Soft Opening on October 11, 2008

Here are some photos from our soft opening. Business is going great and we are thankful for the great customers that keep pouring through the door. We particularly enjoyed the espresso showdown with the coffee meetup group pitting the 35th Ave Espresso, Nectar Espresso, and Brazil Jacaranda shots against each other.

Kuma Coffee Cafe

Kuma Coffee is proud to announce the opening of our first retail store front. We just got a location at 4110 Stone Way N. in between Fremont and Wallingford. We are going to be opening October 13th. In celebration of our next step within the world of specialty coffee we will be offering $1 drinks and $2 pastries all day long on our opening day. The store boasts bottomless portafilters, a wide variety of fresh roasted coffees for brewing and for whole bean sales, high-end loose leaf teas, a brew station and organic and fair trade offerings. Please join come in and say hello to me or one of my staff. We are eager to share our love of coffee and our desire to roast and brew some of the best coffee you've ever tasted. I guarantee.

Mark

Coffee Fest Weekend

Hello Kuma Coffee Crowd,

CoffeeFest was this weekend and was a whole lot of fun! This year some of the standout exhibits were Cafe Vita serving "Kopi Luwak" through a slow drip, cold brew, science experiment type beaker, visiting Synesso and seeing their new 3-group, 3 pumps, 3 invidual group boilers and seeing 49th parellel and taking shots of "epic espresso."

This week at the Queen Anne Farmer's Market we are going to be doing a Cup of Excellence blowout. We are going to be sampling and selling three El Salvador Cup of Excellence coffees; #11 Santa Maria, the #18 El Porvenir and the #19 San Isidro and one Costa Rica Cup of Excellence coffee, the #5 Finca Carrizal.

Kuma Coffee can now be found at Ken's Market in Quenn Anne. We deliver twice a week for the freshest coffee in Seattle.

Always Improving

Hello Kuma Coffee Fan Club,

I have just a few quick announcements.
Announcement #1: Starting today our coffee can be purchased at the Magnolia Thriftway.
Announcement #2: I have secured a limited amount of Brazil Organic Jacaranda for those single origin espresso lovers out there. It is chocolaty, floral, big body, and glorious fruit. I will have some available at the Queen Anne farmers market this week.
Announcement #3: One of the brazils in the 35th Ave Espresso Blend has been changed to give a bigger, sweeter more chocolaty body. And it's delicious!
Announcement #4: If you missed the Ethiopia Sidamo Koratie - Dry Processed coffee....we ran out last week. The good news is that I ordered in a very limited amount that I will be running as a special at the Queen Anne Farmers market starting August 28th. I had to go through a reseller to get my hands on more of this amazing coffee, so the price on my supply is going to be a little bit higher. Cupping notes on the coffee: peaches and cream, blueberries, mango, sweet aromatic cup. This makes excellent french presses and great single origin espresso.

Rollin'

I have been very bad at keeping my blog up to date. I have given myself 30 lashes and promise it won't happen again. (fingers crossed). With that out of the way, let's talk about the direction that Kuma Coffee has taken.

Since we opened around a month and a half ago we have gone up to about 32lbs a week of production. We are negotiating a contract with Thriftway that should add another 20-25lbs a week of production. That will be 50+ lbs of production per week within the first 2 months! Look for Kuma Coffee in the Magnolia Thriftway by the end of August, maybe sooner.

The Queen Anne Farmers market has been treating us well. We have a core group of eclectic coffee connoisseurs that frequent the market and understand the kind of devotion and attention we put into sourcing and roasting our coffee. We hope that the clientele that supports us within the market will begin to realize that they can get their coffee roasted fresh every week at the market instead of making it an impulse buy at the grocery store.

Kuma Coffee has been Fair Trade certified for a few months, but has finally got some fair trade coffee for roasting. Our first two Fair Trade coffees hopefully amongst many more to come are our Sumatra Gayo Highlands FTO and our "El Dozo" Decaf Blend FTO (which makes a mean decaf espresso and works great as drip).

Our 35th Ave Espresso blend has been really popular among the underground coffee crowd. The blend consists of two brazil varieties, el salvador, ethiopian, sumatran and colombian coffee and has a great chocolate covered cherry flavor with caramel undertones wrapped up in a sweet, thick, syrupy body.

We're in Business!

I haven't shared anything on my blog for a couple months and there is a valid reason. Mainly I have been finishing my Masters of Science in Information Systems Management and secondarily I was running out of options for how I was going to roast out of the third floor of our home. With that said, on to the great news.

I graduated a couple of weeks ago and I have started to have more free time back in my life. I have used that free time to get my roaster setup. Within the last two weeks I completely cleaned and pressure washed my garage, moved the roaster down three stories back into the garage, purchased additional shop equipment such as various sizes of bags, purchased multiple containers to hold green beans to maintain freshness and humidity levels, installed new outlets for power around my roasting shop, put in a new work table, but most importantly I have my Diedrich IR-3's venting and gas hooked up and my sweet red bundle of hot roasting goodness is producing some of the finest fresh roasted coffee in Seattle.

The whole process started out with seasoning the drum. I purchased 30lbs of leftover (past years) green beans at a greatly reduced price from Atlas Coffee. They probably should have been free since I suspect they will be getting a lot more business from me in the future. Oh well. The next step was loading the drum with about 3.3lbs of coffee and taking it to Vienna roast so that the beans get nice and oily and coat the entire drum with nice oils. The seasoning process is a great opportunity to get to know the roaster without worrying about performing all of right air flow and gas flow operations at exactly the right times and you don't have to worry about getting the right consistency since you are throwing away all of the beans anyways.

After eight batches of oily goodness the drum was seasoned and I was ready to try my hand at my first roast for consumption batch of coffee. I decided the I would go with my 35th Ave Espresso blend since I knew exactly how deep I liked to take the blend. Sixteen minutes later and about 10 seconds in to second crack a nice full city roast with just a couple splotches of oil came pouring down into the agitator. It looks beautiful and the roast is so even! I will try and take pictures of the machine and the process over the next couple days and maybe I can even post a video or two on Youtube of the roaster in action.

Thanks for everyone's support!
Look for more news soon!

April Update

We are getting closer and closer to the June 14th launch date.
The roaster duct work should be installed within the next two weeks.
I am starting to rethink running the roaster on propane and am starting to look at how much it would cost to get our natural gas line run up to the machine.
I have a guy named Terry, a seasoned coffee roaster venting guy working on the logistics.
He has done plenty of commerical installation jobs and just recently finished doing some vent and afterburner work for stumptown's Seattle roasting shop in capital hill. He has also done work for Atlas Importers in Ballard and Victrola roasters downtown.
In the mean time I have been doing a lot of blending. I have been mostly been working on espresso blends and have one in particular that I am pleased with. I will continue to work on my espresso blending over the next month. I expect to go through at least 20 to 30 sample blends until I get everything just right. I also hope to be introducing some new coffees to my repitoire this month. I hope to get some costa rican, some fair trade organic sumatra, some fair trade ethiopian yirgacheffe, maybe some guatemalan coffee and introduce a few new blends.
The other addition to Kuma Coffee is a new dual boiler La Spaziale Vivaldi Mini II from Chris Coffee that's paired with a Mazzer Super Jolly that I found on Ebay brand new for $280. I have to say that this setup is a dream and I could fully reccomend both the espresso machine and the grinder to anyone. I will relay more of my experience with my new espresso equipment in my next post.