Category

Coffee

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

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

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

11/02/2019
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From Origin To Cup – Roasting

At the heart of what we do, we take raw, green coffee beans, and roast them. But what does it mean to take a hessian sack full of beans and transform them into something delicious? There’s something unassuming about a green bean – it doesn’t have the same standout aroma as a roasted one, and to chew on one would be nothing short of disappointing – vegetal and grassy. The magic, of course, is in the roast.  In the simplest possible terms, the roaster is where the green beans are... Read More

04/02/2019
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It’s A Bit Like Wine: Coffee From Around The World

Historically, it has been all too simple to think of coffee as just a thing that you find in a bag on a shelf in a supermarket. It has been there to serve the purpose of keeping us caffeinated, and aside from how strong we want it to be, there haven’t been that many other factors to consider when choosing what to brew at home. In more recent years, people have been paying more attention to the descriptors that are attached to the coffee they are buying. Whether that’s picking... Read More

03/01/2019
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From Origin To Cup – Processing Coffee

Cherries make a pretty sweet treat – finding the ripest, sweetest fruits in summer, and chewing away at the luscious juicy pulp and skins as we enjoy the sweet, rich flavours, before spitting out the stone at the centre of the fruit.  This stone – or seed – to be precise, might be considered an inconvenience to our enjoyment of those delicious cherries!  With coffee cherries, it’s the exact opposite. In this case, the treasure is the two seeds at the heart of the fruit, the rest of which has... Read More

01/12/2018
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Why become a Q grader?

By David Burton Any serious coffee professional will tell you that objectively assessing coffee quality is probably one of the most difficult things to do. This is because no matter how hard we try, we will always let our own bias get the better of us, especially when it comes to something as subjective as flavour. Come New Year, I’ll be into my fifth year in coffee, and leaving my own bias at the door is still something I have to keep in check (however, I still love a bloody... Read More

16/11/2018
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From Origin To Cup – How Coffee Grows

As Rounton Coffee Roasters nears its 5th birthday, we’ve decided that rather than telling you the story of the last five amazing years, it might be much more useful and interesting to run a series of blogs which will tell the bigger story – Coffee – From Origin to Cup. These are blogs that we wanted to write in our infancy, but at that stage, we didn’t feel that we had enough experience to speak with any authority on such topics. These days, we’re still trying to learn as much... Read More