Facility Blend

Brew Guide:

Best Brewed with: Espresso, Moka Pot, French Press

Best rested: Ideally, atleast 1-2 weeks before brewing as espresso

We profile and quality control this blend to produce a solid shot around 18g of coffee in for 38g coffee out, in 30 seconds - easy peasy. Works great in a french press or Moka Pot too!

We're tasting: Dark Chocolate, Fudge, Berry Compote, Hazelnut, Dried Apricot. Kinda Sachertorte vibes?
In milk: Salted Caramel, fruit & nut bar

Traceability (Blend Version: 7)

The Story:

Facility Blend was born out of our intention to create the espresso blend that we always wanted. A daily driver, consistently good, easy to use, suitable as much for a busy espresso-bar as it is for the humble french press at home. 

As much as we drive the concept of functionality and reliability through the Facility Blend, it also weaves in our key principle of facilitating connections. Coffee can play such a wonderful structural and connective part of our lives - the pick me up in the morning, the back-drop to a meeting or catch-up with friends, the interaction with your favourite barista (or the barista with their favourite regular). And for us, it allows us to connect with the farmers, exporters and importers who make it all possible. Through the Facility Blend we hope to weave all these concepts together into a delicious, easy drinking, dependable (but never boring!) house coffee, our flagship.

Often, the coffees selected for a blend represent the largest volume lots in terms of a farmer’s production, and the largest purchases in terms of a roastery’s coffee position. What we select for our blend components is perhaps one of the most meaningful choices a roastery can make, though it’s not often given as much fanfare as perhaps the latest and greatest microlot or experimental process release.

Version 7:

Our winter version of Facility, we've selected a regional field blend from Huila, via our good friends at Primavera to compliment a natty Yirg that needed a home from Nordic.
Rounding out the final few pallets of coffee from Nater Co-op as our fresh crop brazils make their way across the sea, this blend of thirds is a refresh and truly hits the bag flavour guide - Milk Choc, Dark Fruits & Sweet.

The first component is from the region of Espírito Santo in Brazil. This region, close to the south east coast, has a fairly unique combination for Brazilian coffee: namely hilly, steep terrain, a cool and humid climate from the nearby Atlantic coast, and smallholder farmers (typically less than 20 HA farms) hand picking coffees. This produces a distinctive cup profile, from exceptionally clean & complex microlots to the sweet, clean regional blend from Nater Co-op (née COOPEAVI - they have rebranded) we’ve chosen as a continued base note for Facility from the day we launched. We contracted a larger amount on of the second lot of 23/24 crop as buffer to see us through turbulence in the coffee futures market. With prices now set to stay solidly high, we're awaiting fresh Brazil. Unlike more aggressively sun-dried coffees from regions like Minas, coffee from Espírito Santo holds up a lot longer - slower cherry maturation and more intentional drying (typically with parabolic solar drying tents / raised beds) is our pocket theory as to why, and one of the reasons we so dearly love this region.

In a lot that couldn't be more of the platonic ideal of dark fruits, we've got a large allocation of G1 sorted natural from the Ajere station in Yirgacheffe. This lot landed below filter grade, but more than capable of adding excellent heft and fruit at a more developed roast style - so our ability to blend it means the incredibly hard work that went into picking and sorting for G1 (the best) level of defect count is still enumerated, and the coffee gets a good home. We're loving the cupping & espresso QC on this one.

Finally, a regional Colombian field blend, akin to the Familia Primavera house filter - this time created through the careful laying of outturns from 70 smallholder farmers in the Tesalia and Teruel municipalities. This lot is all classic comfort flavours - we find hazelnut, apple and caramel. 

We expect this version to run through to Febuary, when our fresh brazil lands

Each lot is roasted separately with a unique profile to combine in the blend as a delicious, balanced & functional espresso, the house espresso we always wanted.