I stumbled across Heart Roasters by accident a few weeks ago. I’d promised 6 year old Nate & 4 year old Gabbi a special hot chocolate and the place around the corner wasn’t opened….so we walked to Burnside and voila…Heart! B I couldn’t wait to come back and find out more about this amazing space.B Located just outside the Laurelhurst Neighborhood, Owned by Wille (pronounced Vee-lay) Yli-LuomaB and in business for just the past six months–this coffee roaster from Finland takes his coffee very seriously.
First, Wille roasts every batch to precise standards and insists that coffee beans must be ground and used within 10 days of roasting! To this end, Heart Roasters are the only ones in town that give each package of freshly roasted beans a nitrogen flush to remove all the oxygen. This way beans remain in a constant state as when they were ground–until you andB I open them up! Who knew? I also learned that super dark and shiny beans do not equal ‘better, richer, bolder’. When beans get that dark and oily look, it means they’ve been over-roasted. Oh. WilleB would NOT want to see the coffee in my cupboard.
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The cool thing today was being at Heart as they were preparing for a ‘cupping’–an old world coffee tasting!B B What is that? Well, you roast some beans and then…..Pull approximately 30 glass cups, take beans from 10 different roasted batches, measure by weight precisely into the glasses, grind the amount in each glass and use your sniffer over each glass.B Wille, April, Josh and Mike were awesome to let me pepper them with questions. After they have breathed in the grounds for fragrance, boiling water is added to each glass for the coffee to bloomB and steep for 4 minutes.B This round of deeply smelling the coffee is to find the aroma of the grounds. 3rd step–the bloom is scraped off the top of each glass-this stops the brewing.B Last was one of the funniest thing I’ve seen–but similar to wine tasting–even complete with their own spoons…the special spoon is dipped into each cup and the coffee is ‘forcibly slurped’ (best word for it) into each testers mouth with great intensity so the coffee covers the palate and then it is spit out.B And that my friends is cupping.B
B Here’s my video of part of the cupping process! Cupping Coffee at Heart Roasters
