A week in the roastery.

Notes from the shop floor, week thirty-one.

Mondays are for roasting. The Probat is on at 06:20 so the drum is up to temperature before Marek walks in with the first bag of green. First charge in by seven; last drop, on a heavy week, around three.

We work in five-kilo batches. Anything smaller and the profile becomes finicky; anything larger and the drum takes longer to recover between charges than the coffee wants to wait. Each origin has its own approved profile stapled to the wall above the roaster, written out by hand, updated in pencil after every session that changed something.

Tuesday

Cupping day. Every batch we roasted the day before gets tasted at eight-thirty, blind, with a spoon each and a stopwatch. Notes are short. If a batch does not match the profile in the cup, it goes to staff coffee and we roast it again on Wednesday morning.

Wednesday

Packing. Bags are one-way valve foil, sealed at the top with a hand crimper; the label goes on last because it curls if the bag is still warm. We pack in order of the queue, oldest orders first, so no roast sits in the shop longer than forty-eight hours before it goes in a courier box.

Thursday

Admin. It is boring. Invoices, boxes, courier bookings, the standing order for cupping cups because Julia keeps chipping them on the sink.

Friday

Quiet. We drink the coffees we rejected on Tuesday and think about the next lot. Sometimes we roast a test batch of something we are considering; more often the machine stays cold and we clean.

That is the whole week. There is no seventh, hidden roast we do not tell you about, no bulk drum we rush through on Saturdays. Five origins, one Probat, one Monday. If it is not on the wall, it is not in the bag.

Filed from ul. Św. Krzyża · Kraków

What natural process actually means.

On drying beds, patience, and where the fruit ends up.

A washed coffee is soaked, scrubbed and dried; a natural is not. That is almost the whole story, but the almost is where it gets interesting.

When a ripe coffee cherry comes off the tree it is essentially a stone fruit — the bean is the pit. Washed processing peels the fruit off within hours and ferments the sticky mucilage away in tanks of water. What dries is a clean, pale bean that has never really met its own juice. That is why washed coffees taste transparent: you get the seed, not the fruit.

Natural processing does the opposite. The cherries dry whole, in the sun, on raised beds or patios, for two to four weeks. The fruit slowly ferments around the seed the entire time. The bean absorbs everything — sugars, acids, the odd note of over-ripe berry that pushed the timing on day nine.

The line between perfumed and pickled.

Done well, a natural is perfumed: jasmine, ripe stone fruit, sometimes red wine. Done badly, a natural is a vinegar bomb with a compost bottom. The difference is almost entirely the drying: even beds, daily raking, protection from rain, and the discipline to stop when the moisture reading says so, not when the schedule says so.

Our Yirgacheffe is a natural. The station near the Beriti mill dries on bamboo beds under shade cloth, and the beans are turned by hand every three hours during the first week. It is a lot of work for a floral note in your cup on a Tuesday morning in Kraków.

The middle categories.

The two others worth knowing are honey and pulped natural — the fruit is pulped off, but the mucilage stays on during drying. They sit halfway between the two extremes. Our Cerrado is pulped natural; the round, cocoa-heavy sweetness is exactly what that process is good at.

None of this is a hierarchy. Washed is not cleaner-therefore-better; natural is not funkier-therefore-worse. They are two different answers to the same question: how much of the fruit do you want in the seed?

Notes · Roastery reading list

Sourcing trip: Huila, February.

Neiva to Pitalito, and up the mountain to El Mirador.

Neiva is warm and flat and smells of diesel. Pitalito, three hours south by minibus on a road that behaves like a rumour, is cool and green and smells of rain. From Pitalito the last farms are another hour up gravel switchbacks in a Toyota that Elias has owned since the year his oldest was born.

This is the fourth February we have made the trip. Elias Ospina farms twenty-eight hectares at fifteen hundred metres, half of it Caturra, half Colombia variety. In 2022 we bought one container from him; in 2023, two; last year, three; this year we cupped the samples in Kraków in November and told him to hold the same volume regardless of how the market moved.

Why go at all.

The reason to go, honestly, is not the coffee — the coffee is settled long before anyone gets on a plane. The reason is the wet mill. This trip Elias showed us the new drying beds, doubled since last year, and the moisture room he built into the side of the sorting shed after the November rains cost him a lot of parchment.

Wet-mill work is what determines whether a good farm becomes a great farm. Cherry gets sorted at reception; underripes and floats are removed; the depulper is set for the size of the bean that week, not the size it was two weeks ago; the fermentation tanks are cleaned between every lot. None of it is dramatic; all of it is the difference between our El Mirador tasting like red apple and cane sugar, or like a wet cardboard box.

The cupping table.

We cupped every day-lot from the current harvest. Twenty-three cups, laid out on the concrete counter, poured at four in the afternoon when the shade came over the yard. Two lots stood out. The one you are drinking is one of them.

We left three days later, on the same road in the other direction, with green samples wrapped in butcher paper and a bag of chapulines Elias's mother had insisted we take. The container followed six weeks later. It is in a warehouse in Antwerp now, and it will be in your bag by autumn.

Trip notes · Huila, February 2026