Just finished day two of moving the roastery operations. It's really starting to come together in the new space, lots of room to design an efficient flow and room to really grow into ourselves. It's amazing how small the roaster looks in an empty space with high ceilings! I've been looking forward to this move for quite a while now and it's all a little dreamlike that it's really happening now. I scrubbed and set up shelving, organized product and got the place ready for tomorrow. Tomorrow we have the plumber coming for the natural gas line to the roaster, the air guy coming to set up the roaster vent
alation, the phone and internet coming and an electrician. I know it's ambitious, but we're planning to roast again on Tuesday morning. I think it will happen. It will be really nice to have a dedicated office space and a consolidated wholesale stockroom. For those of you who don't know, we used to haul all of the wholesale products (save coffee) out of the coffeehouse basement, next door to the roastery. This made picking a large order quite a task and with our new wholesale hallway, we'll just toss it in the boxes as we move down the line. I'm very much looking forward to Java Moon's first order from our new space.We still don't have flooring i
n the office and showroom spaces, but that's coming soon, maybe this week, more likely next. Also we're getting a new cyclone chaff collector, so we won't have to spend a halfhour or more cleaning out the old one we've got every morning. We will have a dedicated bagging table, tripling the area that was previously dedicated to this, (you're welcome Carla), and we'll have more green coffee storage space. Our goal is to double our stocked inventory, so that we would pay freight on fifty or so bags of coffee at a time, rather than 22-26.Perhaps best of all in the green coffee end of things will be this: we will no longer have to carry coffee bags on
our backs across Grand Avenue, Laramie Wyoming and into our roastery. We have a garage door and can either use the drivers lift-gate/pallet jack, or borrow a handy fork-lift from the friendly electric supply warehouse next door. Yee haw.Also, speaking of green coffee, I'm wildly excited about some coffee that should be arriving tomorrow or perhaps early tuesday. New to Coal Creek will be an Organic Bali Blue Moon coffee. When we cupped it, I tasted homebrewed root beer, ginger and vanilla, sweet and full bodied, almost creamy enough to call it a root beer float. It was rich and earthy and man was it awesome. The Bali is processed using an interesting method previously unkown to me, called wet-hulling. This is when the cherries are de-hulled and fermented for about 24-36 hrs. Then they're dried in their parchment to about 40% before being sold, wet-hulled (de-hulled) and dried down to 12-15% moisture, which is where we receive them. I'm really excited about putting this through a production roast, especially with the current situation in Ethiopia, I've been craving some coffee with a wild character. Also coming is an Organic, Rainforest Alliance coffee from El Salvador. Las Lajas is a tasty treat and I look forward to adding it as an origin and playing around with it in some blends.
Today I'm drinking a Little Sumpin' Sumpin' Ale from Lagunitas, it's sweet and hoppy cantaloupe melon and orange peel flavors give it a juicy finish. Not my favorite of theirs, but it tastes good after working through a weekend!
