Rounton Coffee | Blog

30/04/2020
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Nightingale Coffee – Our Pledge To The NHS

Over the last few weeks, we have been doing our best to keep local NHS services well-caffeinated. Given the circumstances they find themselves in, a good cup of coffee is the very least we can do for them. Back in March, before we entered lockdown, we pledged to give free coffee to NHS staff, from our two shops in Middlesbrough. With the support of Drew Rowley of React Nutrition, we had the equivalent of 500 coffees behind the bars.  Unfortunately, we didn’t get the chance to give all of these... Read More

T&Cs – Essential Home Brewing Kit Giveaway

There is 1 prize of 1 “Essential Home Brewing Kit”, including delivery. Open to UK residents aged 16 and over, excluding employees of Rounton Coffee Roasters. Closing date for entries is 11.59 pm GMT on Saturday 23rd May 2020. Only one entry per social media platform per person. Entrants via Instagram must ‘follow’ @rountoncoffeeroasters, like the giveaway post, and comment with a mention to another Instagram user. Entrants via Facebook must ‘like’ the Rounton Coffee Roasters page, and ‘share’ the giveaway post. The winner will be chosen at random. The... Read More

01/08/2019
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Why Do We Cup Coffees?

What is Coffee Cupping? Cup tasting (a.k.a cupping) is the process of objectively assessing the quality of coffee samples. If you’ve seen anyone with what looks like a soup spoon, slurping loudly at a table full of coffees, they’ll have been cupping! Coffees are scored according to Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) protocol using this sheet, and the resulting total gives us an indication of the quality of the coffee – anything scoring 80+ being classed as specialty grade. This protocol gives us a shared language to use when talking to... Read More

04/07/2019
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Fresh is Best (or is it)?

The Life Of A Roasted Coffee Bean Coffee goes on a long journey before we get our hands on it as roasters. If you’ve read our ‘From Origin To Cup’ series, you’ll know all about the years of care and attention it takes to get the most out of a coffee plant, but it doesn’t end there!   When it flies out of the mouth of the roaster, coffee still has a lot of life left in it. As coffee roasts, it lets off gas (mainly carbon dioxide), and this... Read More

21/06/2019
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Our New Roaster

Why Do We Need A New Roaster? Every journey has its first steps, and for us, that took the form of some pretty humble beginnings. After spending time in Sumatra and deciding to take the plunge into the world of coffee upon returning home, Rounton Coffee Roasters was born – but we had nothing to roast coffee with! We started out by buying a 10kg drum roaster from Toper, imported from Turkey. In our infancy, the roaster would be turned on once a week, and we would roast a handful... Read More

13/06/2019
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World Of Coffee ’19 – Our Thoughts

We’ve just returned home after a great trip out to Berlin, for the annual World of Coffee (WoC) – one of the biggest events in the international coffee calendar. We’ve visited WoC before, and having learned so much in Amsterdam in 2018, we decided that this year we’d learn a lot if the whole team took the trip to Berlin, to see what’s new in the coffee industry. Our goals were simple: meet as many people as we could (roasters, importers, farmers, famous coffee folk), and learn as much as... Read More

05/04/2019
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Arabica vs Robusta – The Clash of the Coffees

You’ll have seen it everywhere – from supermarket shelves to fast food outlets; from high street coffee chains to the most niche speciality coffee houses – ‘100% Arabica’ seems to be something that everyone boasts about. But what does it actually mean? We want to go one step further than just saying we use 100% Arabica coffees, and explain the background behind the claim: what that guarantees to you as a consumer, and what the alternatives are. First things first, a little science lesson… A quick delve into our biology... Read More

07/03/2019
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Introducing… Tomas Keavney

Name and Occupation Tom Keavney – Training & Marketing If I’m not roasting, I’m out and about catching up with the people we supply with coffee, running our Barista Skills Course. I like to share as much as I can about how we source our coffee, how we roast it, and how to make it taste delicious. You can also find me writing all sorts of stuff – whether that’s keeping the Rounton Coffee social media accounts up to date with what we’re getting up to, writing blogs for our... Read More