Ember Coffee Co.

A short one from the two of us, to the regulars who show up most. You are the reason any of this works. We opened Ember to make a place worth coming back to, and you turned it into Minnesota's Best shop, a roastery, and jobs for people we love. A few things happening this fall: the Big Lake shop is open Mondays again after a few years dark on the day. Fall drinks are back on the board. And September's Roaster's Choice is a Kenyan micro lot called Elephant Head that we roasted deeper than most. The part that gets us teary eyed is that we would not be here without customers and friends like you. So thank you. No ask today. Matt and Elisa

Some of you tell us our coffee sits easier. Part of that is where we buy green coffee, and part of it is testing it before we roast. What mold and mycotoxins actually are Coffee is an agricultural product. It is picked wet, dried, bagged, shipped across an ocean, and stored. Every one of those steps is a chance for moisture to linger where it should not. When it does, mold can grow, and some molds leave behind compounds called mycotoxins. This is a quality-control problem, not a mystery. Coffee that is dried on schedule, held at the right moisture content, and stored well does not give mold much to work with. Coffee that is rushed or stored badly does. What we do about it We source green coffee from importers who share their drying and storage data, and we test our green coffee so that only clean, high-quality beans reach the roaster. Lots that do not pass do not get roasted. We also air roast. Every machine Ember has ever owned is a fluid bed roaster, which means the beans roast suspended in hot air rather than tumbling against a hot drum. Chaff and particulate leave the roast chamber instead of riding along with the beans. Why people notice Jitters and an unsettled stomach often get blamed on caffeine. Sometimes caffeine is the answer. Sometimes the answer is the quality of what was in the bag. We cannot tell you which one is true for your body, and we are not going to try. What we can tell you is what we control: where the coffee comes from, that we test it, and how we roast it. This post is being expanded with more detail on our testing process.

This is not a sales email. It is a note from the two of us about where Ember is headed this fall, a couple of things we are proud of, and a thank-you that is about four years overdue. We are opening on Mondays For the last few years we have been closed on Mondays. Starting this fall, that changes. We are opening the Big Lake shop on Mondays, and we could not be more excited about it. Judging by how often it comes up at the register, a lot of you feel the same way. Here is why it matters to us. From the start, Ember was meant to be more than a place that sells coffee. We wanted a place of connection, a hub where people meet, work, read, and actually talk to each other over something good in a cup. Being closed one day a week always sat a little sideways with that idea. Opening on Mondays gives the week one more day to be that place. Keep an eye on our social media for the launch date. Once it is set, start thinking about what you want to do with the extra day. The standing meeting. The book club. The Monday-morning work session. The catch-up with a friend you keep meaning to see. That is exactly what the room is for. A word about our roaster In June, Sivetz named us their Roaster of the Month. Sivetz builds the fluid bed roaster we roast on, and they have been building air roasters longer than just about anyone in the business. They pick one shop a month out of everyone running their equipment, and this time it was us, in a town of thirteen thousand people. We are honored by it, and we genuinely love working with them. Their commitment to innovation is a real part of why our coffee tastes the way it does, and the whole journey with them has been a good one. You can read Sivetz's write-up for their side of it, or our own explanation of why we roast on air if the mechanics are your kind of thing. Who we are, and where we are headed Since we are being reflective, it is worth saying plainly what we are trying to build. Our mission is to turn strangers into friends, serve the best coffee anywhere, and be a place that cultivates creativity and good works. That is not a line on a wall. Every person we hire learns it, because we tell them the same thing on their first day: you do not serve coffee, you serve people. Coffee is the reason someone walks in. Belonging is the reason they come back. The name comes from right here. Big Lake was once called Humboldt, and it was a gathering place, somewhere people traveled to spend the day by the water. That era faded over the years. We named the company Ember because we believed a coal of that was still here, and it only needed someone to blow on it. We put all of this to the test on paper this summer when we applied for Roast Magazine's Micro Roaster of the Year. That meant answering a stack of essay questions about our mission, our sourcing, and our people. Win or lose, the exercise made us put a real number or a real name behind every claim, and it clarified where we are going: better sourcing, real jobs for real people, and a shop that stays a community first and a business second. New this fall in the cup A few things are making their way to the menu. Our banana bread latte has been a hit at the farmers markets all summer, to the point where people keep asking us to put it on the board at the shop. This fall, we are doing exactly that. It joins our Bramble Berry matcha, an original recipe we came up with that has quietly turned into a favorite. Every espresso drink we make is built on our El Jefe espresso, and that brings us to something we want to do more of. Let us be your barista at home We want to be more than the company that ships you beans. If you are pulling shots at home and something tastes off, or you want to build one of our drinks in your own kitchen, email us at hello@embercoffee.co. Our team will walk you through the recipe or help you dial in your grinder. Think of us as your at-home barista coach, because that is genuinely how we see the job. If you want a running start on espresso, we wrote a full guide on pulling a light roast shot without it going sour or thin. Four years in One last, more personal note. This summer, Elisa and I took a real vacation for the first time in about four years. We went to Mexico. It was the first stretch in a long time that we were not within arm's reach of the business. We mention it because it is easy to walk into a coffee shop and assume it runs itself. Getting Ember to a place where we could step away for a week took years of sixteen-hour days and a long list of hard decisions, a lot of them personal, most of them made so we could hire the right people, source the right coffee, and still keep the doors open. Starting a coffee shop is the easy sentence to say. Building one that lasts, and that supports real jobs for real people, is the part nobody sees. Four years later, we are still here, still growing, and still meeting people who found us for the first time this week. We do not take a minute of that for granted. Thank you for being part of it. Come see what we are roasting, and we will see you on a Monday. Written by Matt and Elisa Berry, co-founders, Ember Coffee Company, Big Lake, Minnesota.