'HOLIDAY BLENDS' BOX JAN. 2023

Dec 19

Written By Kayla Clark

‘HOLIDAY BLENDS’ BOX…

… features three of Pour Ta Coffee’s fan favorite roasters featuring Bird Rock Coffee Roasters (San Diego, CA), Cartel Coffee Co. (Tempe, Arizona) and Little Waves Coffee Roasters (Raleigh, NC). The award winning cast in this year’s holiday box showcases the 2012 and 2022 Roast Magazine ‘Roaster of the Year’ recipients.
*Image: Little Waves Coffee Roasters*

From the Owner and Last Best News:
“It’s revel coffee because revel means to ‘take great pleasure or delight,’ so I want to continually offer exceptional coffees that one can take great pleasure or delight in,” owner and head roaster Gary Theisen Jr. says.
He selects optimal beans, roasts them for favorable expression and then brews an extraction that highlights what Theisen calls “the intricacies” of the coffee. He says the coffee should “ideally expose the utmost sweetness and origin in the cup.”
Theisen developed a taste for coffee early on.
“I actually started drinking coffee when I was a 2-year-old,” he says. “I had asthma and coffee helped open my bronchial tubes.”
At 15, he worked at Todd’s Plantation Gourmet Coffee Roasters downtown. There, he crossed paths with a customer who roasted green coffee beans in a popcorn popper, which later inspired Theisen to experiment with this technique.
These days, Theisen has a roasting operation in a warehouse on the West End, processing a “couple hundred pounds” of coffee per week. He roasts samples that vendors send him and then blindly evaluates the brewed results. His goal is to “try to find coffees that are exceptional and unique.”
From the Roaster:
This blend embodies those warm and fuzzy feelings of comfort we all crave. Of being home for the holidays surrounded by our loved ones. Its sweet notes of toffee, bundles of joy, and mimosas, perfectly pair with slow mornings and breakfast in bed. ⁠
TASTING NOTES
mimosa, toffee, bundles of joy
ORIGIN
Peru & Ethiopia

From the Roaster:
This coffee holds a special place in my heart. It is from the Grupo Terruño Nayarita in Nayarit, México, the state that my father is from. I first saw roasted coffee from the Nayarit region in 2014, on the shelves of Victrola Coffee in Seattle, WA. I got so overwhelmed with excitement about the fact that coffee grew in Nayarit - this was the first I knew about it.
In 2015 when co-owner Leon and I went to visit family in Tepuzhuacan, Nayarit, we reached out to Jim Kosalos (founder of Cafés Sustentables de México and San Cristobal Coffee) to see if we could visit the farms where that first bag of coffee I saw was from. Jim graciously invited us to visit, and so Leon, my uncle, and I took the bus to Tepic and met up with Jim. He handed us the keys to a Volkswagon Bug and up the mountain we went.
He showed us around the washing station, the drying stations, and through the small towns where the coffee was grown. We were able to meet a lot of the producers and workers from those stations and got to hear their perspectives and needs in the value chain firsthand. It truly helped shape our approach to sourcing, one in which we consider the wide array of coffee grown in one farm, lot, or community and figure out a place for all of it while taking into account our own standards of quality.
We started roasting coffee in 2017, and I have been waiting to get my hands on this coffee ever since. This year is our third year having the privilege to purchase 20 bags of a naturally processed coffee from the group of women from this community in Nayarit and I am so excited to share it with our community. It feels so rooted and ancestral to be working with this coffee and I am forever grateful to Jim, Devorah, and their team, as well as the producers from Grupo Terruño Nayarita who allowed us into their space and opened up to us about the struggles of producing coffee and how we can support them.
From the Roaster:
A minor miracle can be the result of an approach to the world. It can be the feeling of relief and rejuvenation after a long privation.
It can be living in uncertainty and still seeing assets over deficits. It can be an excuse to breathe deeply, put your worries aside, and feel joy and love with others.
It can be feeling grateful for the goodness of others and people leaning into the beautiful, wondrous plurality of people, world, and universe.
Some days, it’s just managing to get out of bed, or catching the bus right as it pulls up. Maybe it's finally nailing that recipe, talking to someone you admire and are seeing for the first in a long time, or connecting with the person you used to run into at the cafe.
Minor miracles will be personal to you.
We hope that our holiday blend helps evoke feelings of gratitude, kindness, and love, and a willingness to extend those gifts to the people in your life. We hope you can share it with others, safely in person or by sending them some and savoring it in unison.
Happy holidays, y’all. We're so thankful for all of you!
TASTING NOTES: mulled wine, cherry cordial, and piloncillo in a warming cup
ORIGIN: 40% Natural El Salvador , 30% Kenya , 30% Colombia

From the Roaster:
Cartel Coffee Lab was founded in 2007 by Jason and Amy Silberschlag. The Tempe-based roaster now has eight locations across Arizona and spots in Austin, TX and Palm Springs, CA. The key to Cartel’s rapid success has been their “expertly sourced and roasted coffees”. Cartel also embeds a data-driven approach to maintaining equality in their workplace. Under the leadership of Chief Operating Officer April Baum, Cartel has eliminated the gender wage gap among their employees, which are majority female. Cartel has also adopted proactive policies to combat the potential for gender or other bias related to compensation of its managers.
From the Roaster:
A limited time offer washed/natural microlot single origin Colombia with notes of milk chocolate, berries and a velvety body.
TASTING NOTES
Milk chocolate, berries and a velvety body.
ORIGIN
Colombia