Winter Warmer Special Dark: Behind the Scenes of our Newest Seasonal Coffee
For the last four years, our winter Seasonal Blend has been Winter Song. While we've loved the blend, this year we wanted something new—a coffee that still felt how winter feels after the holidays, but with a fresh flavor profile.
(All photos in this blog are unedited extras from our Winter Warmer photo shoot!)
Most often, our coffee selection process begins with our Green Coffee Buying Team or more rarely, our Marketing Team. This was one of those rarer cases where the idea for a refresh on this Seasonal coffee came from a customer survey we recently conducted through email. We received a fair amount of requests for another dark roast option in addition to our customer favorite dark roast, Addicting Liquid, and our Jeff Ruby's Signature Blend, a medium dark roast with caramel and vanilla notes.
A new dark roast coffee seemed like the perfect option to introduce during the longest and darkest days of winter. So our Green Coffee Buying Team got to work!
When tasked with choosing which coffee(s) to roast for the new Winter Warmer Special Dark, our Green Coffee Buying Team—comprised of Justin Carabello, Shannon Savage, and Kelly Combs—initially planned on creating a blend of as many as three coffees. Because they knew that they were creating a darker roast coffee, and that the finished coffee was to be very cozy and balanced, they chose only washed coffees: two from Honduras and one from Nicaragua—all three from direct relationships we maintain.
Typically when creating a blend, the team will do smaller sample roasts of the different blend options. This time, however, instead of doing a standard 100 gram sample roast of each coffee, which would be a light roast, they decided to do a full 15lb production roast of each that went a bit into the darker range. Even though this was way more coffee than the team needed to roast for this experiment (and they had no plan for what to do with the leftover roasted coffee), this was really important because it was the only way to be able to taste how each coffee would perform as a darker roasted coffee.
Justin, Shannon, and Kelly began by cupping each individually, a standard Coffee Industry protocol for sensory evaluation. Then, they brewed each coffee in a Clever Dripper and began to construct some potential blends of all three coffees. This is where things got really interesting.
Going into this project, the Green Team thought a blend of the three coffees was going to produce the best resulting cup profile. Surprisingly, as the team tasted as many as 6 different blends of the three coffees, they kept coming back to the fact that the Honduran from Finca El Puente tasted superior by itself compared to all the blends. This really caught them (and the rest of us at the Carabello HQ) off guard! But honestly, from a sourcing standpoint it was actually the best and easiest thing for us to manage. Hence, Winter Warmer Special Dark is actually a Single Origin!
Once the Green Team decided which coffee would be our winter Seasonal, our entire HQ Team had a lot of fun coming up with the name for the coffee before landing on Winter Warmer Special Dark. Here are some of our rejects: In the Bleak Midwinter, Cozy Cabin, Winter Warm Up, Winter Elixir, Cozy Up, Defrost Your Soul, Hearth Tonic, Fireside Brew...there were more, but these are the ones that make the most sense! (If we could have brought back our beloved Kayon Mountain in the winter, the winner definitely would have been Go Tell It on the Kayon Mountain.)
As our first dark roasted Single Origin, Winter Warmer Special Dark hits on notes that both devoted Single Origin fans and those who prefer Addicting Liquid can appreciate. In the cup we taste Chocolate, Molasses, Warming Spices, and a Touch of Smoke. This isn't a fruity cup at all, yet somehow even our most staunch Natural-loving employees have loved this coffee! We think that's a testament to the sheer quality of this Washed coffee from Honduran producers Marysabel and Moises Caballero. Read more about them and the Geisha of theirs we just released!
