Facility Blend Hot on Sale

Facility Blend

Roasted to produce a solid “house espresso”, with distinct chocolate and darker fruit notes, an all-rounder suitable for milk, alt-milk and black coffees. Coffees seasonally sourced to ensure consistent core flavours year round.

Brew Guide:

Best Brewed with: Espresso, Moka Pot, French Press

Best rested: Ideally, atleast 1-2 weeks before brewing as espresso

We profile and quality control this blend to produce a solid shot around 18g of coffee in for 38g coffee out, in 30 seconds – easy peasy. Works great in a french press or Moka Pot too!

We’re tasting: Milk Chocolate, Jaffa Cake, Walnut, Nougat, Dried Apricot
In milk: Butterscotch, hints Terry’s choc orange

Traceability (Blend Version: 6)

The Story:

Facility Blend was born out of our intention to create the espresso blend that we always wanted. A daily driver, consistently good, easy to use, suitable as much for a busy espresso-bar as it is for the humble french press at home. 

As much as we drive the concept of functionality and reliability through the Facility Blend, it also weaves in our key principle of facilitating connections. Coffee can play such a wonderful structural and connective part of our lives – the pick me up in the morning, the back-drop to a meeting or catch-up with friends, the interaction with your favourite barista (or the barista with their favourite regular). And for us, it allows us to connect with the farmers, exporters and importers who make it all possible. Through the Facility Blend we hope to weave all these concepts together into a delicious, easy drinking, dependable (but never boring!) house coffee, our flagship.

Often, the coffees selected for a blend represent the largest volume lots in terms of a farmer’s production, and the largest purchases in terms of a roastery’s coffee position. What we select for our blend components is perhaps one of the most meaningful choices a roastery can make, though it’s not often given as much fanfare as perhaps the latest and greatest microlot or experimental process release.

Version 6:

In an autumn refresh, we’ve pulled a claaaassic ratio out of the hat as we prepare for our winter component arrivals. We had slightly more Brazil to hand relative to our forecast, so we’ve worked with import partners Osito to find a punchy, high-quality component that will both compliment the Espírito Santo blend and also stand up at a lower ratio. 75% Brazil to 25% Ethiopia might be the oldest blend in the book, but we’ve constructed this with care and intention while this season of Brazil is still fresh.

The first component is from the region of Espírito Santo in Brazil. This region, close to the south east coast, has a fairly unique combination for Brazilian coffee: namely hilly, steep terrain, a cool and humid climate from the nearby Atlantic coast, and smallholder farmers (typically less than 20 HA farms) hand picking coffees. This produces a distinctive cup profile, from exceptionally clean & complex microlots to the sweet, clean regional blend from Nater Co-op (née COOPEAVI – they have rebranded) we’ve chosen as a continued base note for Facility V4 with a second drop of 23/24 harvest coffee. This fresh crop lot is a blend personally constructed by Osito legend Stuart Ritson, and we find sweet demerara and walnut aromatics as well sweet praline, grape and cooked plum notes in the cup that really stand out as a step above the typical pulp-natural/semi-washed profile from Brazil. We contracted a larger amount on arrival of this second lot as buffer to see us through turbulence in the coffee futures market, which influences speciality pricing, which has been mainly driven by speculative trading and spiking commodity prices in Robusta, Cacao, and the wider commodity markets in general – this larger commitment of coffee ensures our blend pricing should remain robustly stable through the future months.

Holding the fort and adding complexity and top note sweetness, we selected a banger of a grade 1 Ethiopia – a honey lot no less – from Mike Mamo’s Telila washing station. We’ve been itching to find a way to get some of Mike’s coffee in the rotation for a while – after cupping in his lab in Addis Abada in 2019 – and this lot made up from smallholders in the Genji Challa kebele more than fit the bill. Punchy, bright and complex, something we’d have absolutely fit in the single origin range – even at 25% by committing to a blend size allocation we’re about to buy about 6x as much as we would have otherwise. Heaps of stonefruit, orange and milk tea sweetness that when developed for espresso adds that perfect oomph

We expect this version to run through to mid to late November. 

Each lot is roasted separately with a unique profile to combine in the blend as a delicious, balanced & functional espresso, the house espresso we always wanted.