One of my old regulars came by today after a long hiatus. He bought some coffee and some brewing equipment. He also took this cool panoramic shot of both espresso bars. Enjoy!

Red Rock plans to resume hosting Saturday morning tastings in the New Year. These will be about once every month. Stay tuned to the website, follow us on twitter, or email our Director of Coffee to hear more about our plans. We'll resurrect old favorites like the introductory tasting and more advanced formal coffee cupping. We are also talking about an espresso tasting and a class where 1 coffee is tried via 5 different brew methods as an exploration of coffee equipment.

A couple weeks ago, we wrote about our excitement at the return of the Ethiopia Welena Suke Quto as a single origin drip coffee. In the back of our minds, we were also hoping it would make a good single origin espresso for the 2nd bar. And has it ever! As an espresso, it delivers red fruit flavor - like raspberry, strawberry, and cherry - as well as enveloping sweetness throughout. Drop by Tuesday - Saturday between 9 and 3. Maybe this coffee will, as one of our customers put it, "change the way you think about a shot of espresso."

Our single origin coffee list rotates seasonally. This has the benefits of serving a fresh product and getting excited about new offerings. However, sometimes it gets frustrating when supply of one of your favorites runs out. This is tempered in some cases by Direct Trade relationships. Our roaster, Four Barrel, returns to some of their most amazing farms each year to cup their new harvest. Coffees that continue to make the grade are purchased year after year for everyone's enjoyment.
The Ethiopia Suke Quto is one such coffee. We loved this coffee last year for its deep, brilliant red fruit quality. The origin makes its return this year with an even cleaner cup quality. It is aromatically floral before sitting syrupy sweet like honey on the front of the palate. You should come try a cup!

This will be an exciting summer at the Red Rock. The unfortunate side of the story in Kenya is that poor coffee growing conditions have driven production very low. The positive flip side of this is that there are fewer trees to take nutrients from the soil and fewer cherries to take sugar from each tree. This resulted in a much higher proportion of AA lots - the highest grade in the Kenyan auction system. Our roaster Four Barrel cupped over 400 auction lots in Kenya this past year. They whittled this down to a marvelous selection of only 11 coffees. We will be receiving shipment of these coffees in pairings to offer contrast, rotating to a different pairing every few weeks. Some of these promise to be among the best coffees I have ever tried. My mouth is, in fact, watering as I type about them.

We're thrilled to announce a new format for our coffee tastings. Come by the 2nd bar any Tuesday at 3pm for a free coffee tasting. We'll experiment with a variety of preparation methods, including cupping, French press, Chemex, syphon pot, and espresso. We'll also try the full range of our coffee selection, including samples before they're available for purchase. We want you to experience all coffee has to offer, and we hope it's fun to try over and over again. Join us whenever you can.

We have a new espresso bar. The 2nd bar will be pulling single origin espresso and serving handcrafted coffee from 9am -- 3pm weekdays and Saturdays. Come try our favorite coffee of the moment prepared as espresso or your favorite coffee of the moment prepared as a fresh cup of drip. And get your coffee nerd on with one of our most talented baristi.

It is currently a busy season for coffee turnover. We are losing some favorites and discovering new ones. Our new offerings hail from Ethiopia, Costa Rica, and Guatemala.
The most exciting coffee for most of our staff right now is the returning ETHIOPIA SHAKISSO MOREDOCOFE. Last year we carried dry-processed lots of this coffee. This year we will be featuring the wet-processed lots. Those who experienced Panama Geisha at Red Rock in the past will enjoy the harmonizing floral and fruit notes carried on this cup's tea-like body. This coffee is purchased annually from producer Haile Gebre through a Direct Trade relationship.
My personal favorite is the COSTA RICA SAN JUANILLO DON JOSE. This crop delivers honey-sweet smoothness that is characteristic for the country. It adds its own flair by finishing with a smooth smokiness reminiscent of fine Scotch. We are privy to this sample after the cancellation of the Costa Rica Cup of Excellence competition. Four Barrel managed to get their hands on some of the lots that had been selected for the competition, and we are thrilled to share this one with you.
Finally, we are proud to add another solid GUATEMALAN to the menu - OJERCAIBAL. The archetypal big body tastes of semisweet chocolate. This is marvelously balanced by the sweetness and acidity of maraschino cherries. Ojercaibal is not a region but a project. A community of 1,300 in San Jose Poaquil, Chimaltenango, compiled this lot from 61 small home gardens. Four Barrel's purchase of this entire lot supported infrastructure development in the form of schools, cooking appliances, clean water, and waste management. So you can enjoy this coffee along with its impact at source.

Sharlena, our tea-lover extraordinaire, poured this beauty in soy mocha. A customer posted it on our twitter feed.

Our introductory coffee tasting was a lot of fun. We enjoyed classic Colombian El Jordan Reserva, bright Kenya Gakuyuini peaberry, savory Sulawesi Toarco, chocolaty Guatemala Concepcion Pixcaya, and stunning Kenya Kangunu. Popular choice mirrored our current favorites, with most people taking home the Pixcaya or the Kangunu. Contact John for more info on future tastings.

Since the last entry, two new coffees have been added to our menu. Both are Latin American, but their only similarities are sweetness and cleanliness of cup. The first is a new COLOMBIAN microlot. Named for farmer NORBEY SANCHO, this coffee is exceptionally clean. It opens with crisp lemon and finishes with pure cane sugar, reminding the drinker of lemonade. The cup is a smooth and well-balanced experience. A small microlot, look for this coffee to stay on our menu for less than a month. The second new coffee will have a much longer shelf life, as is typical of coffees from GUATEMALA. This year, Four Barrel bought the full lot of SAN JUAN CONCEPCION PIXCAYA. This coffee will continue to develop in complexity as it ages throughout the next 5 or so months. The cup opens with sweet marshmallow, finishing with big, clean, chocolaty body and subtleties of orange zest.

Hello, my name is Brendan...

This past Saturday we hosted our monthly coffee tasting. Eight people attended this introductory tasting, and all of them had a blast. We tasted smoky Sumatra Gajah Aceh, balanced Costa Rica Montes de Oro, bright Kenya Gakuyuini peaberry, sweet Kenya Kirimara peaberry, and the spectacular Colombia Huila Rodrigo Romero microlot. The Rodrigo was the favorite of most, but the Costa and Kenyans were well-appreciated. For information on future tastings, please contact Director of Coffee, John Dustman.

A New Decaf

Shockingly, one of the most exciting changes to our menu is the decaf single origin offering. If you aren't in the shop often, you may not have heard much about the Four Barrel decaf program. There are two primary reasons that decaf coffee tends to be nasty. The first of these is selection of beans. Most exporters assume that they can get better value on their best coffees if they sell them in the caffeinated form and reserve their lower quality beans for the decaffeination process. The second reason for the bad taste of decaf is the process itself. Common processes often use chemicals to flush the caffeine from the bean. An alternate method, the Swiss Water Process, uses only water and solid filtration to remove 99.9% of the caffeine whilst retaining most of the flavor. Four Barrel has addressed both of these problems by buying green coffee from their direct trade relationships with the same standards for their regular single origin menu and then paying to have this coffee put through the Swiss Water Process. The farmer still gets top dollar for all of his/her beans and all of us get to enjoy excellent decaf. In this case, the new coffee is DECAF ETHIOPIA SIDAMO SHOYU. It is a naturally processed coffee with strawberry and blueberry flavors shining through.

The Caff Half

In addition to this decaf, we have added two regular coffees to the menu. Our most exciting new coffee is KENYA KANGUNU, which was bought at around four times the cost of most fair trade coffees. The coffee delivers on both acidity and body. This rare combination is best described as cranberry and plum on the front with a long, dark chocolaty finish. Our second new offering, PANAMA DUNCAN ESTATE, is sure to be a solid, crowd-pleasing coffee. The cup is quite well balanced, with low acidity and medium body. The flavor profile includes subtle hints of banana, grape, and vanilla.

We are thrilled to announce the arrival of a new Colombian microlot. We will be carrying the RODRIGO ROMERO on an exclusive basis from Four Barrel. The 3 bag microlot comes from Rodrigo's farm at 1800 meters in southern Huila.
The coffee opens with clove, giving way to pear and cherry acidity. The cup cools to show honey and is remarkably smooth throughout. We'll be serving the coffee for only the next few weeks. Get it while it's hot!

Since the beginning of the year, we've been happy to carry the Clever coffee dripper, brought to us through partnership with green coffee importer Sweet Maria's in Oakland. We use it in the shop to brew Handcrafted Coffee, giving you the power of choice of any bean we carry, the guaranteed freshest cup possible, and a little one-on-one time with your favorite barista. The Clever makes an excellent cup by combining the steep time and rich cup of a French press with clean filtering and cup-at-a-time brewing advantages of a pourover cone. Since we sell the Clever, we thought we'd share a few brewing hints with you.

- use a #4 brown Melitta filter and wet it before adding coffee
- warm your cup with hot water
- grind to about a drip coarseness
- we use 3 coffee scoops of whole beans with 10 ounces of hot water to brew about 8 ounces of coffee
- let the grounds steep in hot water for about 4 minutes, stirring halfway
- keep a saucer on top throughout the brewing process to retain heat

New May coffees have arrived. We have two KENYAN PEABERRY auction lots that are similar in their clean cup character but dramatically different in flavor profile. KIRIMARA offers herbaceous dill and fennel then cools into blackberry and huckleberry. GAKUYUINI provides acidity via raspberry, red licorice, raisin, and lime. Finally, we are happy to serve our second new Central American coffee of the year, COSTA RICA MONTES DE ORO. This Direct Trade coffee delivers the balance typical of Costa Ricans with panache. Floral aromas translate well into the cup, where they blend with honey, butterscotch, apricot, and white grape.

For the second consecutive year, Red Rock was happy to donate a full coffee tasting to the Cherry Chase Elementary School's annual walk-a-thon. This allows us to neatly tie together our values of Caffeine and Community by bringing the coffees to the peoples. Our guests were treated to sweet Ethiopia Sidamo Mordecofe natural, savory Sulawesi Toarco, chocolaty Guatemala Bella Carmona, complex Burundi Kinyovu, and decadent Colombia El Jordan Reserva. All the coffees performed well on the French press. The Mordecofe was the darling of the tasting, with more than half of the tasters taking it home as their free bag. For information on future tastings, contact John Dustman.

a Red Rock macchiato paired with our new delicious single origin Venezuelan dark chocolate

Brendan steps up to his new part time role as Assistant to the Art Director by posting some fresh art on the 2nd floor and serving up drinks like this.

Red Rock barista trainer and evening supervisor Aaron Moon dropped this in a mocha. Love the fat heart at the top of the rosetta!

Red Rock is pleased to announce a relationship with a new roaster. We are proudly serving Four Barrel coffee. Look for our selection of single origin coffees to expand and to change frequently to keep everything fresh. We hope you enjoy our new take on coffees that are all sweet, clean, and balanced.

Another submission from our Bar Manager, Brendan McCarthy. No great marker for scale in the pic, but the drink is a macchiato and the cup is a three ounce demitasse. Owned.

A contribution from our tea specialist, Joy Farber

If you check out this blog on a regular basis, you might think Brendan is our only barista who ever pours latte art. He is actually the only one who regularly sends me his pics.

For years, Red Rock was proud to sell coffee from the Rusenyi co-op in Rwanda in support of Project Rwanda. We are now thrilled to announce the release of an amazing new coffee in support of an equally tangible impact in source country. Andre Luiz Reis is a naturally-processed coffee produced by the Dos Costas co-op in Brazil. Starting September 18th, we will be drip-brewing this coffee, pulling it as a single origin espresso, and selling the whole beans in support of upgrading the co-op's drying patio. This investment into their processing capabilities will allow them to produce with greater quality and quantity for years in the future, resulting in direct payout to the farmers and visible benefits to the surrounding community this co-op supports. Come try some!

still more strong work in teh latte category from teh Brendan

A few Red Rockers had the opportunity to visit Four Barrel on Valencia in the Mission in San Francisco. We were jealous of the simple menu and the magnificent taxidermy. Check out the picture of Dustman with his rosetta'd macchiato.

I think this is some of my best work in the cappuccino category. ~John Dustman

Red Rock hosted its monthly tasting on Saturday morning. We enjoyed the surprisingly chocolaty body of Honduras Las Capucas, the tobaccoy chocolate tones of Sumatra Gayoland, the brilliant berry of Mexico Nayarit, the herbacious, buttery body of Sulawesi Toraja peaberry, and the winy complexity of Kenya Ruera peaberry. We'd love to see you at a Red Rock tasting in the future. Contact Director of Coffee John Dustman for more information.