Highlights?

Bali. 

The Bali Organic Kintamani Natural definitely stole the show. The roasted beans looked like the color of light milk chocolate and showed such outstanding fruitiness. The Bali began with notes of deep, wild berry and that blossomed into a natural pungent sweetness. An instant hit.

Schlurp. “Woah!”

Schlurp. “Holy cow!”

Schlurp. “Wow! It’s SO sweet!”

The Balinese coffee definitely presented the most interesting fruit-forward profile and didn’t digress into an acidic tang after it cooled a little.

Of the three Sumatras, the Mandheling DP “Rona Bkahti”  pleased quite a few palates with rich malty body, notes of maple and sweet tobacco. Just complex enough and not aggressively earthy.

The Flores Organic Bajawa A/WP-1 gave us a velvet mouthfeel with light floral notes and a hint of melon and citrus.

The two from Papua New Guinea offered deep floral and herbal tones.

The FTO Peru Cepicafe offered the most complexity of the three Peruvians. Enough high notes with some light peppery spice, but not so much as to overpower the smooth, earthy body.

What a treat to sample a variety of under-explored Asia-Pacific coffees that offer more than the usual lineup of smoky, dark and rich flavors.

More coffee cuppings coming soon, so keep your palates ready for more schlurping!

Photo Credit: http://media.news.com.au/travel/lp/images/BN2140_2.jpg

Last week we had a pleasant surprise when Sebastian Pinzon and Juan Villegas came by the cafe to check out our Colombia Huila Monserrate. In the picture Sebastian (left) and Juan are enjoying a cup made in the Chemex. We were excited to present them with what we thought is the best our Colombia Huila can be.

Sebastian and Juan often travel to the town of Monserrate. They are responsible for the super-premium segment at one of Colombia’s largest (if not THE largest) coffee exporter, Racafe.

While enjoying some coffee - we also sampled a great vacuum pot of our Tanzania Blackburn Estate - we had a great conversation about what has made the brand of Colombian Coffee so strong: a relentless focus on quality by the all powerful Colombian Coffee Growers’ Association.

How to Brew a Good Cup of Coffee from Ben Helfen on Vimeo.

Thanks to our friend Ken Wagner, who likes the burnt stuff, for passing this along!

From moving our café to inaugurating our very own roasting operation; from a website re-launch to appearances on many national media outlets including NPR and ABC (and soon, CNN); but mainly from excellent coffee to excellent coffee.

We’ve had a good year. Our team and our business grew more in 2009 than we could have hoped for. While we may have disappointed some who are missing our original concept of having ten different espresso blends “on tap,” we have had quite a few encouraging reviews, including more than one calling us the finest in coffee roasting Seattle has to offer.

We know that it’s a privilege and honor, and an obligation!, to be roasting and making coffee in the epicenter of the coffee world. While we feel flattered by all the wonderful feedback we’ve received, we also have a list of about one million things we’ll work on in 2010. Please stay tuned!

But before we turn the page, a huge thank you to all members of the Seattle Coffee Works crew, past and present, who have worked their hearts out to take us to where we are now. We’re very lucky to have a team of such dedicated and talented people. Thank you!!!

We would have not survived the year without a lot of help! Thank you to all the brilliant people who contributed to our build-out! (The health inspector’s jaw dropped when we turned our new space around even faster than a very well known coffee chain in town which threw an army at the effort.) A million thanks to the good folks at Green Tortoise Hostel who are the best neighbors anyone could wish for.

And, oh man, what would we have done without the indefatigable family members and close friends who were there for us during this past year, at every step of the way??! Thank you!

Happy New Year to all!

Picture Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dancingwithwords/4046704573/

(The line about the super human is a joke. We’re all human around here. But if you made it to the end of that sentence, you probably do have stamina.)

About stamina and passion: what we do is hard, hard work and it can easily turn into a “job” for people who are not completely passionate about our line of work.

To make sure (as best as we can) this would be a fit, we ask that you don’t apply in the traditional ways. Instead, please make your way down to our cafe‚ at 107 Pike Street. Come in, have a cup of coffee and hang out for a  while. Don’t let us know who you are. Just check us out. Find out if you’d like to be a customer. Come back another day.

If you like what you see, and if you could imagine spending your days behind the counter, please introduce yourself. A resume might be helpful. Other hints from your past indicating your excitement about food in general and coffee  in particular definitely help.

Don’t expect us to hire you overnight. It’s helpful if you’re currently holding another job and can start trying out part-time. If joining our team is for you, then we’ll all know in good time. If you’re looking for a generic food-service gig we’re probably not the right place for you. If your first question is “How much per hour?” we’re definitely no match for you. (We pay what most pay in the industry; benefits might be available; but surely there are many other jobs out there which would give you better pay.)

If you dream about the things you do, then we might well make for good dance partners. Partners in the dance of life. The band: all of us here at Seattle Coffee Works. The tune: music from a country between the tropics of cancer and capricorn. The rhythm: coffee grinding and brewing. The smell: coffee coffee coffee.

(If you bring the will, we’ll provide the skill.)

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rojojam/1621836966/

Our good friend and local Coffee Hero, Michael Smith, writes that he’s taken up home roasting because of the rising prices of Espresso blends from Seattle roasters.

The view from beach house number five on my privately owned island in the Carribean.

Even though Michael doesn’t mention names in his post, he could be referring to us when he writes that “one Seattle roaster [which] saw my May 2009 Espresso price list…raised his whole bean price 50 cents a pound, because he was priced lower.”

Michael goes on: “There are two ways to put more cash in the register.  You either increase your customer base through competition and marketing or you squeeze the customers you already have a little bit more.”

He’s right. Seattle’s roasters are overcharging their customers. We’re gouging, we’re greedy, we’ll suck any of those sacred green bills from the living. (In fact, I’ve already applied for a job at a big, sleezy investment bank — I hear they’re always looking for my type.)

While I can’t speak for other roasters, Michael’s conclusion is certainly not true for Seattle Coffee Works.

Before I go on let me state that, yes, we did increase the price of our Seattle Space Espresso Blend by 50 cents to $13.45 per pound (that’s a whopping 3.861%), and, yes, we reduced the price of our Swiss-Water Process Fair-Trade Organic Decaffeinated blend, which we call Our Best Decaf. We also adjusted (up and down) many of our single-origin coffees to better reflect the different cost bases for the different coffees we source. This had nothing to do with Michael’s price list but was a long planned adjustment in our pricing structure. On average, our coffees are probably now cheaper than before.

Michael writes the price of coffee should generally decrease because of coffee futures, oil, commercial real-estate, and because almost everything else in this economy that costs money has gone gotten cheaper.

His observation sounds true at first; yet if you look little more closely you’ll find that price development in a specific industry often has very little to do with price development in the overall economy. Case in point: While many goods and services have gone down in price, some have gone up.  

For instance, softwood lumber has seen a price increase of 6.7% year over year – despite a prolonged decrease in building activity. Pure conjecture doesn’t help explain price increases or decreases; it all depends on the specific economic activity.

The reason we had to increase the price for our signature Espresso blend is very simple: we use a large percentage of coffee from East Africa in this blend, and simply put that coffee has gotten 20-30% more expensive during this past year. Our modest price increase doesn’t go very far to cover that increase.

And our costs also don’t adequately reflect any of the services a roaster provides, namely the work involved in sourcing really high quality beans, the storage—both the quality of storage as well as the space—packaging, the continuing sourcing of new-crop coffee… the list goes on. If our prices were so high as to actually make us some serious money, you would likely find us lounging on the beach rather than in downtown Seattle.

Other than some of the big chains no one has gotten independently wealthy in our industry. The adage: Start with a big fortune to make a small fortune, certainly holds true for most of us in specialty coffee.

There are exceptions. Check out the coffee aisle in any large supermarket. Despite the comparatively low overhead and the less-than super premium coffees on offering, you’ll be hard-pressed to find coffee that’s cheaper than what your local roasters charge. (Trader Joe’s and Costco are an anomaly, and this would warrant another post.) That would explain the nice earnings at some of the large coffee companies. I know that some especially savyy folks have indeed retired to some beach in Central America.

But here’s the deal, Michael. In addition to roasted, we’ll also sell you green coffee for your home roasting. It’s cheap. It’s straight from our roastery with the added services (minus the actual roasting) provided by the roaster.  And by the way, if you order online with the code: STORE, we’ll package your coffee, ready to go for you to pick up in the café, with no additional shipping costs.

So check out some of the new, outstanding coffees we’ve recently received: Sulawesi Toraja Sapan Minanga; Sidamo Moredocofe; Tanzania Blackburn Estate; El Salvador Capitales Unidos; Honduras Las Capucas. We look forward to seeing you back for your green (or roasted) beans sometime soon! Or, just for a chat over an expertly pulled double espresso ($1.82 + tax.)

Picture credit/source:  http://www.flickr.com/people/18220192@N04/ / http://www.flickr.com/photos/18220192@N04/2053190004/

The other day when I was chatting with Melissa Allison of the Seattle Times, she told me that I talked about Starbucks a lot more often than most other folks in Seattle’s independent-coffee scene.

The truth is, here at Seattle Coffee Works we do talk about Starbucks a lot. Not only do our customers ask us how we’re doing amid the 99+ Starbucks within three blocks of our store but we also actively study our big corporate neighbor. We often buy coffee from our neighboring stores and check out their operations. We figure there’s a lot we can learn from Starbucks (as well as other cafes and roasters).

In today’s Seattle Times article, I mentioned Starbucks’ somewhat unnerving visits to our tiny hole-in-the-wall café. Here’s the story: last winter, three separate delegations of Starbucks folks came by. Each time they filled our little store so that no one else could fit in. Usually they didn’t introduce themselves, and one delegation even lied, saying they were just a group of Japanese tourists. They didn’t buy a single drink. When we offered to make them an espresso for free, they didn’t care for it. That was really strange, for a company that says they like coffee. Plenty of other roasters, café owners and baristas stop by our store all the time for coffee. We love exchanging ideas, opinions, samples, techniques.

That’s what makes us Seattle Coffee WORKS, emphasis on the WORKS. Coffee is a work in progress, and we’re an experience coffee project, a place to explore, communicate, share our passion and fascination for coffee. Even a lot of Starbucks baristas come by. After all, many of them are curious about coffee too. Coffee is a deep subject, with so much to learn. (Did you know it’s the world’s second most traded commodity, after oil?) Starbucks corporate reps checking out the café décor but not the coffee? Go figure.

That misdirected interest among Starbucks higher-ups is one of the reasons why Starbucks will have a hard time creating a “neighborhood” store as reported in The Times.

Here are some other principal differences between a Starbucks store and an independent coffee roaster like us:

• We’re not profitable and we never expect to be profitable. If our little coffee business can pay a living wage to everyone working here, including the folks who own and operate it, we’ll call it a success. Starbucks has to pay the baristas, the store managers, a regional manager, all the way up to the COO & CEO and a bunch of creative types doing all kinds of corporate rethinking. I do believe small businesses have the opportunity to provide better value for this reason alone. (Weighing the economies of scale versus passionate investing and re-investing into a product and an experience you love would warrant another blog post.)
• We have a much easier time connecting personally and directly with our customers. No one’s speech is scripted or otherwise limited by corporate speak.
• Our interior design is conceived by real people for real people; we’re not pursuing a hidden agenda of pushing more product or cutting down on our customers’ “dwell time.”
• We love coffee, and (did I say that already?) we always want to learn more about coffee, even when that means buying a cup of it from one of our competitors.

We study and admire Starbucks for some things we have a harder time getting right:

• Speed of service; few companies have spent as many resources on figuring out the best and most speed-inducing bar setup
• Merchandising and labeling; Starbucks design is often really well done and it’s made to sell
• Location location location; man, all of us indies would die to know the SBUX formula for choosing a successful location.

At the end, all of us Seattle coffee creators know that things would have been very different without Starbucks here. It created a market of people who appreciate making coffee a part of their daily routine and cafes a desirable destination. Face it, Starbucks stores are almost a neighborhood fixture, like public libraries, schools or community centers. Without Starbucks, there would be far fewer coffee places here, and we would probably sell a lot more drip coffee rather than the lucrative tall latte. Without Starbucks, Melissa Allison would probably have to write about airplanes or Microsoft Windows, and I’d be working deep in the belly of a well-known Internet retailer. So thank you Starbucks. You’ve liberated me.

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisdag/, the original resides here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisdag/3398960788/

The construction begins…

Slowly taking shape as the barista bar and counter are pieced together…

Sebastian and Anna, our new roaster…

Molly. Our very first roaster. It’s nice to remember how far we’ve come.

The final touches…

Check back for more photos soon and we hope to see you this Tuesday!

Just like us, Essential is working hard to make a difference in the world. Essential’s basic principles revolve around: 1. Unwavering customer service; 2. Relentless pursuit of quality; 3. Minimizing the environmental impact; 4. Respect for all stakeholders.

I may be mixing up our experience with the company’s stated vision. Let it be said though that all of us coffee people came away deeply impressed after seeing the operations behind the flawless service we receive, 362 days a year.

We found some things especially impressive. Essential operates around the clock. Most baking takes place at night, 24 trucks deliver the goods in the wee hours of the morning. So many things can go wrong: a driver might not show up, a vehicle might break down, an oven might need maintenance, a flour delivery might not have happened, and the list goes on and on. Of course large industrial operations face these kinds of challenges all the time; but for a relatively small business like Essential to deal with and successfully overcome all of these potential issues is truly impressive.

Photo: At the end of our tour, we posed with Essential’s founder and head baker George DePasquale (far right.)
Photo Credit: Polina Notik, our indefatiguable summer intern, who loves using the self timer on her new camera (Polina jumped into the picture next to George.)