Roast takes it coffee and espresso preparation pretty seriously.  We are always looking for ways to tweak our methods and/or techniques to get the best flavor out of our coffee.  There are a lot of details that one can control in order to extract the best flavor out of coffee.  It all takes knowledge, time, and (most times) money.

The Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) has developed a Gold Cup Standard for brewing coffee.  There are a lot of parameters that are outlined that need to be measured in order brewing the perfect cup.  We won’t get into specifics on everything that needs to be measured.  However, one of the many criteria is Total Dissolved Solids (or TDS). We recently tested our coffee and compared it to the brewing control chart.  Once two variables are known, the third can be found.

We’re happy to report that with some minor adjustments on our grinder, we are within the optimal extraction range.  What does this mean to you?  We are doing everything in our power to insure that you are getting the best quality cup of coffee in the city.  And we can back up our findings with facts, and not just subjective tasting.  That’s the Roast difference.

On the espresso side, we have done several modifications to our La Marzocco espresso machine to control temperature, flow rates, and brew strength.  But that’s only half of it.  We were controlling several variables that lead us to believe that our espresso blend wasn’t performing like we’d want it to.  So we met with our roasting partner to develop a signature espresso blend for Roast. There were three employees from Roast along with the owner, head roaster, and head barista from Anodyne. We set up a controlled environment and tasted every offering Anodyne had.  From that point, we started blending and created a blend that really worked well with the parameters we had set up on our machine.  What really makes us smile is that there is a small coffee company in Chicago that is using the same components that we have in our blend.

It coffee, which means it’s forever changing.  Our parameters might change next week, next month, or six months from now.  But we want you to know we are keeping our eye on the ball in an attempt to better serve to our neighbors and friends.  We hope you can taste the Roast difference.

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