Reading Break

Nothing goes better with a cup of coffee than some good reading (we usually recommend paper but since we're already here…). We've gathered a few posts from around the web to keep you in the know and expand the coffee side of your brain. 

Michael Butterworth- gives a recap of CoffeeFest NYC

Darren on Coffee + Beer and Coffee Beer 

You may notice that we've referred to The Coffee Compass blog more than a few times and that's because it's awesome. (And as you know- we are verified, proven, authenticated, certified organic judgers of all things awesome). Truly- it's a few local Louisville coffee geeks who happen to also have quite the penchant with the pen. And one of them (Michael) just happens to be an inspired & inspiring Quills Coffee barista. Go catch up and follow along.  

More fest talk- Chris Elliott from Prima reviews SCAA in Boston

A beautiful view of the Chemex.

An older article on a still growing and spreading concept- coffee on a bike.  We've cycled around the idea of doing it ourselves. What do you think? 

Finally - some oldies but goodies on this very Quills blog:

    Matt Park shares his journey of becoming, being  and loving to be a barista

    This one time Quills was featured in Imbibe Magazine as one of the top places in the South to get caffeinated

     2 1/2 years later these drinks are still among our most popular

Quills Cold Brew is Back!

Quills brought out the cold brew ​last week for a new (half of a) year's run. We've noticed that people get really excited about cold coffee. And with that- conversation abounds again over how to best make and enjoy it. 

Prima wrote a great informative article last year about two different methods of brewing: Cold Brew/Toddy vs. Iced/Japanese method. Those looking for a quick reward might choose to brew the coffee hot through their favorite pour-over method - straight over ice. In addition to immediate gratification, this method serves in retaining much of the taste and aroma of what one is used to in a hot cup of coffee.

If you don't mind the wait, brewing cold (room temperature) from the start creates a less acidic, sweeter cup and goes better with milk and any other additions you might enjoy ​

The cold brew method also serves the busy barista well as it can be made in a large batch and lasts for a few days in the refrigerator.

Here's a brief synopsis of how Quills uses our own Toddy system to make our well-loved large batch cold brew:

1. After a long busy day of serving the best customers ever -and right before closing up shop- we place a giant mesh filter in a giant bucket, open end facing upward. Then we place a giant paper filter in the strainer (seriously- it's like all your normal coffee equipment got shot by that gun in "honey I blew up the kid")
2. We grind 5 lbs. of coffee on a coarse grind setting (18). Right now we are using the Peru Cenfrocafe (resorting to Papua New Guinea if Peru is out)
3. Place coffee in the filter.
4. We then pour 7 quarts of filtered water over the grounds and stir them up with a spoon to ensure that the entire bed is submerged.
5. Almost done- we wrap up the top of the paper filter, then tie tightly with string making sure there is plenty of room in the filter bag for the coffee to move around!

6. Finally we add 7 more quarts of filtered water to the bucket and move the strainer around a bit to agitate the grounds and integrate all the water and coffee.
7. Cover the lid

...Go home and enjoy some dinner, a drink with friends, a good book, a few plus hours of sleep...

8. Before opening the next morning we take the filter and strainer, and sit them in the metal strainer on top of the bucket, allowing all excess coffee to drip from the bag into the bucket. 

9. Then we simply throw away the filter, wash the mesh strainer and decant the cold brew into designated pitchers 

And now the best part... we serve it to you by filling the cup with ice, water (about 1/3 way full) and topping off with the concentrate. For a "dirty" cold brew, we add a smidge of half&half and one pump of simple syrup.

You drink it. You love it. You praise, applaud and adore us!

Quills on Wheels

A few-plus-some days ago we took our mobile coffee bar to the first Love & Such Boutique Bridal Show. We enjoyed joining other local makers like Rooibee Red Tea, Peake Bowties, Billy Grubbs, Sarah Havens Millinery and many others at this inaugural event seeking to bring the niche into nuptials.  

​                                                Matt had a serious obsession with the hat

Book our mobile bar

​Quills loves to party! And we'd love to bring our ​brews and hearty hospitality to your next event. Just picture the guests at your Wedding/Bar Mitzvah/Derby party/etc... having the option to enjoy a freshly poured Chemex or sip on a made-to-order latte with Quills well-loved Blacksmith Espresso -all served by your kind, talented (& lets face it-likely suspendered) Quills baristas.

Pricing is based on # of people and the services you would like (espresso bar, pour over bar, both).  Please contact Matt Park within a minimum 6 weeks notice to get a quote, etc. 

NOTE: From APRIL - OCTOBER you can book us for 25% OFF our normal rates!

Coffee's Journey (Part II)

Today we continue following coffee on its eventful journey from the farm to your favorite mug. Before you go any further- make sure you've read Part I which includes the start of its pilgrimage - from those beautiful farms into the hands of our importers. Now we'll take a look into the delicate process of roasting and finish off with those smooth, good-looking alchemists* responsible for turning it all into something you get to sit back and effortlessly enjoy

*We're talking about Baristas of course. You knew that.

​Ready for some cupping 

Next up- there’s our roasting team. As good as the coffee is when it arrives at our shop in New Albany, it’s still not something you’d be excited for us to serve you. Those green beans need a few more steps of TLC before they arrive in your cup. At Quills, our roasting philosophy centers on the uniqueness of each coffee.

Rather than roast in a way that highlights certain classic “roasty” profiles (like a dark, smoky French Roast, for example), we want to bring out the best aspects we find that each coffee has to offer. So we keep our roasts a bit lighter, developing the coffees slowly and seeking to find the “sweet spot” where all the special attention the coffee received at the farm can now shine when we brew it. We don’t want to hide the tart citrus and chocolate of our Finca Los Congos or the soft, pineapple sweetness of the   Los Naranjos! As we spend months with each coffee, our roasting team can also continually refine how we want to present those flavors. So don’t forget to keep trying coffees as they continue to evolve under our care!

​photo by OMC Louisville

And finally - our barista team (or YOU if you brew our beans at home). All of this effort would be for naught if we didn’t have a staff dedicated to brewing the coffee with attention to every detail and educating our customers on how to do that at home. What is an inherent sweetness or pleasant fruitiness in the roasted beans might easily become dull or sour if the coffees aren’t brewed with care. So we fully nerd out with our specialized gear––scales, water towers, fine-tuned grinders, etc. Further still, we take a lot of time to train our staff to do this well. And finally, we take the time to hone in on unique parameters for each of our coffees - again, in order to highlight their distinctive characteristics. When our newest coffee, the Peru Cenfrocafe, arrived last week, we took the time to try a few different roasts and brewing approaches in order to figure out the best way to bring out the natural floral and citrus overtones, nutty-caramel sweetness, and stone fruit. In fact - We’re still working on it and will continue to for a quite a while.

So there you have it. Once your barista brews that coffee for you, it’s already been on a long road to bring it to that near-perfection you taste in the cup. Our hope is that perhaps this bit of story-telling helps you enjoy it all the more next time you sip!

Coffee's Journey (part 1)

With all of our talk recently about “great coffee” and our endless pursuit of it, part of you may still be legitimately wondering, “But really - what makes this so different from what I can get in the store?” It’s a fair question, and one that we could spend many pages answering. And because coffee and the people who love it are incredibly complex, well...complex answers abound in coffee geekdom. But, we’ll try to give a pretty simple one here.

To understand why the type of speciality coffee you get at Quills (and many other great shops) is so good, take a little journey with us. We’re going to follow the coffee from the farm to your cup, and take a few little stops along the way.

First, there’s the farm. Coffee farms are, of course, abundant in the world, but the one where your beans came from is a little more rare and unique. Your coffee was grown at a higher altitude than much of the coffee you find in grocery stores or some shops, meaning the beans are a bit denser and naturally more complex in their characteristics. To top it off, the farmers have been working to build an exceptional farm, one in which the coffee is given the best conditions of soil and other environmental factors to thrive.

They have pursued ongoing developments in processing techniques as well so that when they pull the coffee cherries from the tree, the coffee is carefully processed (a combination of various techniques to remove the cherry and other outer layers to get a clean seed or “bean”) in ways that will allow its full, dynamic flavors to shine through in the cup. Otherwise, these could easily be masked by dirty, moldy, or other unpleasant characteristics. Check out our Koban Plantation coffee from Papua New Guinea which spends up to 10 days in processing!

Then, the importer. Great coffees don’t just magically show up in Louisville. Instead they have to be found, and a long-term, sustainable relationship has to be nurtured. This is where an importer comes in. We hope to be able to step into this role ourselves to some degree in the future, but we are also proud to have worked with our importer, Café Imports, ever since we started roasting our own beans. We love this partnership because this team of folks takes the time to find great farmers and co-ops and invest in developing new ones. See the links on our page for our current Colombia offering from the Los Naranjos Association, to catch a glimpse of how Café Imports is working with farms in creative ways to help them grow better and better coffee.

Once we have worked with Café Imports to narrow down and select the coffees we want to carry (a detailed, thorough process of roasting, tasting and comparing), they ship them to us and that's where we get to work our roasting magic.... which is what we'll be telling you about in Part II

New Coffees: Finca Los Congos. San Fernando, Nicaragua

{For other coffee stories, scroll down the blog. Or click here for Cenfrocafe Coop, Cajamarca, Peru; here for ​Koban Plantation, Papua New Guinea; here for Los Naranjos, San Augustin, Huila Colombia.}

To round out our overview of our current coffee lineup, we saved the best for last. This coffee has been featured in our espresso since January, and has been available on pour-over and in retail bags for a month or so. The Finca Los Congos represents the first in Quills' official "Top Shelf" line of coffees. While we are incredibly proud of every coffee we bring to you, this one in particular stands out as one of our finest offerings to date. Here’s a little more about it form our importer, Café Imports:

“Finca Los Congos is located in the town of San Fernando, Nueva Segovia.  On the northern region of Nicaragua in close proximity to the Honduran border.  Coffees from this region (as opposed to Matagalpa/Jinotega) have proved to be superior in the cup due to higher altitude in this part of Nicaragua.  On the other side of the mountain, in Honduran soil, is the town of El Paraiso; this region is also producing some of the best coffee in Honduras.

Rene Martin, the operator of the plantation, is not only a close business partner but also a friend of ours.  His father, Jose Rene, the owner, planted about 32 hectares of Pacamara (70%) and Caturra in Los Congos.  Why Pacamara?  There really isn’t much Pacamara in Nicaragua and probably no other plantation with this big of production!  A friend of Jose Rene suggested he use Pacamara due to its productivity and hardiness so he got seeds from El Salvador.

Café Imports has cupped through innumerable Nicaraguan coffee throughout the years and we’ve never seen such an amazing coffee out of this origin.  These coffees are delicious!  Complex, savory, juicy, berries, passion fruits, with citric-lime-acidity.”

Quills is proud to bring you the Pacamara variety of this coffee, and we have been incredibly pleased with it. You can enjoy it in several ways over the coming month. Try it on a pour-over, or take it home to brew manually yourself. You’ll pay a bit more, but it’s well worth it.  Look for strong citric acidity with notes of tart cherry perfectly balanced with a chocolate/caramel sweetness and smooth body. Or enjoy it as the bright, punchy note at the front of our Blacksmith Espresso. We won’t be offering this coffee on batch brew. We just don’t feel like we can do it justice there!

Some more details:

Variety:  Pacamara

Altitude:  1,550 MASL (Meters Above Sea Level)

Processing:  Fully washed and sun-dried

Producer:  Rene Martin

New Coffees: Los Naranjos. San Augustin, Huila, Colombia

​Today we feature our Los Naranjos from Huila, Colombia. This coffee has been around in our shops for a month or so now (and in our Espresso for longer), but we haven’t taken the chance to tell you its exciting story. Want more coffee talk? Read up on Papua New Guinea and Peru 

We prize this Colombian brew as one of our favorite offerings right now- both for the quality of the cup and for the incredible story of the innovative Asociación Los Naranjos. Below is the story from our importer, Café Imports (images are theirs as well):

“Through the town of San Augustin runs a river called Los Naranjos. Up the sides of this riverbank in to the mountains is a community of coffee growers with small clean and beautiful farms. Butterflies, Hummingbirds and giant lavender flowers are the norm.

This land is buffeted on the west by a 500 square mile biosphere reserve called Cueva de los Quacharo. It is the place where two of Colombia's three mountain ranges converge and where ancient peoples lived and carved giant stone figures. It is a special place and the people who live here believe that the great forest tracts of the natural preserve protect their land from the violence of weather and give them a calm, peaceful place to live and farm.

In 2001, Some of the farmers of this area got together with the intentions of improving their managerial skills and gaining access to the elusive “specialty coffee market,” and they formed an association called La Asociación Los Naranjos de San Augustin.

Today there are 50 growers/members with about 150 hectares in coffee. Average size of a farm is 2.8 hectares (1 hectare =10,000 square meters). Yield is between 1,500 and 2,000 Kg per Hectare during the main crop and about half that during the fly crop.”

{Read more from Cafe Imports' through this interesting account of their 2011 visit to the Association}

This Association is becoming widely known for its innovative work to continue improving both coffee quality and quality of life for the farmers involved. All of the effort also shines through in the cup. This particular lot is a blend of various Los Naranjos farmers who produced similar cup profiles.  During the fly crop, not enough quantity is produced to merit microlots, so the top cups are combined into one lovely lot. We taste a well-balanced bright, fruity acidity complemented with a soft, sweet body. It's rich and sweet, and we've noticed notes of pineapple as it cools.

We’ve been featuring this coffee on batch brew for a little while now, but we recommend it as a pour-over if you want to truly experience everything it has to offer!

A little more info:

Producers: 97 small coffee growers, members of the “Asociación Los Naranjos San Agustin”

Origin: Municipality of San Agustin, Department of Huila (Colombia)

Processing Method: Traditional fully-washed process, fully sun-dried in green-house type drying patios

Shade: Cachimbo, nogal and guamo trees (~30% shade cover) - 25 members Rainforest Alliance certified

Green Preparation: Excelso EP (Screen 15+) & Specialty Grade (Hand sorted)

Want even more? Watch a 2010 video from the farms themselves.​

Andrew took a trip to Huila in December 2010 and took this video of the small farmers in the region.

New Coffees: Koban Plantation. Papua New Guinea

We're talkin' about our new coffees all this week. A couple of days ago we told you about our Cenfrocafe. Cajamarca, Peru. And today we're headed to Papua New Guinea. As always- be sure to read up on our new menu and a few changes moving forward, then dig right into our new coffee stories. (remember you can buy these new coffees- and your other favorites online as well as in your local store location)

Coffee growing and production has been steadily improving in the region of Indonesia and Southeast Asia in recent years, and Papua New Guinea coffees have often been on the leading edge. While only representing 1% of world coffee production, much of what comes out of the country stands up well with a variety of interesting coffees coming from smaller farms and from larger Plantations in the country. This particular coffee, from the Koban Plantation in the Western Highlands, stands true to form for what many of the Plantations have to offer in coffees with clean, delicate and sophisticated character.

A little picture of the production process at Koban: Coffee is wet-milled and dry-milled on site. The wet-mill uses large disk pulpers and fermentation tanks. Coffee is then fermented for three days and is washed multiple times during the process, then dried for 5 - 7 days on blue tarps. Once off the patio, the coffee gets hulled and put in wooden conditioning-bins for a couple of weeks. This homogenizes and stabilizes moisture content in coffee and gives it an extremely nice bright-green appearance.

​Again- click on images to be taken to our importer- Cafe Import's- site where we borrowed these awesome pics

The Koban Plantation coffee will hit all of our stores this week, becoming a regular feature as a batch-brew offering for a while. You can also try it as a pour-over, or take some beans home for yourself. In this particular cup, we taste a creamy, caramel body and mouthfeel with cloves and a lingering herbal aftertaste. It will prove to be a nice replacement for the El Guayabo microlot from Honduras that so many have come to enjoy. Come try it out!

A little more detail:

Farm: Koban Plantation

Region: Jiwaka Province, Western Highlands

Process: Fully washed and sun dried

Varietal: Typica, Arusha, Caturra

Elevation: 1,585 MASL