My friend Hilary Henegar over at Granville Online posted a a couple of days ago about how she engaged through social media and about how they listened. They're good like that. As V.I.A.'s coffee sponsor they keep our office caffeinated and we love them for it but beyond delivering amazing, fair trade, organic coffee to our non-profit every month they deliver a level of engagement with their customers that is tough to beat. It's one thing to have a QR code on each bag of coffee so that you can hear the story of that particular batch right in the grocery store before you even buy it, it's another to have somebody manning your social media channels and actively talking to your customers. Ethical Bean has both.
And speaking of engaging, they had me in for a "cupping" at their facility earlier this week, which is basically tasting a variety of different roasts, slurped up from a spoon in a controlled environment. The spoon pictured below is a "ceremonial spoon" that they gave to me as a gift along with that handcrafted pouch all the way from Guatemala. Nice! The coffee wasn't too shabby either.
The cupping was done in Aaron De Lazzer's lab where he experiments with different roasts and handles all of the quality control. I'm not sure exactly what his title is but I'm going to deem him The Bean Master. That chart on the left contains a whole bunch of different elements that he rates the different beans on. That's him on the right.
This is one of Aaron's scientific gadgets that he uses. It actually measures the degree of the roast based on the color of the coffee.
After the cupping our friend Michelle Sexton suited me up with a beard net and a lab coat and we went into the roasting facility.
Behind me are a ton of beans. Probably a few tons, actually. Here are some bags of them about to get roasted.
This is a big coffee bean roaster. Not much more to say about it.
And finally, donuts! They've just recently begun producing organic, fair trade donuts and donut holes on site and I can attest to them being delicious.
Thanks for having me, !
