Courier Coffee Roasters

Three hours sleep was hardly enough. Old Dominion Freight has closed out our shipment of coffee, for delivery today. Sometime today their semi-truck will arrive.

Alex is biking the Monday run of downtown deliveries, with only his front porteur rack, made by Paul Conte. More on that later.

We received a modified Anfim Super Caimino espresso grinder Friday. Alex biked this to LRBC Saturday morning to use as he covered bar for Tyler of LRBC. Sunday afternoon the grinder was transported to CoffeeHouseNW so they could get a look. The Anfim has an Omron timer, adjustable within a hundredth of a second (.01sec), titanium coated 75mm flat burrs, cool actuater buttons, and a continuous cooling fan. Review soon.

My hope is we get to roast the new coffee arriving today.

New coffee arriving at the start of next week for CCR. When it arrives we will update our offering list, which will appear as a new entry here.

This morning we added a new scale to our workshop, courtesy of A1-Scale on 23rd and Raleigh. They have a nice little showroom of scales. We like them because their business is mostly recalibration and refurbishing, and so they know what they sell from the inside out. We purchased an Ohaus Cent-O-Gram 311g balance scale, accurate to 100th of a gram (thats right, a hundreth!). This thing is totally sick, but please do not expect us to bike it to your establishment and weigh samples. Well, we totally would, but scales are pretty delicate.

This scale is a cool addition so that we may weigh very small amounts of coffee accurately. Last week Ray, formerly of Little Red Bike Cafe, came over and we had a discussion about stirring vs. no stir technique of french pressing coffee (we do not stir). We weighed out equal amounts of coffee and did two presses of coffee, lamenting the quality of our Soehnle kitchen scale (+/- 1 gram). Ray stirred, and we did not. Then we pressed, poured cups for ourselves, while straining a third cup out with a chemex paper filter, to check the amount of sediment in the cup. Ray’s stirring provided more fines in the cup (and more flavor!), while our no-stir made for a much cleaner cup, but without as much depth. Ray stirs gently, 40 seconds after the coffees contact with water, fine particles drop to the bottom. At the coffees pressing the absence of these fines allow more to move through the screen, any fine dust suspended makes its way through easier. I think we still have more to play with. We did have a small gram scale, but it did not like rechargeable batteries, nor could it be plugged into a power source with ease.

The scale is also precursor to a more interesting look of two commercial espresso grinders. Today we have shipping to us a custom Anfim Super Caimino grinder, altered to provide a lower burr rotation, with timer, with fan. We will be comparing this to the Robur 110v grinder w timer (both super nice commerical espresso grinders). Also we will be looking at the amount of grams we are dosing with our LSM espresso machine. For a short while we had a Robur with fractional second timer installed, however we never got close to using it with our LSM Leva machine. ..

Alex Geddes of Courier has been roasting more. If you enjoyed our coffee this weekend, chances are the batches were roasted by him. Alex is the only full time employee of CCR. Matt Sperry is doing one day a week, his other job being a medical intern. Yes, we certainly have variation from batch to batch. Our roasting notes may be almost identical but yet batches have their differences.

So the kid you see biking around especially Monday and Tuesday, working downtown and deep North Portland is also playing a vital role in developing awesome coffee.

Much love to our coffee friends, thank you for making the many espressos that we sometimes take for granted. Biking coffee around town, that we roast, is a dream.