#rosetta roastery

I would love to go to here!!! Mostly because I always wanted to visit South Africa but also because the vibes look amazing 😍!!!

@RosettaRoastery now available at @yuppiechef. Well done to the Yuppiechef guys for teaming up with our favourite coffee guys.

Nothing else left to say really.

Everyone needs a good coffee bean grinder and normally you either find yourself either on the side of a dodge little cheap number or a R5000 barista champion as an option.

This Bodum grinder is nicely priced and does the job really well. A range of colours means that there is the perfect one for just about any kitchen.

Christmas needs good coffee.

Rosetta, Origin, Espresso Lab, Truth, Haas … The list of Cape Town based roasters goes on and on. Cape Town - small city but with a mother of an appetite (See what we did there?) for the black gold. The blossoming coffee city has another one to add to the list of independent roasters/bars: Bean There. This JHB based outfit has spread it's fair-trade tentacles into the mother city which to be honest seems a tad strange to us. Another one? Really? Are there enough Capetonians coffee-swigging layabouts to drink all this coffee? Sure there is an 'industry' (B2B) side to this tea-free tale but we still remain skeptical. Time will tell I guess.

Just saying their name takes us to a happy place. Rosetta. It's no secret that we are huge unashamed Rosetta Roastery fans, in our opinion they roast the best coffee in SA. There is just something amazing about the coffee, they really go beyond in delivering an amazing black gold taste sensation which leaves us wanting more. Rosetta's coffee personifications would make Oscar Wilde proud, well written and honest to the core. This month's South Africa awesome is dedicated to all things Rosetta and the guys give us a look into their world. If you live in Cape Town you better be drinking Rosetta, if you live in JHB or anywhere else in SA they kick ass at fast deliveries so you have no excuse. Give us a little intro into Rosetta…How long have you guys been going? When and where did it all start? Rosetta Roastery is a small but passionate team that sources single origin and estate coffees from South & Central America, Africa and Asia, micro-roasting each one to best present its unique personality. The three of us (Rob Cowles, Jono Le Feuvre and Jeff van Aswegen) met in the beginning of 2002 through a mutual friend, with all of us sharing similar interests in music, sport and an unhealthy admiration for Eddie Izzard. After a very brief courtship, we formed a band and moved into a digs together. It was in digs that our passion for good coffee grew immensely...and we began to dream of an outlet for that passion.

After working for "The Man" for some years, we decided to take the plunge and see where our vision (and our measly combined savings) would take us. Fortunately for us, we met an incredibly experienced and inspiring friend, Ian Scott, who serves to temper our youthful enthusiasm and ask us the hard questions we have to face to ensure that what we’re continues to make sense and add value. He became the fourth leg of the animal that was to be Rosetta Roastery (I’m the primary pillar, Ian is the fourth leg, and Rob is always the third wheel. That’s just the way it is :-). Rosetta officially opened its doors in April 2010, but according to my archives our first meeting took place back in February 2008. We really wanted to bring in coffees from internationally renowned regions and award-winning estates and so we spent a lot of time planning, focusing on our sourcing model and forming some key relationships with folk around the globe. I think one of the things that makes us as strong as we are, are the relationships we have formed with some of the global industries leaders and pioneers.

The Cape Town coffee scene is busting at the seams. Are there enough cool kids around to drink all the coffee? Well, hopefully the cools kids are the 'early adopters' here; there are many, many mouths still drinking stale, commercial grade and/or imported coffee that is generally brewed very poorly to boot. As long as attentive artisan roasters are producing the minority of the coffee consumed, there is space for growth. Is it far fetched that the average Joe (or Johan, for that matter) could actually become more quality conscious and spend the extra dosh? If you look back ten years and see how coffee consuming habits and trends have changed, I think there is a lot of opportunity for the specialty coffee industry to grow. We recently met with the founder and MD of the Cup of Excellence programme - they were both very excited about Cape Town's growing coffee culture  - saying we are positioned not far behind some of the leading cities in the world. Why not come to Johannesburg?

All good things in time...obviously there is a huge market in Johannesburg, and precious little good coffee available, but none of us are ready to sacrifice our sea views just yet! We do courier coffee to Jo'burg for a ridiculously low R40, with no minimum order quantity - at the moment that is how we can service Jo'burg best; we will see how things develop in the next little while.

We are proud to say that you are our favourite roasters, your coffee has a specific flavour that we battle to find everywhere. What makes your coffee this good? There are two points of difference in the way Rosetta Operates. The first is in the actual raw coffee that we buy. If you buy poor quality coffee, you’ll roast poor quality coffee, and then you’ll sell poor quality coffee. We make a point of spending huge time and effort on sampling and cupping as many coffees as possible, so that when we finalise our ranges for the upcoming season, we are confident that we have tasted enough to know that we have the best. There are roasteries that order hundreds of kilograms of coffee without sampling any of it. This obviously doesn’t make any sense for an outfit like Rosetta Roastery.

The fact that we never blend any of our coffees means that, if we buy something that is less than excellent, you as the consumer are going to taste it. The second area of focus is in the way we roast our coffees. The way we see it, coffee is a little like a piece of meat. You might love your fillet steak rare, but your pork chops are always going to best cooked through. In the same way, we’ll roast an El Salvador or Honduran Pacamaras very differently to the way we’d roast a Brazilian coffee. I think our attention to detail in this area, matching particular coffees to particular roast styles, is crucial to ensuring that we bring the absolute best out of the coffees we offer. So I am sure you have seen the trailer for Black Gold, the doccie about coffee and trade. It paints a pretty grim picture, as a part of the coffee cog how do you guys feel about the industry and it's hectic bits? On a philosophical level, the coffee industry is not the problem…it is the universal presence of human greed that is responsible for the “grim bits” in the coffee industry…and every global industry you can name. But I am aware that ethereal musings on the inherent problems within capitalism are not what you’re looking for. So to answer the question: I’d say there are two coffee industry “machines”…both very different to one another; commodity coffee, and specialty coffee. I’ll refrain from commenting on commodity coffee but choose to focus on what it’s like being a “cog” in the specialty coffee machine. In the world of Specialty Coffee, quality is of the utmost importance. Because of the way that specialty coffee, and in particular, single origin and estate coffee, is traded, there is far less of the “nasty multinational vs small farmer” and more of the “hands-on and informed broker alongside said small farmer”. In this context, any buying practice that seeks to undermine the growers has a far more immediate effect on a broker’s ability to buy great coffee. A farmer who cannot afford to keep producing his best will start to produce a poorer product. This is bad news for everyone in the specialty coffee machine, because, as I said, quality is of the utmost importance. In the most real and tangible way possible, it is in the direct interest of everyone in the buying chain that the guys at the start of this chain (the farmers) are educated, equipped, and compensated to be able to produce the best product they can. It is for this reason that Rosetta Roastery chooses to focus on coffee certifications that promise a price point (in the same way that Fairtrade does) and also guarantee an objective quality increase for that price (which Fairtrade does not do).

Certifications like Operation Cherry Red promise that every bean in your bag of coffee came from an absolutely ripe cherry, ensuring greater development of sugars in the cherries, and therefore a sweeter coffee. The consumer is guaranteed fairness for the farmer AND a better cup of coffee. In light of this, only a small fraction of Rosetta Roastery’s coffees are “Fairtrade”, but every single one of them is traded fairly. We pay far more than the Fair Trade price for all of our coffees to ensure the sort of quality we seek. In addition to this, the brokers we work with regularly donate updated farming equipment, and contribute to the costs of improving infrastructure for the farmers they work with. So how do I feel about the grim scenes shown to us by films like Black Gold? They appall me, and leave me with a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach. Do I think there are things we could be doing to address the situation? Almost certainly. What are they? I have no idea.

Have you met any of the farmers where your beans are from? No. But we’ve seen pictures of them… ;-) I think the romance of “shaking hands with the farmer” is a little passé. It was a symbol for a high level of transparency in the trade chain to be able to “shake hands with the farmer”, but to be honest, it is neither economical, nor a good use of the farmer’s time! He has much better things to do than to have to stand around shaking hands with a bunch of small time roasters. He has coffee to harvest!

There are incredible brokers in each region who make it their business to ensure transparency, broker fair deals, impart the latest farming techniques and equipment, share expert knowledge both with roasters and with farmers, and to form a reliable link between these two parties. Unless you are a massive roastery like Intelligentsia or Stumptown, with huge teams of coffee sourcers, who fly around the world 11 months of the year, roasters and farmers are actually best served by fair and honest brokers, who make it their business to ensure standards remain high enough to please demanding and discerning specialty roasters. Usually the only way to ensure high standards is to pay farmers enough money to grow their coffees with up-to-date techniques and adequate harvesting and processing equipment…which is why the coffees we buy can often cost us up to three times the Fair Trade price. There is one particular coffee we’ve just sourced, which costs us more than 10x the Fair Trade price…just to give you some perspective on coffee pricing structures. Do you think the average guy sipping on his cappuccino cares about Fairtrade? No. But there are people who look very disappointed with us when we say that only a few of our coffees are “Fairtrade”. Weirdly enough, those are often the same people who tell us that our coffees are too expensive. Which of course makes absolutely no sense. But I think a better question would be “Do people care about coffee that is traded fairly?” My reason for saying this is that only a very small percentage of coffee that is traded in a fair and sustainable manner is actually “Fairtrade coffee”. That’s why coffee companies will often say things like “We supports principles of fair trade”, even though the coffees are not “Fairtrade coffees”. (Off the record, I have written a blog article on Fairtrade vs fair trade, which can be found at http://rosettaroastery.com/blog/?p=70)

The 'personification descriptions' of your coffees on your site are awesome, if you had a coffee called 'elephants & easter' how would you describe it? I guess it would have to be African (or an Indian Malabar for that matter). Unwashed. Super full-bodied and earthy. And there would obviously be some chocolate notes in there somewhere. In your professional opinion what is the best way (cost & ease) for someone to prepare a great cappuccino at home? Unfortunately, the ‘best’ way to prepare great espresso-based beverages at home is neither hassle free nor particularly cheap! Realistically, most of us will need to make a compromise of sorts. So…
For absolute ease of use:
You will need to buy a ‘super automatic’ machine. This grinds, brews, froths and cleans up after itself. It might even throw in a little LCD ‘Good Morning!’ This will cost you R7 – R15k; so it is not particularly cheap, and the quality of the ‘espresso’ is, at very best, mediocre. 
If budget is your restriction:
 You will probably end up with steam-powered, or single boiler ‘semi automatic’ espresso machine – where you add ground coffee to the porterfilter basket, lock it into the group head and press ‘on’.

This will set you back R2 – R5k; the quality of your espresso will vary from horrific to almost passable – depending on your skill level (there are some tricks that can be learnt to make the most out of these machines) 
For the holy grail, you will end up dirtier and a little poorer than you’d like.
You need to purchase a good burr grinder – we cannot emphasize this enough! – and grind your coffee fresh, pre-brew. This will cost you about R2k. Then you need to spend about R9k+ to get a truly capable domestic ‘semi automatic’. Then you need to read a lot, practice a lot, clean up a lot, and then start again.  

So, the real solution for the man on the street is actually to look outside the realms of espresso. What we would recommend are a few fantastic slow-brewed methods that are far cheaper and easier to use. Consider some of these – Aeropress, Hario pour overs, Chemex, french press, or even the absolute show stopper piece – the siphon brewer. Using a simple combination of good brewing and simple filtration, truly great coffee can be enjoyed at home. Ask us if you want to know more. I remember reading on your site something about making the world a better place one cup at a time… what happens when we are all drinking good coffee? What are the Rosetta plans for the future? I don’t think any of us will live long enough to see everyone drinking good coffee. Partly because there will always be a huge part of the population who want nothing more than hot caffeine, and won’t be willing to pay more than a certain amount for it. It’s the same reason that boxed wine still exists.

The other reason I think that is because the definition of what makes a “good coffee” is always shifting and changing. At Rosetta our goal is not to convince everyone that our coffee is “good”, but rather to convince everyone that each coffee we source is a little journey of enlightenment worth spending time and money on. Each Rosetta Roastery offering is a foray into the amazing world of flavours and aromas that can be produced by the simple combination of seed and terroir. For us, the perpetual adventure of coffee hunting is that every harvest will produce new flavour profiles and possibilities waiting to be unlocked through the roasting process. Our plans for the future? Well, there is a Rosetta Roastery concept store in development, where we’ll be able to more tangibly represent our thoughts and philosophies on roasting, brewing and serving coffees. But we aren’t going to rush that, as we want to make sure we do it right.

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