“Hi, come on in. Can I get you a coffee? Perhaps our extra special custom coffee blend? It’s speciality coffee, freshly roasted earlier this week and totally unique to our business.”
Imagine saying that to each new customer who walks through the door or popping it on your Instagram story. What a way to build your brand – and get customers queuing out the door!
Great news coming up, café owners… we can make this happen by creating a custom coffee blend just for your business.
Our Coffees
Here at Two Chimps Coffee, we source and roast the best single-origin, speciality coffees. Unlike commodity coffee (the low-grade stuff you find at supermarkets and most chain cafes), speciality beans score highly when ‘cupped’ by professional Q Graders. They are picked by hand rather than stripped from the plants in bulk, ensuring only the ripest beans make it to your brew. These are lush, full-flavoured beans with breathtaking natural sweetness. Best cup ever? Quite possibly.
We roast our sustainably sourced beans multiple times each week. Roasting in small, 12kg batches guarantees inch-perfect coffee every time, while our frequent roasting schedule means you’re always serving cups brimming with awesome taste.
What is a Coffee Blend?
Whilst the flavours of a single-origin coffee are exceptional by themselves, something pretty cool can happen when you blend. Tastes mingle together, flavour nuances interlace in the most amazing cup you can imagine. We like to think of it as a firework display, coffee style!
Simply put, a coffee blend is a unique mixture of two or more single-origin coffees. Single-origin is a slippery term in the world of coffee. It should refer to coffees from the same farm or lot, but companies often use it to describe coffees from the same country. This is a flawed way to get a sense of that coffee’s flavour because coffee beans from one part of a country can be very different from those grown in another. You won’t find this kind of ‘single origin’ at TC. All our beans are fully traceable, meaning we can follow them right back to the farm or association that grew them. This helps to set our blends head and shoulders above the rest, as we know their flavours to a T and can combine them accordingly.
Some roasteries create blends to allow them to replace their coffees from time to time with ones that taste fairly similar. Blending might also be used as a sneaky way of masking unwanted flavours in poor-quality beans. Our blends don’t follow either method. We create bespoke coffee blends from speciality beans to create sensational flavours and help you stand out from the crowd.
Custom Coffee Blend
Want to join in the fun and create a custom coffee blend for your business? Then, you’re in the right place. Come and spend the day with us at the Two Chimps roastery and build your bespoke coffee blend. We will start with blending two single-origin coffees 50/50 and then tweak it to 80/20, 60/40 or even 50/25/25.
We tend to steer clear of using more than three different coffees in a blend to avoid imbalance in the final cup. The average espresso portafilter holds 7g of coffee, and we like to ensure every cup has a happy ratio of the different coffees in your blend. Using a mix of seven coffees, say, makes this balance almost impossible; you might serve a cup containing 1g of each coffee today and a cup with 3g of two coffees plus a smidgen of another tomorrow. Blending two or three coffees helps you to avoid this and serve up balanced brews every time!
The blend recipe you create is yours to keep. It won’t be available anywhere else or served in any other café or restaurant cups. You can name it, design a bespoke label and add stickers – whatever you want. What a way to set your brand apart!
Pre or Post Blending
When you develop your custom blend, you’ll select from a range of already-roasted coffees. The process of blending after your roaster (that’s us!) has expertly roasted your beans the coffees is known as post-blending.
This knocks the socks off the pre-blending approach, which involves mixing the selected green (unroasted) coffee beans together before roasting them as one batch. Different beans all respond to heat in different ways, which makes tailored roasting recipes so important. Rather than bunging multiple single-origin coffees in the roaster at one time, as is the case with pre-blending, we roast each coffee independently to enable it to reach its full flavour potential on its own. Then, it can go on to play a stellar part in your oh-so-delicious coffee blend!
Tension or Harmonious?
When it comes to blending, there are two different types of approaches you can take. The first is tension blending. This process is all about contrast. Think maple syrup and bacon or PB and jam. You choose coffees with opposite tasting notes to create a blend that’s intriguing, complex and all round delicious! You might, for instance, choose a coffee with rich notes of chocolate and hazelnut and team it lighter and fruitier partner. And that’s it: you’ve created a tension blend! This method can sometimes produce utterly fascinating coffees, with different flavours‘ fighting’ against each other.
Harmonious blending is the opposite. Here, you’re looking for coffees that complement each other. An example would be pairing a biscuity sweet coffee with one showing hints of chocolate. And, voila, drinkable chocolate digestive!
Sourcing Speciality Beans for your Coffee Blend
We source every coffee for your blend ethically and sustainably from small, independent farms and associations worldwide. Seasonal sourcing (the only way to get the best-tasting beans) means our individual coffees change every so often, but we always make sure to source coffees with similar tasting notes to the coffee it is replacing.
Because our beans don’t come from a conveyor belt, your blend might evolve from time to time. Introducing new coffees is always exciting, and we work with you to develop a fresh, adapted blend your customers will love. Equally, if you fancy more coffee fun, you can come to the roastery and develop a brand new blend. You’re always very welcome!
Whether you’re buying our standard single-origin coffees or topping up on your bespoke custom blend, you’ll always receive freshly roasted coffee delivered as and when you need it. We give all our lovely wholesale customers a call each week to say hello, see how much coffee you need and answer any niggling questions you might have. We’re a small, family-run team and put you first all the way!
Support
We roast and blend your bespoke coffee each week, but the fun doesn’t stop there. We’re on hand every step of the way. You and your team can look forward to social media posts and spotlight features on our blog. You’ll also receive all the info you need to tell the world about your awesome custom blend.
So, come on over, let’s have a coffee party and make a bespoke custom coffee blend today. Coffee doesn’t get much better than this!
Meet the chimp behind this article!
Head Chimp founded Two Chimps alongside Laura in 2016 after being self-employed from the age of 21. He caught the coffee bug from using an at-home roaster, and the rest is history!
What Andy does outside of the treehouse:
When the weather’s nice, Andy loves going on bike rides with his trusty sidekick, microchimp Felix (who always leads the way, of course). Andy also enjoys spending time tending to the family’s vegetable garden, and looking after their at-home farmyard, which includes a cat, two guinea pigs, and six chickens!
Andy says…
“I believe every day is a school day, and I’m always looking for opportunities to stick my head in a book and absorb new knowledge. I also love a problem to solve and fix – there’s no such thing as problems, only solutions.”
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