Blind Coffee Tasting In The Studio

We're a team fuelled by coffee. The studio kitchen is home to a filter coffee with a thermos pot and first one to arrive in the morning, gets a nice strong brew going, ready to prepare us all for a day of focus. 

We like to subscribe to a coffee roasters house blend of ground for while - and it was time to mix it up and select a new one - so we thought it would be fun to get input from the full team - by organising a blind taste test.

As you know, community and sustainable values are at the heart of all our decision making - so our key criteria for selecting a new blend are:

• Locally roasted
• Sustainable values
• Reasonably affordable
• Offer a ground coffee subscription 

• and delicious, obvs.

Based on the above criteria, Helen, our buyer, selected three coffee roasters for this session:

• The Roasting Room
• Yallah 
• Olfactory

Helen kept the brands a secret and poured us all blind cups - no milk or sugar allowed.

Picking a favourite filter coffee wasn't easy. We sipped and went back in forth for quite a while.

In the end, the votes came in and the winner was... our neighbours at The Roasting Room. Overall, it's strong, rich taste with notes of milk chocolate, toffee and cherry in their house blend had the most votes. Although it was very close. 
We can literally smell the coffee being roasted from our desks in the studio, so it doesn't get more local than that.

Watch behind the scenes...

The Coffee Brands We Tried:

The Roasting Room

The team at The Roasting Room aim to provide high quality and sustainably produced coffee. Their coffees are AtSource certified and their coffee bags and labels are totally compostable at home.

Our coffee tasting winner: Single Estate Brazil

Yallah

Yallah have brilliant sustainability values, they import their coffee by sail (talk about reducing your carbon footprint), use plastic free packaging and their cafes ditch  single-use cups. Plus, their roastery runs on renewable energy, and they compost over half of their food and coffee scraps on-site. 

Our coffee tasting pick: Yallah House Coffee

Olfactory

Olfactory was set up in 2013, is all about amazing coffee, being upfront about where it comes from, and doing things right. They build strong bonds with specialty coffee producers who share their passion for quality and fair trade.

Our coffee tasting pick: Steadfast

Doing a coffee tasting in the studio was such a good way to get the team together and bond over one of our daily rituals.

We'd love to hear your suggestions for other coffee roasters that meet our criteria for the next tasting.