Choosing Our New House Espresso

We’ve been loyal to our beloved Colombian house coffee Café Granja La Esperanza for 3 years now, so when we found out there’d be no UK import of this lot this year it’s fair to say we went through the 5 stages of grief. Once we’d reached acceptance, the prospect of a new house espresso started sounding pretty exciting.

We couldn’t have done the last 3 years without our pal Adam at Northside Coffee Roasters, and we couldn’t turn to anyone else to hunt down our new beans.
Our big asks were:

- Something that would taste amazing in a double espresso and a large latte with syrup: special without milk, but robust enough to shine through in milky drinks. 
- A similar chocolatey, nutty and lightly acidic flavour profile that has kept our customers coming back for more.

With this in mind, Adam picked out a bunch of Colombian lots for us to taste as a team in a cupping session.

This process allows the pure properties of the coffee to stand out, in order to pick out the body, sweetness, and acidity desired. It is also often done blind, using a standardised process that removes any biases and lets the cupper focus on flavour alone. 

We sniffed and slurped our way to two favourites which stood out for being both crowd-pleasing but a little bit interesting. 

It's difficult to tell from cupping alone how a coffee will taste as espresso and especially how they'll handle mixing with milk, so Adam took both and roasted them to perfection for us to try in the shop. 

While we loved both in pure espresso form, we felt that the body of El Eden stood up better in larger milky drinks and was a close match for everything we loved about Cafe Granja.

The farms that make up El Eden’s community blend are all located in Armenia, Quindio just 35km from the La Esperanza farm in Caicedonia, so the two share many similarities.

With our beans selected, we had a bit of a secret trial in the shop, testing the beans out on our regulars to get some feedback on how El Eden performed in their favourite drinks. 

After 1 month of El Eden in the hopper, we couldn't be happier with our new house coffee beans. You can try them on the counter at LOCAL now, or shop them for your home espresso machine here (we've heard they make a pretty tasty filter too!).