Ember Coffee Co.

Elisa and I recorded a quick update on November 11, sitting in a parking lot outside a distributor. We were about to walk in and teach their sales team about air-roasted coffee. It took us two takes, because the sun was in our eyes and I forgot what I was trying to say. More grocery shelves in the Twin Cities Ember is headed to more grocery stores. We'll be in almost every Kowalski’s, we're starting with about five Jerry’s Foods stores, and we're growing our footprint with Coborn’s. A lot of you in the Twin Cities have asked how to find our coffee at a store near you. This is the first part of that answer, and we expect more news over the next few months. When bags land on shelves, you'll hear about it here first. That's why we were at the distributor. Their salespeople are the ones who talk to store buyers, so we went in to show them what air roasting is. Our beans roast on a column of hot air and never touch hot metal, and the chaff blows out of the roaster before it can char. If you spot us on a shelf, send us a photo. At the cafe Elisa says the cafe in Big Lake is doing great. We have a wonderful team, they're focused on hospitality, and new drinks are coming soon. We can't wait for you to try them. This month: Honduras Lempira November's Roaster's Choice is Honduras Lempira, grown by 131 smallholder farmers in the CAFESCOR cooperative in Lempira, Honduras. It's washed and roasted dark, with molasses, brown sugar, toasted graham and a faint orange-peel edge over a full body. It's here for November only, while the lot lasts. Twenty-one years married The day after we filmed this, Elisa and I celebrated 21 years of marriage. We asked each other what we'd pass on to anyone watching. Elisa's answer: "Take responsibility for your own baggage and stay in the fight." Mine: "Try to always be the first one to say you're sorry." What running a business has taught us I've learned to have thick skin. I've also learned that our most important asset is our people, the ones who work with us. When you find really good people, you want to hang on to them. Elisa's lesson is to find good people to take advice from, and then take action. If you want to own a small business because you think it'll be easy, I have news for you. In the last five years I've become an espresso technician, a roastery mechanic and our marketing department. Elisa says I have the gray hairs to prove it, and she has a few herself. It's hard work, and it's rewarding. It's best when you get to do it with someone you love. Thank you None of this happens without you all. You keep showing up, you ask where to find us, and you bring friends along. So, thank you, and we'll see you around. Matt and Elisa

Dale's dialed-in recipe for our flavored coffees Dale bought a bag of our Hazelnut Cream, fell for it, and then did what perfectionists do. He wrote in asking if we had a recipe for his xBloom Studio. We didn't, so we sent him our standard pour over adapted to the machine and asked him to tell us if he found something better. He did. A few weeks of tweaking later, he sent us the screenshots below, saved in his xBloom app under the name "Ember Flavored." It's a gentle, clean brew that keeps the hazelnut sweet instead of harsh, and it works as a starting point for every flavored coffee we roast. Thanks for sharing it, Dale. Why flavored coffee needs a gentler brew Flavored beans turn harsh when you push extraction hard. Hotter water and a finer grind pull more out of the coffee, and on a flavored bean that extra pull lands on the flavoring first. So this recipe runs cooler and coarser than you'd use for a single origin, and it lets the bed drain without stirring it up. The recipe at a glance Setting Dale's recipe Dripper Omni, grinder on Dose 18 g Ratio 1:16 (288 ml water) Grind size 80 (xBloom's French press / cold brew range) Grinder speed 120 RPM Water temp 194°F bloom, 192°F for the main pours Pours 3: 36 ml bloom, then 126 ml, then 126 ml Pour pattern Spiral, agitation off Total time 3:15 Step 1: Set up the coffee Choose the Omni dripper and turn the built-in grinder on. Set the dose to 18 g and the ratio to 1:16 (more on ratios in our brewing ratio guide), which gives you 288 ml of water. Grind size goes to 80. That's coarse, in the range xBloom labels French press and cold brew. Grinder speed is 120 RPM. Dale's coffee settings in the xBloom app. Step 2: Build the three pours The water splits into a small bloom and two equal main pours: 36 ml, 126 ml and 126 ml. That's 12%, 44% and 44% of the 288 ml. All three pours add up to 288 ml. Step 3: Bloom The bloom is 36 ml at 194°F, poured in a spiral at 3 ml per second, then a 35 second pause. That's twice the dose in water, enough to wet all the grounds and let the gas escape before the main pours. Agitation before and after both stay off. Bloom: 36 ml, 194°F, 35 second pause. Step 4: The two main pours Both main pours are 126 ml at 192°F, in a spiral at 3.5 ml per second, with agitation off. The only difference is the pause. Pour 2 rests 25 seconds before pour 3 starts. Pour 3 has no pause and drains straight through. Pour 2: 126 ml, 25 second pause. Pour 3: 126 ml, no pause. Step 5: Check your time Dale's brew finishes at 3:15. If yours runs much faster, go a step finer on the grind. If it runs much slower, go a step coarser. The finished brew record: 3:15. Dialing it in for other flavored coffees Use Dale's recipe as written for any of our flavored coffees, then change only the water temperature, 2 degrees at a time. If the cup tastes flat and thin, go up. If it tastes harsh, come back down. Leave everything else alone so you know which change made the difference. Our guide to dialing in any coffee walks through the same idea step by step. One thing to try Split the last 126 ml into two pours of 63 ml with a short pause between them. It keeps the bed from flooding and can bring out a little more sweetness without adding heat. Keep everything else the same, so that split is the only thing you're tasting. Got your own recipe? If you've dialed in an Ember coffee on your brewer, send us the numbers at hello@embercoffee.co. Screenshots from your xBloom app are perfect. That's how Dale sent his. We'd like to see them, and the good ones might end up right here with your name on them.

Elisa and I sat down for a minute and a half to catch you up on where we are and where we're headed. Elisa looks great in it. I look like a guy who spends most of his day standing next to a coffee roaster, which is fair. If you caught our summer and September notes, this picks up where those left off. The short version is that a lot is moving at once: new drinks, new shelves, a new face at the roastery, and a couple of things we've been quietly building for the holidays. The video covers it fast, and the rest of this post fills in the details. New Christmas drinks, and you get a vote We're working on new drinks for Christmas, and this year we're not picking them on our own. Right now that means a lot of taste testing and some market research behind the counter. It's the best part of the job, and also the part where we drink far more coffee than anyone should. Next comes the fun part. We'll narrow it down to a few finalists and put them up for a vote, and the one you pick makes the menu. We'd rather build a drink around what you actually want to order than guess and hope. Keep an eye on your email for the poll. It takes about a minute, and whichever drink you pick gets a spot on the holiday menu. If you've ever wanted a say in what we pour, this is it. On more grocery store shelves Our beans are headed into quite a few grocery stores. For a small roastery in Big Lake, that's a big step, and we're excited about it. It's the same coffee we roast for you, air roasted in small batches, just a little easier to grab on a weekly shopping run. Getting onto a shelf is mostly about trust. A store has to believe people will pick the bag up, and then pick it up again the next week. A lot of that trust comes from you, the people who have been ordering from us, telling friends, and bringing us up when someone asks what coffee to buy. If you spot us on a shelf, we'd love a photo. And if there's a store near you where you wish we were, tell us and tell them, because store managers listen to their regulars. Either way, nothing changes about how we roast: every bag still comes out of Big Lake. New hands at the roastery A new roastery technician is joining the team, and we're excited to have them. That gives us another set of trained hands on the roaster, which means more consistency batch to batch. It also frees up a little room to try new coffees and new profiles, which is the fun part of this job. While we were at it, we gave the roaster some maintenance. A fluid bed roaster lives and dies by airflow and clean parts, since the beans roast on a column of hot air instead of against hot metal. It's the unglamorous work that keeps every bag tasting the way it should. Roasting on air is a big part of why our coffee tastes the way it does. The beans never touch a hot surface, so there are no scorched spots or burnt edges, and the papery chaff that comes off each bean gets blown out of the roaster before it can char. Keeping that machine in top shape is how we keep that promise every single batch. This month: Vietnam October's Roaster's Choice is Vietnam Lam Dong, and it's a good one. Ninety-seven percent of the coffee that leaves Vietnam is robusta, the kind usually sold on price. This is the rest: arabica grown in the hills above Dalat, where very little of it ever reaches a shelf like ours. The farms there average about a hectare, small enough for one family to walk in a morning. Most of them plant more than coffee, with persimmon and jackfruit between the rows. The fruit trees pay at different times of year than the coffee does, they hold the soil on the slopes, and they feed the family in the months between harvests. When the coffee is picked, it goes down to the wet mill at Duc Trong. Every grower's delivery is washed together there and dried on patios and raised beds for five to seven days. On its own, no single one of these farms grows enough to interest an exporter. Together, they make a lot worth shipping across an ocean. In the cup it's toasted almond and brown sugar, smooth and rounded, with nothing sharp about it. If you like a coffee that's easy to drink and doesn't fight you, this is the one this month. It's here for October only, while the lot lasts. Next month: likely a Honduras For November, we'll likely have a Honduras coming in. I'm still testing a few roast profiles before I land on one, so we'll see what it becomes. That testing is where a coffee either clicks or doesn't, and I'd rather take an extra week than send out something I'm only half happy with. When it's ready, you'll hear about it here and in your inbox first. Stocking stuffers are coming Our Discovery Boxes are being released just in time for holiday shopping. Each one is three 2 oz bags in a single box, so you, or someone on your list, can find a favorite before committing to a full bag. They're $18 each, which makes them an easy stocking stuffer. The Blends box walks you across our lineup. Gunflint Trail is the darkest blend we roast, with dark chocolate, cardamom and a finish that lingers. 10,000 Lakes sits in the middle with rich chocolate and buttery caramel, and Bramble is the lightest, with blackberry, blueberry and caramel. Three mornings and you'll know where you land. The Single Origin box is about place. It pairs two coffees we always keep on the shelf, Guatemala Acatenango with dark red cherries and bittersweet cocoa, and Colombia Huila with brown sugar, cherry and pecan, with a third bag the roastery team picks from whatever is in season. We roast all three the same way, so the differences you taste come from the farms. Keep an eye on your email for when they open. They're small enough for a stocking, and good enough to start a habit. Thank you The part that still gets us teary-eyed is that none of this happens without you all. New drinks, new shelves and new people at the roastery all come back to the same thing: you keep showing up. So, thank you, and we'll see you around. Matt and Elisa