Interval Espresso

Brew Guide:

Best Brewed with: Espresso, Moka Pot, French Press

Heavy Roaster Influence: For interval roasts, we apply a heavy hand with the roaster - deliberately extending every phase of the roast so that we're both maximising the sugar browning character we add; but also rounding off any wayward acidity, and very much deliberately tasting the flavours that come from roasting. But never bitter, harsh or disconnectedly smoky.

Best Rested: Ideally at least 1-2 weeks before brewing as espresso

Filter: 62g/L, 94°C when fresh; 92°C when rested

Espresso: 18g/32-36g/25s

We're tasting: Super chocolatey - we're tasting devil's food cake (think fudge & chocolate) with a syrupy body. In the finish there's a little dried fruit and hint of process character that reminds us of sherry soaked raisins, but the overall character is rich and low acid.

Traceability

The Story

We've talked before about the trilemma of green buying: out of cheap, ethical, high quality, you can only pick two. With this range we want to focus on coffees that are affordable for a mainline espresso and put ethics front and centre, without holding them to the same quality bar that defines the rest of the range.

It's always been a bug-bear of ours that speciality roasters will champion impact and social good, then only sweep in for 2 bags of the top microlot while leaving bulk production to the side, literally skimming the cream of the crop. We've been guilty of this at times since we started, and this espresso offers us the chance to make some amends.

We'll be focusing our sourcing on farms completing excellent ecological projects (regenerative agriculture, native forest protection and similar endeavours), alongside impact projects, and buying the bulk production from producers in our network, which is where we can really move the dial. What we're doing here is shifting our emphasis towards the extrinsic value of a coffee, the attributes that exist around it: who grew it, how the land is managed, and what it represents, rather than chasing intrinsic cup quality as the sole measure of what makes a coffee worth buying. To satisfy the trilemma, we're nominally trading quality for ethics, but by leaning into the additive flavours of a heavier roaster influence we can create a final outcome with a quality of its own, letting us buy deeper into the production of the farms with whom we work rather than just the top lots.

Brilliant for milk, easier to extract, and a safe choice for those who want a syrupy bodied, low acidity, more traditional espresso.

We intend this to broadly be a single origin coffee, but future versions may also be blended.

Version 3:

When importers purchase coffee for "spot" (coffee that is available off the shelf, at the warehouse, to be bought at your leisure - much in the same way as you might purchase roasted coffee from this very platform) - they take on a risk that that coffee may not sell. The producers have been paid prior to export (in most cases! there are terrible exceptions to this) so the risk sits entirely on the importer that if a lot does not move, it will sit in a warehouse, racking up storage rent and financing fees, and eventually the season will move past it. This risk factors into the price - spot coffee is the most expensive option because you pay for that risk. But small indie importers, especially those that are origin based/more exporter than importer - even with the prices factored in, the oft do not have the same deep pockets for risk and commercial channels to clear exposure that a gigantic multinational has, and often face much steeper rates for finance compared. It may be that having coffee on spot for too long can represent an existential risk; and a coffee that did not sell - and it could be for no fault of its own other than not enough of the right people even saw samples of it! represents a lower chance that that producers coffee get bought the next year - after all, it becomes a risky gambit.

With this latest Interval, we're helping Chacra coffee - a tiny, farm driven vertically integrated exporter/importer out of Peru clear some of their UK position. Fredis Rodríguez farms coffee in a region with extreme poverty; and was previously growing corn and maize with limited profits. Since moving to growing coffee as a cash crop, he has seen a significant improvement in income and support for his family, and it's indicative of the impact coffee can have - as a crop that can be dried and shipped for international export /relatively/ easily (compared to those that might need reefer containers, let's say), carrying value above and beyond fungible crops, it is capable of bringing measurable changes to peoples livelihoods in lower development areas that are suitable for growing it.

We think it's very, very easy at this point for a roaster to veer into a saviour narrative; so we should be very clear: Chacra have put in the hard yards finding and supporting producers in these extremely rural parts of Peru, and paid the maximum farmgate price and took the risk on to bring it to the UK - they are the one who is creating the impact. We're taking up a small part of that ensuring there was a buyer on the other end, because we think this coffee was delicious and perfect for the brief.