Courier Coffee Roasters

Mason Jar cozies now sold at the bar (pictured below) also here.

Please note this week we deliver retail wholebean coffee to Fat Straw Wednesday, Market of Choice/FoodFight/Dovetail Thursday, and Eastmoreland Market/ Jade Teahouse Friday.

Thursday extended bar hours to receive friend Karen’s work, featured February. Coffee will be available in some form after normal hours. Karen put together a group of artists for our wall last year, and is friends with BT, who did the wooden lettering and signage. Should be pro.

In a second freak occurrence at the Roastery we lost our three bay sink for 24 hours. James and I sweated said sink all afternoon. Our problems later got sawzalled away, and thanks to James the dishroom is the cleanest ever.

resale coffee delivered today to Eastmoreland Market (342g jars qty 8), Jade Teahouse (227g bags qty 4), Food Fight Grocery (227g bags qty 10). Yesterday Market of Choice Burlingame (342g jars qty 6). Our bar received 5.2 pounds total of fresh Peru San Ignacio decembers lot, and still holds Ethiopia Nigussie Lemma dry hulled coffee from the 24th. We can do bags or jars.  Both the Nigussie coffee and San Ignacio delivered to all listed above.

vegan bakery is back at our bar. Peru coffee from the town of San Ignacio is now a new lot, shipped at a different time, and tastes different, yet still awes0me. Those driving on 26 please gather quotes for a 16 foot life size mother bear cut from wood using a chainsaw (or whatever a realistic size would be). Also steel welding friends, quotes needed for  shorter than normal beer tap columns (suitable for double or triple tap columns fitting the SS Perlick tap). Year of the water Dragon is a year to get things done.

Rain flooded our roastery storeroom at the end of last week. This was a little nerveracking. Should we bring coffee to our clients, or save our roastery? The big question of the day was how fast the water was acquiring. It was pouring rain outside, and already we- either wet from biking, or soon to be wet. The wet/ dry vac was a late miracle (we have the hardware brand “shop-vac”, cheap yet it works). Using a wet finger to flip the switch would get us electricuted, but strangely not trip the gfci switches. The entire time our bar served drinks, clients actually received wholebean coffee, and the day came off. We do not often shop Fred Meyer, however their tarps and a staple gun from the Woolen Men served to protect the foundation of our house from further flooding.

Some parts of the roastery are extremely getto- like the gutters. Others, like our roasting equipment, our scales, most of our bike components and tools, and our gorgeous copper bar, are exactly not. A mix of both luxury and frugalness. the stack of notebooks by the door we got at a back to school sale for pennies on the dollar, next to the leftover phil Wood parts perhaps denotes this. There is a method.

Some spring cleaning happened early on this weekend. Now that we have been flooded and dried the basement is cleaner than ever. Monday is New Years for a few different places- Year of the Water Dragon. Happy New Years in advance, and much love.

prototype mason jar cozies, by Michael Parich, available at bar for testing. your feedback is appreciated and will be taken at the bar, perhaps written on a napkin so that your message may be conveyed accurately. They look really cool.

Saturday our bar served as a race checkpoint. Michelle Weeks and Michael Parich (friends of Courier) brought pancakes, where we warmed in the oven. Teams raced to multiple locations from Division to Lombard, having to drink a cup of coffee and eat a stack of pancakes at each stop. Team Sizzle Pie (previously known as Blacklodge Cycling)/ by Veloforma threw this years race (last year it was pizza and beer). The race ended at Apex.

I have to say, having all the bikes and riders at Courier was totally awesome. The first teams to arrive were served Papua New Guinea Kimel estate coffee, after  that it got kind of chaotic and I lost track of what we made next. Coffee was brewed drip pourover in advance and decanted into preheated thermoses, served in warmed cups.

Final Team results:
1st: Grundelbruisers
2nd: Upper Echelon
3rd: Spork/Ryan O’connel and Friends
4th: Trusty Switchblade
5th: Ironclad. Relegation for going to stops out of order
6th: Cthulul. Relegation for skipping stop #4

Bonus Round
1st Anona Whitley
2nd Brandon Sequoia Rothauge

Check out the Sizzle Pie Veloforma blog for more on pancake race

Our delivery bike frame is on its third failure, a slight crack has formed on the top of the seat tube. We discuss this at our next OSHA meeting (serious). Any one brazen enough to purchase wholebean coffee (along a larger route) may not see how much we carry. While a beast to ride, our long john style front loader makes delivering coffee en masse possible, and throwing on that extra 30 pound order ‘almost no trouble at all.’ on top of an already loaded 80 pounds. Lucky for us our bike is made of steel, and we will probably look to one of our friends to work on it shortly.

On the upside Veloshop added new brake rotor, pads, and rebled our hydraulic brake line with mineral oil. Actually, a look into the roastery the other day would have shown that all three of our personal delivery bikes now have front porteur style racks (i bet we could hustle for a few days). James and Alex both with CETMA racks, and Joel’s Sprout Cycles rack.

The photo above shows how beautiful it was this morning, moving coffee through the city. At six AM on the eastside the moon was huge, and then downtown was full of lights. The way we move through the city brings with it a different mindset that we hope carries to all our work.

more energy and love put into what we do in 2012. We are now eight years in to Courier. In this time we have opened one bar, and have grown to seven people. There is a severe amount of focus, heartache, and awesomeness, we feel, in the work. It has been difficult, and wonderful. Thank you for being with us.

We moved from Ethiopia Shoye Cooperative coffee for espresso to Ethiopia Oromia Lekempti. Last night we drank the last espresso from our machine for 2011 before closing up, the Lekempti was really tasty. At our closing SizzlePie officially opened serving Champaign and pizza, so we headed over to celebrate. Our bar has a new neighbor.

Also on the gold plated filter front- our supplier has ceased importing coffee filters from Swissgold. This appears to have happened nine months ago. They have contracted a different factory to make their own filters which from blurry photos do not look promising. We panicked and bought them online at retail pricing in order to assure another couple years of coffee brewing. The reason for the change? The price of gold is increasing and the company importing fears they will not be able to move the filters as a product. Up until recently these had been picked up by Williams and Sonoma as merchandise.