Selected Best of Pittsburgh 2008
When you work in a business long enough, you know what it is and what it is not. Each time you make a change to the business it either feels good or it doesn’t. Each step is an evolution of sorts, a further refinement of what you believe the business should ultimately be. You begin to really focus on details that you couldn’t see before. I give you our new menu…
It feels good.
As promised- the new Direct Trade Panama is here!
We were so excited we cut a bag open before we were even done receiving today’s shipment. Initial thoughts… the aroma had a little bit of spiciness to it. We brewed some on the Clover at a couple of different recipes and found one that really highlighted the natural sweetness and berry notes. I’m definitely getting the maple and the spiciness I smelled when I first opened the bag is also present in the cup- spicy like a high grade cocoa. Yum. I need to update the coffee menu now.
By the way… I’ve heard there may be a single origin espresso of this coffee in the near future- that would be really awesome.
Our coffee is fresh. REAAALLLY FRESH. Sometimes too fresh to pull a shot of espresso. It’s fresh from the harvest, expedited from origin to the roaster, and then roasted to order each week. At 21st Street we try to represent these beautiful coffees on the retail side. We can’t make it taste any better than what our roaster found on the cupping table. We focus our expertise on the craft of brewing. We like to surround ourselves with other experts that compliment what we do well. That’s why we like Intelligentsia.
Our roaster has recently made a commitment not to sell coffee beyond 10 months from the harvest date. Once you pick the coffee cherry from the tree it’s a race against time to get these beans to market while they still have all the flavors that made them worth the high price to begin with. Having said that, not all coffees are in season year-round, so there are times when our menu is full and times when it is lean. The lean times are almost over…
Here’s Intelligentsia’s “In Season” initiative in a nutshell…
Specialty Coffee has it all figured out, right? Direct relationships with growers, careful roasting, Baristas pulling perfect shots… we’ve squared the circle. Not exactly, as there is a final missing piece: seasonality.
Coffee is just like great fruit and vegetables. Most coffee-producing countries have only one specific harvest season each year, and once the coffee is picked from the tree, it begins the inevitable process of slow decline, losing quality with the passage of time. The result is that no matter how great a coffee tastes while in its prime, the day will always come when it loses the very things that made it so tasty in the first place.
What then does Intelligentsia In Season™ mean? It means that our coffees are offered only while they are fresh and retain the vibrancy that both nature and the fastidious coffee farmer intended. It means that the coffee offers the same kind of compelling traits it did when we first selected it and brought it to our Roasting Works
The coffee industry has long perpetuated the idea that coffee is a year-round crop without recognizing publicly that the harvest cycles do not allow for this. So you really need to know when a coffee was actually harvested. Selecting your coffees in this way ensures that you are getting them while they are their most delicious. The Intelligentsia In Season™ initiative is our commitment that every coffee encompassed by this effort has no more than 10 calendar months between its sale and the completion of harvest.
Ok that sounds awesome… but what does this mean for the menu? Wait… for… it….
Zirikana- Rwanda is out of season but we’ll have a little at the Frick building this week. Finca Matalapa- El Salvador and Anjilanaka- Bolivia are just about out of season, but we’ll have them this week and that will probably be it.
The first new coffee to arrive will be the new Direct Trade offering from Panama- El Machete. I know I’m excited because I haven’t had Intelli’s Panama before. This will soon be joined by new crops of Tanzania (another new one for me), Colombia (the Huila crop of Tres Santos) and the always popular Kenya. Next month we’ll have our choice from the latest crops of Costa Rica, Honduras, Nicaragua and Guatemala. We’ll have our hands full trying to decide what to put on the menu- that’s a nice problem to have. Whatever we have, you know it’ll be F-F-FRESSHHHH. Respect.
We’re always looking at ways to cut down on our waste- whether it be coffee (brewing fresh by the cup), milk (steaming only what is needed for one drink), paper (why don’t you have that drink in a mug?), or otherwise. Generally I drink my coffee or espresso drinks out of ceramic or glass- it just tastes better, retains the heat, and it seems wasteful for me to use a cup when I know I’m going to finish the drink quickly.
On my recent trip to Seattle, I don’t think I touched a single paper cup… but I was in the mood to hang out at all the great coffee bars and take in the atmosphere. Many of our customers don’t have that luxury and they want something good but they need to take it to go. With our coffee, we also sell quite a lot of paper every day, so we got to thinking… how can we cut down on paper waste without making everyone late for work?
We switched from our old preprinted paper sleeves a while back, opting for the “Eco Sleeve” you see today. We chose them for many reasons:
Eco Sleeves insulate better than paper sleevesThat’s a WIN-WIN-WIN-WIN-WIN, but what if your drink didn’t really need a sleeve? We steam our milk drinks to the 140-145F range. Your drink is nice and hot but you can drink it right away and enjoy it while it’s fresh. We’ve been putting sleeves on cups for two years with drinks that didn’t require it- because we wanted to get our brand on the cups and get our name out there.
Enter the stamp…
we started stamping our hot cups in the Strip District this week and when you order a milk drink you’ll get a stamped cup without a sleeve. It has our logo, the drink tastes the same, and you just wasted a little less paper. Our initial research has also shown that the stamped cup increases our “punk-rock-ness” quotient in the ever important “coffee community”. You can’t underestimate the power of community ’round these parts.
Seriously though, by finding ways to save on our costs we’re able to offset increases in the cost of just about everything else- the cost of the cups, milk, coffee (that’s how direct trade is supposed to work so we’re ok with that one), fuel, etc has all gone up while our prices have remained fixed for the past year.
Another example of being responsible with the cup issue- we put out a pitcher of ice water and “for here” glasses for customers that want water, so we don’t have to use a plastic cup if you just want a quick drink after your espresso. We always have bottled water if you want something “to-go”.
If you read through all of this and you still want a sleeve for your latte we’ll give you one, but you’ll feel bad about it later I guarantee you.