In 2019, on the corner of Michigan Avenue and Erie Street in Chicago, Starbucks plans to open up its largest roastery concept location yet.
This 4 story location will not be a typical store location. Customers will get to watch coffee beans being brewed and packaged, and will also get access to special small reserve batches. The location is set to offer tours, multiple brewing methods, and specialty drinks and artisanal snacks ((continued))
The third wave of coffee is a term that was coined in a newsletter by the Specialty Coffee Association of America back in 2002, and essentially means that we are entering a phase of coffee production where it is becoming more artisanal and a craft coffee type of conception. We have so much control over a huge variety of coffee beans, and a wide range of places to grow them, ways to clean them and roast them, different waters to influence it just so. Coffee is entering the same arena that craft beers and micro breweries recently started dominating, and that wines have been in for quite some time.
In a previous blog we addressed how water extracts coffee from the coffee beans and how that process affects your coffee. But what about the water itself? Short answer: yes, yes it does.
Your coffee is about 98% water. What type of water you brew your coffee with actually makes a large impact as well.
Do you have soft water? Soft water is essentially how water falls from the sky as rain, and typically only has sodium in it.
And what about hard water? Hard water has a bunch of other minerals, and is generally what happens when rain water passes over ground into our waterways, and tends to have large amounts of calcium and magnesium.
There is no more sure sign that the concept of craft coffee is taking off than one of the world’s largest hard alcohols deciding to make a plunge into the other way to get people buzzed: caffeine.
Jack Daniel’s, makers of the in/famous Tennessee whiskey recently launched their coffee beans in conjunction with a craft coffee roaster. They’ve officially gone full circle- you can drink yourself into oblivion the night before, and then when you regret your decisions the next day but still have to work, you can pep yourself up with their…
