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:
Fruitcake, rooibos, biscoff, dates, nut brittle, chocolate dipped dried blood orange, syrupy bodied with a balanced acidity
In milk: Sticky toffee pudding, orange zest, vanilla

Traceability (Blend Version: 11)

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 11:

Bit delayed on updating the website AGAIN - sorry this slipped the net - We swapped at the end of Facility V10 (in version 10.5) to "Poços de Caldas" - a regional blend of 6 farms in Minas Gerais, built by Osito with their export partners Bourbon coffee. It's a really, really classic Brazil blender lot - think toasted hazelnut, peanut brittle, dried fruits, dark chocolate.

Combining with this and bringing us to 100% Osito sourcing we have a fresh crop washed G2 Ethiopian from Haider Abamecha's Kebena estate in Jimma. It's a relatively large farm and what really attracted us to use this as a Facility component is the restrained acidity we found in this lot - heaps of body, dried citrus, black tea and butterscotch, as opposed to a screaming lemon floral bomb that would be out of key with the sourcing ideology (we'd rather buy lower acid lots and roast lighter, as opposed to vice versa). 

Ethiopia:Brazil is such a classic pairing as to be almost cliché - it's the PB&J of coffee blends, really. But there's a reason it's so successful - the combination of these two coffees is definitively more than the sum of its parts, creating a balanced pairing that has more character and definition whilst holding heaps of sweetness and cutting through milk without needing super heavy influence in the roaster.

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.