Only the Finest Coffees - Roasted at 7,500' in Salida, Colorado

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COFFEE 101 - Q&A with The Roaster Dudes

Above: Carefully checking the beans during the roasting process. Notice the glow of awesomeness that resonates from our premium quality coffee beans.

Q: Which one’s darker?

A: Oh boy, do we get that one a lot. To make this simple, the answer is somewhat complex. First of all, we have a finishing temperatures of specific roast. A French Roast for instance, is going to finish much higher than a medium roasted Mexican. By the time that French roast comes out of the drum, it is about 80% oil and carbon, which definitely produces a “dark” taste in the cup. But for a true understanding of coffee, lets delve beneath the roast temperatures and look at single origin coffees for there inherent “dark” properties. The Sumatra we roast for instance, finishes at the same final temperature as a Mexican, but produces HUGE amounts of deep, smoky body, compared to the nice acidity of the Mexican.

Q: My coffee is bitter, why?

A: Ah yes, bitterness. Bitterness in a cup is actually one of the easiest things for you to control. The bitterness that you may sometimes taste in a batch of coffee is related to the amount of caffeine that the water is extracting, or “pulling” out of the coffee. Caffeine is an extremely bitter substance, and 90% of the time, when you are experiencing more bitterness than you would like, you can solve this problem by decreasing your grind size. A larger grind size allows all of that great flavor to be extracted with just the right amount of caffeine, instead of to fine a grind, which may lead to the overly bitter cup.

Q: What’s the best way to brew coffee at home?

A: There really is no clear cut answer for this one. Personally, I use a simple insulated French Press. Of course, I spend most of my day around fancy equipment, so I like the romance of a hand-crafted cup. There are some really great home brewers and espresso machines out there, but it would not be fair of me to recommend one over the other, since I have not spent time on all of them. I can tell you this; the quality of the machine is directly related to price. A home espresso machine that coast $600 is going to do much better than the one sitting on a shelf for under $200.

Q: Why does specialty coffee cost more than grocery store brands? Is it all hype?

A: Speciality coffee is indeed more expensive, as specialty roasters like ourselves purchase the absolute best beans we can find and then put a lot of time and energy Into developing a proper roast for them. We then custom roast these batches each and every week. Grocery store coffee can easily have been sitting around for months, and usually consist of extremely low grade coffee. Avoid those large industrial cans of coffee like the plague; The coffee is under roasted, sour, and stale. As far as the bulk bins of “specialty” coffee in stores, it can be a hit or miss. The most important thing is to know your grocer, and ask them where they get their coffee from, how often it is roasted, and how long they leave it in the bins. Example: I would never buy bulk coffee from one of the big box stores, I can barely look at it, but Mountain Phoenix is a featured coffee at Curt’s Organic grocery in Crestone, where we work in a relationship with the buying managers to insure no coffee is more than three weeks old, (the age limit of “fresh” coffee).

Q: What’s the best coffee in the world?

A: Oh man, I know this is going to sound so corny, but the best coffee in the world is really whatever YOU think the best coffee is. There are so many different types of origins, blends, and roast styles in this world, there just is no way to say one particular coffee is the holy-grail. At Mountain Phoenix , what we do is gather what are the best crops available at that particular time in the marketplace, and roast them to bring out the best flavor possible. All regions display different traits; From the intense blueberry finish of a dry-processed Ethiopian Harar, to the ultra rich body of a Sumatra, to the beautiful floral, acidity of Central Americans. Each coffee is a unique experience in the history, landscape, flavors and geography of the coffee producing regions.

Q: I have a movie I just got from Net-Flix and really want to watch it tonight but it’s scratched! What should I do?

A: Unless you have been completely plugged into the matrix, you probably have some car wax laying around the house. What you need to do is rub a thin layer on the CD, let dry, and clean off. Repeat this twice. As long as the scratches weren’t to bad, the car wax has now successfully filled in the scratched surface, allowing your DVD eye to read the material. How do I know this? I’m a coffee roaster…