Common Grounds

Tonight we went to the first of 4 Monday night coffee tastings at a local roaster called Uncommon Grounds. Usually, we don't really like their coffee, but tonight's tasting really helped us to learn the story behind their business and the close attention they pay to helping the farmers who grow their coffee. I think it'll affect our perception of them and I can see us going there more often.

Tonight the tasting and info session was focused on Central and South American coffees, which is the region we prefer. We tasted coffee from Guatemala, Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Mexico. Next week they're focusing on Indonesia and the following will focus on Africa. The final class on 3/1 is all about home roasting, which is what we've gotten into lately, so it'll be a great final class for us. Maybe Cammy/Mom and Art/Dad will want to join us for that class...

There was a representative from La Minita coffee in attendance, which is a farm/company from which Uncommon Grounds sources their green beans, and we cornered him and probably borderline annoyed him with our barrage of questions. It was fascinating and very informative. It helped us to get one step closer to our coffee roasting empire. Hopefully he'll be a great contact to have going forward.

For those who don't know, we've been roasting our own coffee over the past 4 months and it's been awesome. We use an old electric popcorn popper but hope/need to upgrade to a proper coffee roaster sometime over the next couple months. We'll roast later this week and will document it and post pics.