After an incredibly busy holiday season, we are reflecting on all the many changes and events this year. It’s been a year of change, and maybe, maybe we’ve finally found our starting point for the journey to come.

Here are a few highlights from 2008:

• Customers Kristi Cromwell and Katie Shaw liked our café so much that they gave up their day jobs to tend the store! Their smiles and lattes delight all who enter. And now they have full-time access to great coffee.
• Polina Notik traveled from Samara, Russia to hone her barista skills at Seattle Coffee Works this summer. Shortly before returning for the fall semester, she competed and made the finals of the Seattle latte art competition, stunning the audience with her original, daring designs. (Trilobite, fish, pine tree reflected in water.) We are looking forward to seeing her again next summer!  

• We started our own roasting operation, with many fair trade, organic and even a few direct trade coffees.
• We relaunched seattlecoffeeworks.com as a shopping site; we now have customers in all 50 US states, and regularly ship to customers as far away as Brazil and Singapore, and as close as Capitol Hill.
• We have been blessed with so much love and appreciation from our customers; we often remark on just how lucky we are to be doing what we do and getting to meet so many wonderful people from near and far.

 Thank you for being part of the journey; thank you to everyone on the team and their supportive significant others (see the collage Polina sent from Russia); thank you to all of our regular and occasional customers; and many thanks to all of our vendors and friends. We couldn’t do it without you. You make our lives fun and rewarding!

Happy New Year!

Many Seattleites have been enraptured by the hope and change sparked by the recent elections. At Seattle Coffee Works, we’ve also dabbled in creating positive change. Last month we introduced our new Obama bend, which is so popular we can’t seem to keep on our shelves. We’ve also focused on environmentally and socially conscious coffee, as well as our place in the community.

So when we heard about families in Texas still struggling to rebuild their lives after Hurricane Ike ravaged the Gulf Coast, we sprung into action and launched a week-long fundraising event to generate support from our loving coffee drinkers for those needy families. In our downtown cafe we asked for donations to the Save the Children, Hurricane Ike: Children in Crisis Fund. As a token of our appreciation we offered a small coffee for every donation.

Right from the beginning everyone gave mighty generously. Slowly, through conversations in the cafe, we discovered that many Seattleites knew friends and relatives who were affected by Ike. Despite the rocky economy, people ambitiously donated to the fund, which helped provide cribs, diapers and other greatly needed supplies for a community far away from our own.

In the same spirit of giving, we’ve amped up the gift goodies in our store. We’ve introduced a new line of coffee samplers for the holidays–including some tasty treats from our friends at Theo Chocolate. We stocked the shelves with shiny new mugs–both ceramic and travel– and snazzy new T-shirts with our Drinking Man logo.

‘Tis the season for gift giving. We hope to keep the generosity flowing.

The first six bags of Obama Blend sold within 15 minutes. On our next roast date we made a very large batch of the blend; within two days we were sold out. There seems to be no end in sight.

Admittedly, our Obama Blend is quite spectacular: we have been using our beautiful Kenya Mchana Estate coffee, the most spectacular Kenyan we have come across in a long time, and our amazing Sumatra Mandheling (Fair-Trade Organic). The combination is divine.

Now we’re in the market for more Kenyan and Sumatra as our reserves are coming to an end. If we’re lucky enough to find the right coffees, we’ll even put out an Obama Deluxe Blend which will include some Hawaiian Kona. It’ll be pure bliss!

Read more about it on the Q13 website. We’ll update this posting with the clip, once it’s out.

UPDATE: Here is the clip…

All of us here at Seattle Coffee Works are such coffee fanatics that we find ourselves talking about coffee almost in terms of an alternate reality.

When we named our Guatemala-East Timor blend Chocolate Truffle we didn’t take into account that to everyone else this sounds like a flavored coffee. To us Chocolate Truffle tastes like pure hot chocolate; most folks in this world would describe it more like a smooth and balanced coffee “with a hint of chocolate.”

Admittedly, we’re a little over the top with our descriptions. With that said I think it’s time for an update on what direction the Seattle Coffee Works roastery has taken in recent months, and what new coffees we have recently received.

Direct-Trade Model

Our long-term goal is to move towards a direct-trade model. That means we’re aiming to directly import coffee from farms with socially and environmentally sustainable practices, partnering with individual farms and coops rather than sourcing our coffee from importers who often give us very little background about the coffees sold. Most coffee today is traded anonymously through a chain of middlemen; the model of “fair-trade” certification seems to be only a partial fix to ensuring basic ethical standards.

Some larger roasters have started promoting a “direct-trade” model; yet most of the coffees they sell continue to lack certification let alone a verifiable pedigree. Check it out at the roaster of your choice next time you’re in their store: their best-selling espresso blend usually has no sticker on it. From this little hill it looks like they are pursuing a smart marketing strategy, no more and no less.

Currently we’re doing no better than those roasters but certainly no worse either. Our long-term goal is to source 100% of our coffees directly.

Our Colombia Huila “Monserrate” is a first step in that direction. This highly rated coffee comes to us directly through Atlas Coffee Importers, one of the several importers we use to find the most outstanding coffees. We wish we could get our hands on more such direct-import coffees with a known pedigree; we’re certainly willing and able to pay a premium for this kind of coffee. While this is the way of the future, it seems at this point the only way to make direct-trade happen is for us to grow large enough to start importing directly ourselves.

Satisfying Taste

Having the most conscientiously sourced coffee can be no substitute for a winning taste. Coffee – just like chocolate, wine, and ice cream – has to be delicious; otherwise it has no place in our lives. We have learned that our preferences in coffee do not necessarily predict what our customers like.

One good example is decaffeinated coffee. While decaf drinkers are in the minority, we have come to respect them as true coffee connoisseurs. Decaf drinkers like coffee for its taste alone. Initially, we paid little attention; with our latest green-coffee buy we have improved a little. Try for instance the water-processed Costa Rica, which has an aroma of sweet candy and a good deep body. Both our Sumatra and Guatemala decafs also display desirable profiles of those origins. And then there is our Decaf Chocolate Truffle – well you have to try it for yourself to go crazy over its deep chocolate notes as we did.

Another good example is our new Harrar Longberry (Grade 4) which we sourced through Walker Coffee Trading company. It’s back to a close-to-optimal taste profile – notes of blueberry, fruit, and simply a tasty coffee.

For whom if not for our customers?

When we started Seattle Coffee Works we were focused almost entirely on espresso drinks. At first we didn’t even carry “drip coffee;” we simply brewed up coffee blended for espresso once it was too old to use in the espresso machine. When our customers wanted to buy coffee by the pound we sold them espresso blends as well. We theorized that espresso blends are superior to any “drip coffee” out there. We were wrong about that.

Through our Taste-Off 2008 we discovered that our customers much prefer blends with the medium body of the Central and South American origins. About a month ago, our Atlantic Blend was born. While it’s “smooth” we think it also has plenty of personality to please the true coffee connoisseur.

Speaking of coffee connoisseurs. Our new Chocolate Truffle blend is certified organic and shade-grown (Guatemala); did I mention it’s sumptuous?     

This week, between 8 am and 10 am, we’re giving you a chance to help. We’re offering free small coffee drinks for every donation of $5 or more to the Hurricane Ike Children in Crisis Fund. All proceeds, either cash or credit, help provide diapers, cribs and other supplies to children and their families affected by Ike.

Please join us this week (Oct. 13-17) for coffee and a good cause.

Thank so much, Yoon! We hope you enjoy the coffee.

So why are we sharing all this? We’d just like everyone to know that we’re so excited about the varied responses we received about their favorites. Sure, we all like to try new coffees, but at the end of the day, everyone just wants a good cup of coffee, something consistent and delicious. All of our coffees have their own brilliant characteristics and appeal to a wide range of palates and the individual preferences of our coffee drinkers lets us do what we do best: serve up that favorite cup. Whether it’s berry Tanzania, smoky Sumatra, nutty Brazil or our light caramelly Mellow Seattle and sultry sweet Space Needle blends, we love to satisfy everyone’s coffee cravings.
So, let’s drink some coffee!
P.S.: Look for another post sometime later this week announcing the winner of the sweepstakes…

There are so many little snippets to catch up on in this blog by a little coffee company in Seattle that only today, only this time, a short list seems in order:

• This year alone Seattle Coffee Works has won two-and-one half distinctions:
  • earlier in the year, we were named Seattle Magazine’s 2007 Best Place for a Coffee Tasting, quite a distinction considering that the magazine only chose two coffee shops out of the hundreds available in Seattle;
  • the good people voting on nwsource.com picked us as one of their finalists for their 2008 people’s picks;
  • we have started gaining some speed on yelp.com, and we’re now being reviewed as part of the top five Seattle coffee shops. (I am counting the yelp.com distinction only as a half distinction as yelpers, as much as we love them, tend to be fickle and sometimes punish businesses for things those businesses are not even trying to do).
• Earlier this month we soft-launched our shopping-enabled website — the orders have been pouring in, even though there is still a little construction to be done.
• For almost two months now we have held a daily coffee tasting — every day from 11am to 12pm you can join us for tasting the newest and freshest (and we’d like to think: best) coffees around.
• Vicki Schumann and her Seattle Coffee Crawl have begun their daily tour through downtown Seattle. Finally a tour that gets coffee and comes at a reasonable $15 per person.

More beginnings and surprises are coming — this, really, is just the beginning: of a blog, a business, a coffee company. Let’s drink some coffee!