Fresh Cup Magazine, providing specialty coffee and tea professionals with unique insight into the trends, ideas, products and people that shape their world.
Issue link: http://freshcup.epubxp.com/i/123507
naturals, I came up with our East Coast Espresso. The West Coast is lighter in body, tending to bring notes of caramel and toffee. When it's completely cool—especially in an Americano—it tastes like caramel and fruit juice. When the East Coast is cooled completely as an Americano, it tastes like lukewarm hot chocolate. Though the blends are named for regions, we don't distribute them strictly in the areas for which they're named. Our East Cost blend is on rotation at the three-location Portland shop Barista, while several of our Miami accounts serve our West Coast blend. The East Coast-West Coast roast wasn't a marketing ploy for Panther Coffee, but rather an experiment in taste. The two blends are meant to generate conversations about flavor, which is always an interesting topic to me. Of course the coffees used for the blends will vary depending on what we find on the cupping table and what is needed for balance and clarity. Some coffees are so complete and delicious that they bring forth the desired flavor profile without any blending needed. For example, we've recently changed the West Coast "blend" completely, and it is now made up entirely of a brilliantly balanced and fresh sugarcane-style Rwanda. We've had a lot of fun talking about this project and hearing people's reactions, and those emotions have allowed me to learn even more about the flavor preferences of different folks in different areas. One morning I was talking about the East Coast/ West Coast Espresso to Jeffrey Barone, a good friend who owns a design company called Bonafida and who recently built an amazing outdoor area for our shop. After trying them both, without even taking a breath, the longtime New York resident said exuberantly: "I'm very East Coast." In that instance, our efforts were right on the money, but I'm sure in other cases we haven't been quite so lucky—East Coast palates certainly exist out West and vice versa. Still, as a whole, I think there is a distinction between what consumers are accustomed to and are looking for in different areas. And I think roasters should keep this fact in mind as we craft our coffees and enter new markets. This East Coast/West Coast experiment has also given me a fuller appreciation of all sides of the taste spectrum. I've always been very excited when a crazy-acidic, super-complex 92-point coffee comes my way. But now I'm more attuned to the notable properties of coffees that are more subtle and balanced. And more than anything, delving into the dichotomy of flavors in our two new espressos has encouraged us to be a little more playful with coffee, an attitude our clients have gravitated toward. And as any roaster knows, we wouldn't even be able to get excited about our roast experiments if we didn't have high-quality, carefully prepared green coffee to work with. We're constantly searching for that, and when we find it we're very excited to play with it. With great green coffee as our foundation, we can then go down the rabbit hole of experimentation that leads to fun projects like East Coast/West Coast. freshcup.com May 2013 55