
We offer coffee equipment for offices from ten to a thousand employees. We have options that are direct plumbed, and ones that are filled by carafe. You can look at our coffee equipment options here. We also offer water cooler solutions for offices of all sizes.
Barrel Tasting
What do we need on our End?
Our baristas will come fully prepared. All we need is a water source, a table and two outlets.
How long is a tasting?
A tasting takes about half an hour sandwiched between a 15 minutes setup and a 15 minutes break-down.
How many people can come to a tasting?
We have done tastings for 3 people and 300 people. These events can be as big or small, formal or informal as you like.
Is there any cost or commitment?
Nope! The tasting is totally free and there is no commitment. Even if you go with us, we don't have a contract. We don't believe in them! We think that our beans should speak for themselves and if you aren't happy, you should be able to walk away.
Tasting at Percolate
How Better Coffee Tastes: Stumptown Latins Visualized
We love infographics/data-visualizations here at Joyrideas you might have noticed from past blog posts such as Coffee and the Economy, Tracking Caffeine with Style, and Coffee Export Data Visualization. And while we normally share work by others that we find interesting, from time to time, we roll up our sleeves, compile our own data sets, and generate our own visualizations, made possible by some very cool (and free) online resources, such as Many Eyes. Why data visualization, why infographics? Well, they say a picture is worth a thousand words, and an infographic is a picture on steroids! In particular we enjoy how data visualization affords us new perspectives on familiar facts and info. For example, today we decided to see if any trends emerge when we compile several flavor descriptions together and visualize them as a set. Specifically, we aggregated the flavor profile descriptions of Stumptown's 2012 Latin America offerings.
We collated the descriptions for all of Stumptown's current Latin offerings, removing articles, prepositions, pronouns, etc., to hone in on the adjectives, adverbs, and verbs. The infographic that follows spatially represents the frequency with which certain words are used. As the graphic indicates, the three most common flavors used to describe this year's Latin offerings are Caramel, Apple, and Chocolate:
It will be interesting to see how the Latins compare to the African descriptions or the Indonesian description. It would also be kind of cool to see how the popularity of specific words changes from year to year. After all, it was just two years ago that apparently everything tasted Meyer Lemons. Now that I can finally buy a Meyer Lemon at Fairway, it's use in coffee flavor profiling has all but disappeared.
Cupping: Summer 2012 Stumptown Office Coffee
Cupping yields two new single-origin Stumptown Office Coffee Offerings.
About a month ago, I (Adam) and our consultant Claudio went down to Red Hook to try out some of the new Stumptown offerings for the summer of 2012. I know the post is late, but our new website, (thanks Barrel for a great job!) has taken quite a bit off effort. I've got some pictures from the cupping as well as two new offerings for our Stumptown Office Coffee menu. Sadly the Ethiopian Yirgacheffee Adado has gone out of season, and we needed to find a new Stumptown Office Coffee African single-origin to replace it. While there were some big shoes to fill, I think we found something that fits the bill.
Cupping-at-Stumptown
Sadly the Ethiopian Yirgacheffee Adado has gone out of season, but we are happy to replace it with:
The Ethiopia Duromina (Direct Trade)
The Duromina comes from the Duromina Cooperative, located just west of Jimma. Made from heirloom varietal beans from relatively high elevations (1900-2200m), like many Africans it has bright acidity and a complex, but clean body. In terms of the taste, it is an incredibly complex cup that we think comes through best when prepared as a chemex. Regardless, we think that in Terms of a Stumptown Office Coffee, it makes a wonderful, if slightly less nuanced preparation on a Fetco. Look for notes of lemon, ginger, sweet hops and nectarine and an accent of jasmine. If you want more info on the farming, sourcing or processing of this particular coffee click on the link above to go directly to the Stumptown page.
Claudio-at-tasting
We have also added a new Latin to the lineup:
The Montes de Oro was actually a coffee we served on the Joyride Truck back in the day. We also carried it as part of the Stumptown Office Coffee lineup last year, so for those of you who were sad to see it go, rejoice in its return. Made from a mix of Bourbon, Catuai, Villasarchi and Caturra varietals, this coffee from four farms in the Tarrazu Valley. As is part of Stumptown Coffee model, the green bean sources have been working with these farmers on best practices in picking, and depulping. The cup has notes of honey and caramel sweetness that is tempered by cleat notes of cherry, milk chocolate, apple fig and vanilla. If you are looking to home-brew cold brew, this would be a good choice for a chocolatey and mild mannered cup.If you want more info on the farming, sourcing or processing of this particular coffee click on the link above.
Elizabeth-Casaus
So a big, if belated, thank you to the team at Stumptown. The cuppings are always fun and I think we got some phenomenal Stumptown Office Coffee offerings out of this particular cupping.
