Ember Coffee Co.

In June, Sivetz named us their Roaster of the Month. They build the machine we roast on, they have been building fluid bed roasters longer than anyone else in the business, and they pick one shop a month out of everybody running their equipment. This time it was a coffee company in a town of thirteen thousand people in central Minnesota. We are not going to pretend that was a normal morning. The part worth explaining is what the write-up was actually about: why we roast on air instead of on a hot drum, and what changed in the roastery when we switched. The problem every roaster is trying to solve Michael Sivetz, who wrote the book much of the industry still cites on this, laid out the whole difficulty in about two sentences. Heat has to reach the bean quickly and evenly. Too hot and the beans scorch, not hot enough and they never really roast, and if the beans are not moving the entire time you get uneven color and a few burnt ones in every batch. A drum roaster answers that by tumbling beans against a heated metal wall, and it answers it well. Most of the coffee you have loved in your life came off a drum, and there are drum roasters in this state doing better work than we do. There is a place for everything. Fluid bed roasting answers it a different way. The beans never touch a hot surface. They are suspended in a column of hot air, floating and turning over each other, so every bean sees the same heat at the same moment and nothing rests against metal long enough to scorch. What that tends to give you is a cleaner cup. Less of the roasty edge that covers up what the coffee actually tastes like, and more of the fruit and sweetness that was in the bean when it arrived. We say "tends to" on purpose, because plenty of drum roasters make clean, sweet coffee too. We have just found this way easier to be consistent on, and consistency is most of the job. What we roasted on before For our first few years we ran a Coffee Crafters Artisan XE that we hand-upgraded into an XL configuration, with a Hermethius module handling roast control. Jason Scott and the Coffee Crafters team deserve real credit for that setup. It is where we learned to roast. The numbers are what eventually moved us. Eight to nine pound batches, one about every fifteen minutes, twenty to thirty hours a week of somebody standing at a machine watching it. That is a full job, and it was on its way to being more than one. What changed Since the switch, the roastery runs larger batches with less labor in the same square footage. In practical terms, we pushed a building expansion we thought was a year out further down the road, and our roast-to-roast consistency got better. The consistency is the part we care about. Capacity is a problem you can solve by buying something. Two bags of the same coffee tasting the same in March and in August is a problem you solve by changing how you work. You can read more about how air roasting works if the mechanics are your kind of thing, or read Sivetz's write-up for their side of it. The other thing sitting on our desk In late July we also filled out an application for Roast Magazine's Micro Roaster of the Year. Nine essay questions covering mission, sourcing, sustainability, and staff, in a category that includes every roaster in the country under 100,000 pounds a year. We doubt we will get the nod. But the questions made us put a number or a name next to every claim we wanted to make, which is a useful thing to be forced into whether you win or lose. The answer we are proudest of is not about coffee at all. If you buy from us and cannot get it to taste right, our head of coffee will get on a call and fix it with you. Not an article. A person, adjusting your grinder while you stand at it. That does not scale, which is exactly why most places stop doing it. Who this belongs to The recognition is the team's. Five golds in the 2026 Star Tribune Minnesota's Best, a machine that runs right because the people running it pay attention, and a wholesale bar full of shops who noticed before any magazine did. Our names are on the sign. The coffee is theirs. Taste what all of this is about. Written by Matt Berry, co-founder, Ember Coffee Company, Big Lake, Minnesota.

The Minnesota State Fair runs August 27 through September 7 this year, and for twelve days a lot of us eat things on a stick that we would never make at home. Mini donuts in a paper bag. A bucket of cookies that nobody finishes alone. Honey and sunflower ice cream from the ag building. Malts thick enough to bend a spoon. We are not at the Fair this year. We are here roasting, which gave us time to work out what those flavors taste like as coffee drinks on a Tuesday morning. Four recipes, all of them built on coffee you already have. First, make the one syrup everything uses Cinnamon simple syrup carries two of these drinks and keeps about two weeks in the fridge. Combine 1/2 cup sugar and 1/2 cup water in a small saucepan. Add two cinnamon sticks, or 1 teaspoon of ground cinnamon if that is what you have. Simmer 5 minutes, stirring until the sugar dissolves. Cool completely and strain into a jar. For the brown sugar version used in the cold foam, swap in packed brown sugar and skip the cinnamon. 1. The mini donut latte The mini donut is cinnamon, sugar, and hot fried dough, and two of those three translate directly. 2 shots of espresso, or 4 ounces of strong moka pot or AeroPress coffee 1 tablespoon cinnamon simple syrup 8 ounces whole milk Cinnamon sugar for the rim Wet the rim of the mug and roll it in cinnamon sugar. Syrup in the bottom, then the coffee, then milk steamed or heated to 140 to 150°F. Past about 160°F milk starts to taste flat and scalded, which is the most common thing that goes wrong with a home latte. We wrote more about that in Mastering Milk Temperature. Iced version: skip the steaming, shake the coffee and syrup with ice, pour over cold milk. 2. Cookie bucket cold brew The cookie bucket is warm brown sugar and butter, and cold foam gets you most of the way there. 8 ounces cold brew, over ice 1/4 cup heavy cream 1/4 cup whole milk 1 tablespoon brown sugar syrup A pinch of salt Whip the cream, milk, syrup, and salt in a jar or frother for 20 to 30 seconds, until it thickens to the texture of melted ice cream. Pour it slowly over the back of a spoon so it floats instead of mixing. The salt matters more than it sounds like it should. It is what makes brown sugar taste baked rather than sweet. 3. Honey sunflower iced latte This one is a straight lift from the ice cream in the ag building, and it is the sleeper of the four. 2 shots of hot espresso 1 tablespoon honey 1 teaspoon sunflower seed butter 8 ounces milk, over ice Whisk the honey and sunflower seed butter into the hot espresso first, while it is hot enough to melt both. Thirty seconds gets it smooth. Then pour over ice and milk. Add the seed butter to cold milk instead and it seizes into little beads that never recover, so the order here is the whole recipe. 4. The state fair malt affogato 2 scoops vanilla ice cream 1 teaspoon malted milk powder 2 shots of hot espresso, pulled right before serving Stir the malt powder into the ice cream, then pour the hot shots over the top and eat it immediately. Malt does to vanilla what salt does to brown sugar. It makes it taste like a memory instead of a flavor. For a campfire version, pull the shots from Campfire S'mores, our seasonal flavored roast, and crumble a graham cracker over the top. It leaves when summer does. What to brew these with A darker, chocolate-forward coffee stands up better under sugar and dairy than a bright one does, because milk and syrup will bury a delicate fruit note before you taste it. Dark Prairie is our pick for the cold brew, and Salted Caramel Bourbon does a lot of the work for you in the mini donut latte. Our own two signature drinks, the banana bread latte and the Bramble Berry matcha, are on Instagram rather than in this post, because both of them are easier to watch than to read. Or let us make them for you If four drinks is more project than you were looking for, the Big Lake shop is twenty-five minutes up Highway 10 from the north metro, and our espresso is already dialed in. You can also find our booth at the Monticello farmers market on Thursdays and Chanhassen on Saturdays through the end of summer. The market calendar has the dates. The Fair only lasts twelve days. Your kitchen is open all year. Shop coffee for these recipes. Written by the Ember Coffee team, Big Lake, Minnesota.

Almost everyone who puts a bright, fruit-forward bag into an espresso machine gets the same shot at least once. It runs in twenty-six seconds, the crema comes out thin and blond, and the first sip puckers your cheeks. The coffee is not broken. Light roast espresso asks for different numbers than the dark roast your machine was probably dialed in for. Here is what we change behind the bar, and why it works. Why a light roast fights you Roasting makes a coffee bean porous and brittle, and the darker the roast, the more porous it gets. A light roast is denser, so water has to work harder to pull anything out of it. The grind, dose, and time that made your last dark bag taste sweet will pull short on a light one, and a shot that has not extracted enough tastes sour, thin, and slightly salty. Every fix below is the same idea wearing a different hat. Get more out of the bean. 1. Start at 1:2, then stretch it Weigh both ends of the shot. Eighteen grams of ground coffee in, thirty-six grams of liquid espresso out, in 27 to 30 seconds. Weigh what lands in the cup instead of watching the volume, because crema only tells you two things: roughly how fresh the coffee is, and roughly how strong the shot is. If that shot still tastes sour, stretch the ratio before you touch anything else. Same 18 grams in, 40 to 45 grams out. More water through the same coffee means more extraction, and light roasts want it. 2. Grind finer, one step at a time Finer grounds pack tighter, water moves slower, and extraction goes up. Move one step, then purge the grinder by running a few grams through and throwing them away. Most grinders hold onto old grounds, so the first coffee out after a change is still ground at the old setting. If you adjust and nothing changes, you probably did not purge enough. 3. Run the water hotter Hotter water extracts more, so a light roast wants more heat than a dark one. If your machine lets you set a brew temperature, we have found the top of the espresso range works best here, somewhere around 200 to 203°F. If it does not, run a blank shot through the group head to bring everything up to temperature and then brew right away. A useful rule when you are stuck: persistent sourness usually wants more heat, and persistent bitterness usually wants less. 4. Give the bag a little more time Freshly roasted coffee is full of carbon dioxide, and CO2 gets in the way of a clean extraction under nine bars of pressure. Plenty of shops rest their espresso five to twenty days off roast for exactly that reason. Give a light roast at least a week before you judge it. If the first shot from a new bag gushes and tastes hollow, the coffee may just be young. Reading the shot What you taste What it usually means Try this first Sour, thin, sharp Underextracted Grind finer, stretch to 1:2.5, raise the temperature Bitter, dry, ashy Overextracted Grind coarser, shorten to 1:1.75, lower the temperature Fast and pale, under 20 seconds Grind too coarse, or dose too low One step finer, add a gram Slow drips, over 40 seconds Grind too fine One step coarser Sour even when the numbers look right Channelling Level the bed, tamp flat, stop tapping the basket That last row catches more shots than people expect. Tamping does not need to be strong. Push the air out, keep the bed level, and leave it there. Tapping the portafilter to knock stray grounds off the rim can crack the puck loose from the basket wall, and then the water runs around the coffee instead of through it. That tastes exactly like a bad grind setting. One more thing worth saying plainly. A very good grinder with a modest machine beats a very good machine with a modest grinder. What this looks like with Bramble Bramble is the blend we build for a machine. Ugandan naturals bring blackberry and caramel, Ethiopian Yirgacheffe brings blueberry and chocolate, and the beans are dense enough to hold up under nine bars without turning flat. Our starting point: 18 grams in, 40 grams out, about 28 seconds, water near 202°F, roughly ten days off roast. Adjust from there by taste, one variable at a time. The same density that makes Bramble good under pressure makes it good in a moka pot, an AeroPress, or a strong drip brew, so a machine is not the price of entry. For more background, read what light and dark roasts actually do differently, or our general guide to dialing in espresso. We pull these shots every day at our roastery in Big Lake, Minnesota, so these numbers come from how the coffee behaves on the bar rather than from a chart. Start at 1:2, change one thing, taste again. Sour is a setting, not a verdict. Shop Bramble or browse every coffee we roast. Written by the Ember Coffee roasting team, Big Lake, Minnesota.