On Day 2, Instagram quit in the middle of us saving the Live Broadcast, but we had an awesome time chatting to Grant of Specialty Coffee Exchange who sponsored the Finals Round Coffee. Grant has been with us on this journey from year one and always brings in an exciting coffee for the roasters to play with.
"We love bringing in new, exciting coffees to the South African market. We're always looking to find something special and to keep pushing the quality that the farmers are working so hard at and rewarding them for it." says Grant
This is a sentiment echoed by the producer himself of the Rwandan Coffee used in ASITD competition, Emmanual Rusatira: of Baho Coffee, Rwanda: "Support for the coffee farmer is easy. Just pay a fair price for the coffee, we will show you the change!"
We also chatted to the legendary Cuth Bland (Bean There Coffee Company) who competed in the first year and switched to the judging panel from year two, before revealing the 6th and 7th places!
How long have you been roasting coffee and how did you get into it?
I’ve been roasting for almost 2 years now. After dreaming about a coffee shop for many years I very impulsively bought a second hand Genio and started roasting.
Why did you enter A Shot in the Dark? It was the right thing to do, if you know what I mean! (Ed's note: Andre was defending his 2019 A Shot in the Dark Title!!!)
What was it like to work with small quantities of these delicious coffees?
It was just huge excitement to open the bags and have a look at the beans in the first place. And then to wish you ordered more. And then the tension to know you got only one shot at it. But to eventually smell and see the beans developing into its full potential. That was the ultimate.
What was your biggest challenge and biggest lesson from this process?
My biggest challenge was to know the right time to release the beans into the cooling tray. I guess for me personally it was also important to learn that you can get so technical about the process that you forget to enjoy the art of roasting. Then to do it all over again and remember why you started roasting in the first place. And most of the time the roast turns out to be much better.
Finally it has arrived! Coffees from Rwanda & Uganda for the final round of Shot In The Dark 2020. Thank you to all the...
Posted by Roast Wolff on Tuesday, June 16, 2020
How long have you been roasting coffee and how did you get into it?
We have been roasting for about 2 1/2 years, we got into it being curious. We used and then modified our moms popcorn popper and got some nice results, until it blew up and then decided it was safer to get a coffee roaster instead.
Why did you enter A Shot in the Dark?
We saw that it could be a great vehicle to get our name out there more and gain some credibility in the coffee sphere. What was it like to work with small quantities of these delicious coffees? It was challenging because our production roaster is also our sample roaster. We find that roasting quantities smaller than 2kg at a time yields inferior results on our Genio 6, so in reality we didn’t get many chances to get the best out of the coffees.
What was your biggest challenge and biggest lesson from this process?
The biggest challenge was timing the roasting. We had to send our samples from CT which meant there was little time to test the sample we wanted to send because we wanted it as fresh as possible on the cupping table. Also creating a three coffee blend with limited time, limited coffee and no sample roaster is a challenge in itself. The biggest lesson was that win or lose at the end of the day we are all doing what we love.
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