Lukas' kleine Kaffee-Welt

Roastery: Grand Opening

2012-02-16T22:33:08+01:00

Hi everybody,

I don't know wether somebody still reads this, but if you do, consider yourself invited to the grand opening of our roastery this saturday:

Unbelievable. We did it.

Enjoying the fruits ...

2011-11-12T11:48:30+01:00

This is a first for me: enjoying the fruits of my very own labour as a professional coffee roaster. A bit long in the making, but finally there:

Sure, that Kenyan I'm sipping right now. What else!

Want some? Only within our advent calendar, for now. Watch our Blog (there might be a post about my roasting experiences or so in the next few days, plus Jessica writes about designing the calendar) and subscribe to our newsletter to be notified for updates.,

Sorry for the commercial break, back to normal mode now. I'm just being a little proud here!

Roaster for sonntagmorgen.com

2011-10-12T11:04:39+02:00

So, the news has bean out for a while now: I'll be the roaster for Sonntagmorgen.com (I refrain from calling myself roast master at this time; this ought to be a title that is given to me one day from persons more knowledgable than I!), the newish Coffee startup I've worked on and off with over the past few years. We're currently in the middle of planning the roastery and getting all the necesserry permits (I did know living in Germany means we have to deal with our beaurocracy, but really I'd never have expected this to take such a big slice of my lifetime!), which means there's not much energy left to do much of anything at the moment (plus the fact that a seemingly simple window-and-door-replacement is taking ten times longer than anticipated (plus a kitchen renovation!)). So, exciting news for me at least, and I'll soon be roasting the first few batches for my new, well, employer! Though not in our own roastery yet, see above.

Sneak peak!

2011-09-16T19:26:19+02:00

This (sorry, german only) is a sneak peak into my future profession. Expect details tomorroy. Stay tuned!

Professionalism

2011-08-16T16:39:46+02:00

This was a long time in the making, and it's becoming more real every day now
and I really positively absolutly cannot hold this back any longer: I'm going to be a
professional coffee roaster, or 'Head Roaster' in the very near future.

There, it's out of the box - I've annoyed only my friends with this long enough now, time to annoy the readers (are there?) of this blog as well!
I really am so happy about it that I just can't find the proper words to describe
it.

It's fulfilling a dream I've had ever since I seriously got into coffee, which
must have been around 2004-something.

So what does this mean to me?

Firstly, I'll do professionally what I do in private anyway - roast coffee,
cup, enjoy, brew. Well, and then selling it as well, that'd be new!
It's just not the 200g-batch roaster anymore, but
likely a 12Kg batch roaster. There'll be loads of learning for sure roasting 12Kg
batches, just as there was with the last few hundred roasts of 200g batches. In
the end, I want to produce (And consume! And sell!) really good coffee, and being able to
do this in a commercial scale in a microroastery is really exciting!
Though I fear that screwing up a 12Kg roast will be much more costly and more people will be mad at me than screwing up a 200g roast, where it's just me and my SO ;)

Secondly, I am not so sure wether I can split my personality between
coffee-blogging-and-forum-posting-me and coffee-blogging-and-forum-posting-commercial-roaster-me - I just don't see
there being much of a difference. I still like to promote manual brewing, good coffee and everything that belongs to it. We'll see how that works out, so for now just
keep in mind that I'm also going to sell you coffee if you don't look too carefully. If it gets too annoying, feel free to slap me for it!

I'll talk about the details of how, when, what, where and why in future posts on
here, on TMC or the german Kaffee-netz. If you follow my twitter stream, you
might already have an idea about the direction this all takes. For the moment,
we struggle with the german beaurocracy and would have been up and running
already if I hadn't been so naive as to believe we'd pull this without month-long
formal propositions to the city administration and stuff like
that.

Early september, we'll hopefully receive a pre-decree telling us either to go
away (nay!) or to proceed with the real request (yay!) for the permit to open a
roastery at that specific place. And this already is the simplified variant of requesting such things, the 80's must have been horrible for opening a coffee roastery!

So, all in all not such a big difference to what I do anyway, except the formal
stuff (city administration) and having a much bigger lab than just the kitchen
to play with.

Now that will be an interesting ride!

Very excited to work with a few new and old friends together on all this!