Our new packaging is all about style and substance, showcasing the wonderful variety of beans we sell and the incredible flavours to be enjoyed in each freshly roasted bag. Which one is your favourite?
And we’re delighted for the opportunity to reveal all, because we’re immensely proud of our range and the distinctive, freshly roasted coffees in it.
All Roast & Ground coffees are sustainably sourced, fully traceable, speciality grade and chosen to shine with the equipment we sell. They’re hand-picked for workplace environments too, so you know they’re the kind of coffees that suit drinking throughout the day – not the sort that leave you so wired you can’t enjoy another later.
Now we’ve introduced new look coffee labels to tell you even more about the quality beans inside each pack. We source different types of coffee from all over the world to create reliably delicious espresso, flat white, latte etc – the more you know about it the more fascinating it becomes!
Think of this as a quick coffee guide, highlighting just some of the info you’ll find on our new labels and on the new coffee pages of our website, and why it’s important.
We source our beans from a mixture of single farms, producer cooperatives and regional wholesalers. When the pack specifies Single Estate (as in Roast & Ground’s Lot 84) it means the beans come from a specific named farm (in this case Daterra in Cerrado Mineiro, Brazil), and the coffee reflects that farm’s unique growing conditions.
Single Origin coffees, on the other hand, come from one country. Our Pick Me Up coffee comes from Columbia, while Pura Decaf is Peruvian, and both show the classic flavours of their respective regions: the Columbian is naturally sweet with gentle acidity while beans from the organic growers of Peru are clean and well-balanced.
Blends take beans from multiple origins and combine them, rather like a recipe, in order to produce a particular style of coffee. We’ve designed Forza, for example, specifically for lovers of Italian-style espresso, while Revival is a crowd-pleasing coffee designed to help you power through a busy workday. Our expert roasters fine tune each batch to ensure the blends have a consistent flavour year-round and perform beautifully in your coffee machine day after day.
ROAST NOTE: Your Roast & Ground blend might contain beans from just two coffee sources (Forza, Molten Toffee), or as many as four (Fuel Their Day, Revival).
Coffee grows in a tropical, equatorial belt, between 25° north and 30° south of the equator, often in locations boasting volcanic soil rich in nutrients.
Brazil, the world’s largest producer, is our go-to for smooth arabica beans with nutty and chocolately flavours. They feature in five different coffees in our range, from single estate Lot 84, to blends including our charity coffee Fuel Their Day, and Molten Toffee.
In contrast, Ethiopian coffees are characterised by bright, fruity and floral notes and lively acidity, while Indonesia’s full-bodied, low-acidity coffees are dark, earthy and cocoa-rich. You’ll find them both in Washed Bourbon, along with beans from Central America, which are known for citrussy, tea-like flavours with bright sweetness.
Our Revival coffee, meanwhile, combines beans from Brazil, Ethiopia, Central America and India, where coffees are typically full-bodied with rich notes of chocolate, spice, wood and earth.
ROAST NOTE: Whether a single estate coffee or part of a blend, all our coffee comes from mid- and high-altitude areas 1,000+ metres above sea level.
You might already know that Arabica is a premium type of coffee bean – these days the word is used to flag quality even in the instant coffee sector. What you might not know is that there are many different varieties of Arabica!
Bourbon is a prestigious, high-quality Arabica known for its exceptional sweetness, complex acidity and creamy body. We use it to anchor several of our Roast & Ground coffees – most notably Washed Bourbon, where we make a feature of its nutty caramel, chocolate and subtle fruit notes.
Caturra is a brighter, citrus-leaning mutation of Bourbon, one with a medium body and sweet, clean flavours. It’s widely grown in Colombia and features in our Single Origin coffee Pick Me Up, as well as in Pura Decaf and Washed Bourbon.
Typica (which is far from typical!) has a clean, sweet and elegant profile with gentle fruit and floral notes. Pache, a compact mutation of Typica, is known for sweetness and complexity. Neither of these are common in high street coffees, as they are premium varieties, but we use them in Pick Me Up and Pura Decaf respectively.
Mundo Novo, however, a hybrid of Bourbon and Typica, is a favourite in Brazilian blends from many roasters, including those on the high street. It can be found in our Washed Bourbon and Lot 84 coffees too.
ROAST NOTE: We only use premium Robusta beans and carefully source them from prestigious growing regions of India for Molten Toffee and Revival.
Just as important as the varietals we select for Roast & Ground coffees is the way in which the coffee fruit is processed in order to remove the bean from the cherry. The extent to which layers of skin, fruit, mucilage and parchment are left on, or removed, creates different taste profiles.
There are three main methods:
For Washed beans the fruit, including pulp and mucilage, is fully removed then the beans are left to sun-dry on beds. This gives the coffee a clean, crisp acidity, high clarity and light body.
In the Natural Process (most common in India) the whole cherries are left to dry in the sun with all their layers intact. They absorb sweetness as they ferment, creating coffees that are intensely fruity with a syrupy body.
Honey or Pulped Natural beans are somewhere between these two. The cherries are de-pulped but the sticky mucilage is left on during drying. The coffee beans that result have a balance of sweetness and acidity, with fruity notes and a medium body that’s great for espresso.
In our range, Lot 84 is made exclusively from Pulped Natural beans; Washed Bourbon and Pick Me Up exclusively from Washed coffee; and our blends include a mix of all these types.
ROAST NOTE: there is another process called Fully Washed, which features an extra final soaking of the bean after fermentation. You can taste it in Pura Decaf.
What can you expect from different levels of roasting? It’s actually
Our darkest roast is Molten Toffee, which is heavy-bodied, bold and bittersweet – perfect for mixing in milky coffees such as flat white and latte.
Our lightest roast is Pura Decaf. It’s a tricky balancing act getting light roasts to work well in bean-to cup-machines; this one’s successful because the fully washed Pache beans we’ve selected are ideal for espresso.
All Roast & Ground coffees are freshly roasted to order and, at headquarters, we look to hold no more than six weeks of stock, so you’re guaranteed the beans you receive from our 24-hour online shop will be on point.
ROAST NOTE: Our energy efficient roaster makes use of recycled heat and catalytic carbon capture in order to keep environmental impacts as low as possible.
The Specialty Coffee Association – a non-profit membership organisation of coffee professionals worldwide – rates coffees based on quality, value and ethical impacts. Any beans scoring 80+ are considered speciality. That means they are recognised for their distinctive sensory attributes, consistency and sustainability.
All Roast & Ground coffees score 80+ and amongst our highest scoring are Pick Me Up, our crisp, elegant, single origin Colombian coffee; smooth and chocolatey Lot 84 from Cerrado Mineiro in Brazil; and Pura Decaf from Peru.
It’s important to have independent assessments of quality – that way customers know that our coffees aren’t just great in our own opinion, but according to verifiable objective standards.
We hope you like the design of our new packaging, and learning more about the different coffees we offer. If there’s anything else you’ve been wondering about our range, just drop us a line.