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: Nutella, fruit & nut bar, dried peel, dulce du leche, red plum, brown spice
In milk: Sweet butterscotch, hazelnut, milk choc

Traceability (Blend Version: 8)

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 8:

We missed updating for version 7.5; but here's the scoop on the current Facility:
We've been running a lovely Brazilian peaberry from producer Patricia Coelho; a cover lot bought from the folks at Bossa coffee whilst we wait out a delayed shipment of our pre-booked Brazil. We selected this lot because it had a pretty intense sweetness, the classic hazelnut & cocoa of Brazil but refined and moreish.

Returning for a second harvest, we have the Gito project from Raw Material (Gito means small in Kinyarwanda). Traditionally, smaller screen sizes (smaller beans) would have been discarded as lower grade coffees and not sold for export from Rwanda. A project from Raw Material saw that actually there was a lot of quality at these smaller bean sizes, and that with extra optical milling, a field blend of all small beans could be created to return speciality pricing over internal commercial sales. Suffice to say, it's delicious, representing the outturns of 3 excellent Muraho trading company washing stations as one field blend. And due to the small screen size, is also made up of lots of peaberries!

Finally, a regional Colombian field blend, akin to the Familia Primavera house filter we ran last year - 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, and we're finishing the final few sacks at 50% of the blend, whilst it's still fresh and tasty.

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.