What To Expect at the Eastern Aeropress Championship

This Saturday we're shutting down our Baxter Avenue café a little early to host the Eastern Regional of the US Aeropress Championship. Invented by Alan Adler, the Aeropress is a single cup brewing device prized by coffee aficionados for its versatility and compact size. Many of our baristas are known to carry an Aeropress in their travel coffee kits and we couldn't be more excited to host coffee professionals and home baristas from across the East Coast. 

The bracket-style competition will pit baristas against each other in groups of three, with only one competitor advancing from each group. The top three competitors will receive an assortment of prizes from our sponsors Prima Coffee, Acaia Coffee, Baratza, and Able Brewing and the chance to compete at the US Aeropress Championship in Long Beach, California. 

The event starts at 7:00 PM and is free and open to the public. We'll have pizza and beer from Danville crafter brewers Beer Engine. With coffee professionals from over a dozen companies and 6 states competing- it's going to be a party. We hope to see you there! 

New Art Exhibitions from Michael Winters and Brad Vetter

If you stop in at our Baxter or UofL locations, you will notice some great, new art adorns our walls. 

Michael Winters is an artist that we love featuring here at Quills.  These next few months, you can see and purchase photographs from his Cuts and God’s Intestines series at Baxter Quills. Printed beautifully in black and white, large images from Cuts inspect tree trunks up close. Smaller images from the same series catalog different trunk segments on copper.

I read a poem called Measuring Rings in Sarah Well's book Pruning Burning Bushes. The primary image in the poem is a boy atop a tree stump. Through the poem she comes to realize that if the branches of her family tree had been cut off, like she at times wanted, she wouldn't have this precious boy dancing on the tree stump.   My brother asked me to cut down a tree in his backyard.  I liked the work.  And I liked the way the electric saw cut the ends roughly.  Something about seeing those cuts resonated with me and I started connecting these cut branches to my life experience, to the poem. 

Winters found the subjects of God’s Intestines while wondering around Hole-in-the-Rock, Utah.  On describing his name for the series: “A lot of western places have religious names - Devil's thumb, Hell's Canyon, etc.  I've never heard of a place called God's Intestines, but walking those narrow passageways felt like walking around in God's insides to me.” He captures elements of the landscape that can be  curious, quiet, and piercing. The photographs are printed both in black and white archival prints and on copper.

Michael Winters’ photography has been shown at Kentucky Museum of Art & Craft, Louisville Visual Art Association, Union University, Georgetown University and some other places.  He's just as happy to share his work in a coffee shop though.  As a full-time job, he's Art Director for Sojourn Community Church.  Additionally, he's in the process of starting a new business called MATERIAL, which is all about "photography in print", and offers custom printing, artist editions, and photography books. Winters graduated with a bachelor of fine arts from University of Louisville in 2005. More of his photography can be seen at michaelwintersart.blogspot.com

We have got a punch of color at Quills Cardinal Towne. Letterpress prints from Brad Vetter can be seen and purchased for the next few months. Vetter is originally from Louisville, went to Western Kentucky University, honed his letterpress skills at Hatch Show print in Nashville, and now works independently out of Chicago.  He travels the country hosting printmaking workshops and is dedicated to spreading the love of letterpress.  He has designed show posters for some of our favorite bands and has created freelance work that can be inspiring and fun. More of Vetter's work can be seen at bradvetterdesign.com 

If you would like to purchase any of the art you see on the walls at Quills, you can talk to your barista, call your Quills location, or email our Art Coordinator, Joanna Miller, at joannajustine at gmail dot com. 

Introducing Two New Coffees

Winter is in full force here in Louisville, but we have a couple of fresh crop coffees to warm up your day. 

The first coffee comes from Rwanda, from the Coopac Cooperative and the Kigeyo Washing Station. Coopac was been leading the way in helping Rwandan farmers produce organic specialty coffee. The premium that the farmers of Coopac earn for their crop has an enormous economical impact on the community. We love this coffee not only for its social influence but also its incredible quality. This Bourbon variety yields bright notes of fig and tropical fruit balanced by a rich brown sugar sweetness. All of this complexity is held together by a creamy body. It blew our quality control team away and we're confident you'll love it too. 

Coffee drying at the Kigeyo Washing Station in Rwanda 

Our other new coffee comes from incredibly diverse island nation of Papua New Guinea. PNG has been producing coffee since the 1920s when coffee seeds were brought all the way from Jamaica's Blue Mountain. Most of the coffee production in PNG comes from small subsistence farmers who grow small amounts of coffee in addition to other crops. This particular selection comes from the Waghi Valley of the Western Highlands. Coffee quality in this region has dramatically improved in the last few years with the completion of a brand new washing station. We taste a toffee sweetness, a citric acidity, as well as the herbaceous characteristics we've come to expect from Papua New Guinea. 

Read more about coffee in PNG from our partners at Cafe Imports.

Quills to Host US Aeropress Championship Regional

We're super excited to announce that we will be hosting the Eastern Regional of the US Aeropress Championship at our Baxter Avenue café on January 31, 2015. Eighteen competitors from around the Eastern United States will battle it out in a head-to-head tournament in which each competitor will have eight minutes to make a single cup of coffee with Alan Adler's famed Aeropress brewer. A panel of judges will pick the winner through a blind tasting. Read more about the competition at The Coffee Compass and register for the event here. 

4 Easy Ways To Improve Your Home Brew

Making coffee is probably something you do everyday. We often hear our wholebean customers comment, "your coffee always tastes better in your shops." While it is certainly true that our cafés utilize industry standard equipment operated by professionally trained baristas, there is also no reason why you can't enjoy fantastic coffee at home. In fact, most home-brew can be dramatically improved by taking four simple steps. 

1. Use a good burr grinder

Your coffee can only be as good as the quality of the grind. Brewing coffee is all about even extraction, which is the product of an even particle size. We recommend you spend most of your coffee budget on buying a good grinder. Grind immediately before brewing for best results. 

2. Use filtered spring water.

Louisville tap water is too hard to get a proper extraction. Essentially, all of those extra particles prevent the coffee from fully dissolving. You also don't want the water to be too soft, so filtered spring water produces the best tasting brew. 

3. Use a scale. 

The easiest way to get consistency with your home brew is to use a kitchen scale to weigh your coffee and water. Even small 1 gram difference in dosing can make a big impact on flavor. Considering how expensive good coffee is, this investment will soon pay itself off in coffee that isn't wasted. 

4. Use freshly roasted coffee

Coffee is at its best in the first 3 weeks following roasting. Rather than stockpiling large amounts of coffee we recommend buying smaller amounts as you need it. One easy way to do this is through our coffee subscription program. 

Once you tackle these simple steps there are plenty of online tutorials that can help you develop your skills and technique. Learning how to make great coffee at home can be a fun hobby, with real, material benefits. Chances are your friends and family will be glad you take it up! 

Photos by Matthew Stevenson 

Quills Indianapolis is Now Open!

We're excited to announce our Indianapolis café is now open and serving coffee to the fine people of Indiana's capital. Currently, the shop is open 7:00-2:00 pm daily, though hours will expand shortly after the holidays. In the mean time, check out this write up at The Coffee Compass to see more pictures of the space. 

New Coffee Alert: Colombia Banexport

A bright spot in a cold winter is Colombia's coffee season. And with the fresh South American harvest reaching our shores we're excited to welcome a coffee from Colombia's famed Huila region to our line up. Our friends over at Cafe Imports partnered with Colombia's Banexport group to source this wonderful blend of Caturra and Colombia varieties. According to Cafe Imports, over 96% of coffee producers in Huila are small, independent farmers with 1.5 hectares or less. (By comparison, some large coffee farms in Brazil can reach more than 3,000 hectares!) This coffee represents a blend from some of the very best small producers in the region. 

We loved this coffee so much we're not only offering it as a single origin but also selected it to be a component in our espresso blend, Blacksmith. We taste rich flavors of caramel and cinnamon with a crisp pear-like acidity. It's a barista favorite, and a real crowd pleaser. We're betting you'll love it too. 

Revealing Our New Logo and Coffee Bags

At Quills, we've always been about pursuing excellence: great coffee, great community, and great spaces. With how much effort we put into sourcing and roasting the best coffees possible, it's only fitting that we place just as much thought and intentionality into our branding. That's why we're excited to reveal our new logo and labels. 

Our new label not only features an updated aesthetic but also a new format. All of our single origin coffees will now be identified first by country, followed by the name of the farm, co-op, or region. In other words "El Eden, Mexico" will now be labeled as "Mexico, El Eden." It's a minor adjustment that we believe will help make our wholebean coffee more approachable for non-specialists. 

We're also dropping our "Top Shelf" designation. Initially our Top Shelf label was a way that we could introduce some slightly more expensive coffees to our line up. We believed it served its purpose. Although we continue to base our retail coffee prices on the cost of green coffee, we want to avoid communicating that some of our coffees are better than others. Quality and cost are related, but not synonymous. For example, our baristas often enjoy our Ethiopia, Konga just as much as our Mexico, El Eden, although the latter is more expensive. The different prices are more reflective of the costs of producing coffee in two very different contexts.

As a consumer, you can rest assured that we are still committed to roasting delicious, ethically-sourced coffee in small batches. With stellar offerings from Africa, South America, and Central America, we've never been prouder of our coffee line-up.