OUR COFFEE
SINGLE ORIGINS
PROPRIETARY BLENDS
SPECIALTY ROASTS
OUR PHILOSOPHY
Hand-roasted, High Altitude
Why do we go to such great heights to hand-roast our proprietary coffee beans? The altitude allows us to roast them longer at lower temperatures, giving our coffee its distinctive, smooth finish without any bitterness. From our Roaster in RINO, we deliver small batches of beans to our stores a few times a week. Talk about a fresh cup of incredible ink! Coffee.
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The quest for the perfect cup
At ink! Coffee we don’t stop obsessing over every cup after the sourcing and the roasting is over. We know that how our coffee is prepared matters too. Signature drinks like our B&W (served hot and cold), perfectly extracted drip coffee, and artful espresso drinks are the result of our extensive employee training program. And you can taste the difference in every cup.
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We feel it’s the human element, not just the elevation, that makes our coffee rise above all else. Smell, sight, sound, and even touch are all equally important aspects of what we do, day in and day out—starting with raw green coffee beans. An experienced roaster can use their senses to determine how to roast them. Are they deep green in color with a bluish hue telling us that it was a recent crop? Do they smell grassy, rubbery, dirty or musty? Is the bean extremely dense and hard, as a good Central American bean should be? All of these factors are crucial to our work before the beans are even dumped into the roasting machine.
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When we finally “charge” our coffee roaster with a new batch, we’ve got a game plan in place from the get go. And our attention to detail is what helps us stick to that plan. First, we need to know what temperature to start the beans at and how quickly this temperature needs to rise. As the roast begins to “run” on us, going through its various stages of development, it can be a sensory overload. The beans change color from a rich green to faded yellow to a deeper yellow to chestnut brown. As the beans move through their ever-growing color spectrum, many other changes are taking place. Keeping a close eye, nose and ear on the beans lets us know exactly when to stop the roasting process or keep on roasting. It’s a complicated process meant for highly trained professionals. Luckily, we are that, and we have coffee roasting down to a highly-un-scientific science.