Espresso Roast, Crafted for Excellence
In my time at Starbucks I have lead dozens, and possibly hundreds, of coffee tastings. There have been quite a few celebrities that have come through here, and in most ways I eased into these cuppings with the instantly recognizable personalities.
My first tasting here at Starbucks corporate headquarters was one of the most stressful. I was a barista at the time and was asked to come in and lead a Roaster Event for Espresso Roast. That was pretty exciting and fairly easy. As a partner who had four years’ experience in our stores at the time, there was no coffee I knew better than Espresso Roast. I couldn’t be more prepared.
Two days before the event I got a call from Jason of the Coffee Engagement team asking if I was ready to lead the cupping. I answered easily “absolutely.” Then I was told that the other guests would bea famous Seattle restaurateur and the original creator of the blend, Dave Olsen. About 700 people showed up for the event!
I tossed out my original idea to talk about how much Espresso Roast means to the company with metaphors about heart, body and crema. Those are things every store partner knows, so in the end I just talked about the flavors we love – great caramelly, roasty sweetness.
And who could tell the story about Espresso Roast better than the man who created the blend? Dave Olsen described how he and the original founders of Starbucks were at the roasting facility near Fishermen’s Terminal. They talked about what would be needed for a coffee that could carry its distinctive flavors through 6 to 12 ounces of steamed milk.
As Dave tells it, “We all loved Kenya coffee for its very distinctive flavor and acidity. We probably started with something around one-fourth Kenya in the blend, and it might as well have been 100%! Those great qualities of the Kenya completely overwhelmed the other coffees, mostly Central Americas. So we reduced and then further reduced the proportion of Kenya coffee in the blend, finally determining that the right proportion of Kenya was … zero!”
Since that day I have had the pleasure of working on the team where we focus on maintaining the consistently excellent flavor of this coffee. Every bag of Espresso Roast, be it the one-pound bag you take home or the five-pound bags our coffeehouses use, should taste as you expect no matter which roasting plant they originate from. Part of what makes this a challenge is that coffee is an agricultural product and flavors vary from year to year. This means the components in the blend may change, but the flavors will stay the same as they were about 30 years ago when the blend was first created.
Every day we cup and evaluate coffees for their flavor profile so that the finished product (in this case Espresso Roast) will be as good today as it was then, and so that whether it’s in Singapore or Seattle, it will give you that same sense of pleasure.
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