ABOUT US
ABOUT US
Taste House all started in a café after an energetic exchange with Henry over a few cups of very mediocre coffee. ‘How can anyone serve up a coffee that tastes like this?!’ As any ardent coffee fan will know, we’ve all been disappointed by the taste of the coffee in our cup at some point in our lives, sometimes too often. This time, though, it really set us both off and our curiosity took over.
How difficult can it be to create a great tasting coffee? It’s just like creating a fine wine, we mused. You start with the best coffee varietal you can find, grown in the right soil, in the perfect climate to produce the finest tasting coffee beans. But (there’s always a but) if we’re going to do this, we want to create a beautifully made coffee that is capable of important reforms, important to both coffee producers and coffee consumers. Ours would be responsibly produced and we’d need to do everything right from the ground up.
With the challenge to actually do this set firmly in our minds, we arranged to meet with a coffee expert, a guy who has travelled the world, spent time with coffee farmers and tasted (cupped) over a million different coffees in a decade. He’d even set up a coffee school in Nairobi to train smallholder farmers about land management to increase yields, processing, barista training and the art of coffee tasting.
We were expecting someone older to turn up, wizened from the heat of countless trips to the coffee regions on or near the Equator. He was anything but. A young man about my same age arrived. Alex’s enthusiasm and passion was delivered with an abounding energy, he didn’t stop talking about coffee for ages. By the end of our meeting, we knew we had him locked into the idea. He was genuinely excited by the prospect of helping us to make this coffee masterpiece into a reality. With his knowledge we could actually make this happen!
It was in Alex’s house, on a small farm in Scotland, where we roasted batch after batch of his favourite bourbon coffee beans. The barn was a heady cloud of beautiful coffee aromas as we cupped our way through the coffee to perfect the timing of the roast. We were getting there…our Taste House coffee was now becoming a reality but there was still lots more to do….
