ALL ABOUT OUR COFFEE

Freshness

While many factors contribute to a delicious brew, a major non-negotiable factor is freshness. Like a fleeting glint, the freshness of coffee disappears quickly. Therefore we believe that coffee beans are best consumed within 3 weeks of roasting and ground just before brewing.

Roast to Order

Here at Coffee Alchemy we roast the coffee on demand. Only when you have put your order through do we fire up the roaster. The evidence is on your bag of beans where we stamp the roast date, and in the beans themselves - languor in the aroma and cherish each sip - you won't get such a spectrum of nuances in inferior quality beans roasted many moons ago.

Roasting

Roasting coffee isn't a mere matter of putting green beans into the roaster and taking them out when they're brown. Green beans vary in density and moisture content and therefore develop differently in the roasting process. Furthermore, single-origin coffees often have their own quirks and reveal their full goodness only when roasted in particular ways. Is it a craft? Or is it art? For us, roasting is both. We can only manifest the essence of beans through the precise and disciplined approach prescribed by a craft.

Blending

One could easily conjure an image of the blender, akin to a cook, saying, "a little of this and a pinch of that...voila!" Not so. Blending may start with a grand vision but it is realised through the painstaking and time-consuming process of coming up with the right roast level for each component bean, the right proportion of each bean, cupping the blend for consistency, cupping it for the particular brewing method it was designed for, cupping, cupping and more cupping. Like a piece of poetry, a blend is always likely to become organic, developing its own life and evolution, straying a little or a lot from its initial designs. And, like poetry, a blend is never finished, only abandoned.

Specialty Coffee

Beans that are stellar in the cup, displaying qualities true to their origins, or perhaps deviant in delicious ways, often fall under the specialty coffee category. These coffees are meticulously prepared with the least amount of defects, of the highest grade, and estate produced. But often too, the best-tasting coffees come without estate and other fancy appellations.