August 2024 Roaster's Newsletter

Posted by Scott Dorsch on August 14, 2024

Overview

Reflections from the Roastery
August Releases and Runouts
Feature: Clean Up, Clean Up

Monthly Features

Filter (Drip)

Isaias Reyes
Weathering the Storm Blend
Victor Deras

Pour-Over

Bayron Castellanos

Coffee Fun Fact

Caffeine, the stimulant found in coffee and 60 other plant species like tea, is a natural insecticide produced by coffee trees to help protect their seeds (aka beans) from pests. This is why coffee grown at lower elevations, where there is more pest pressure, tends to have higher concentrations of caffeine. For beings our size, caffeine offers a zap of excitement (maybe too much excitement for some) but imagine what that experience would be like if you weighed less than a few grams. It’d be . . .shocking.

Reflections From The Roastery

A lot has happened since we last spoke, hence the radio silence through July. Sorry about that!

It’s been busy, productive, and generally awesome. We are now fully solar powered at the warehouse; we have another production roaster prodigy helping us out around here in Ames Goldman (You’re crushing it, Ames!); we saw the boom of Coast Guard Festival, Unity, Bike Time, the many craft fairs and other West Michigan events; we’ve hosted a few beach and street cleanup efforts (more on that later); we now have our coffee at the Bridge Street Market in Grand Rapids; and, I’m working on a couple of exciting new coffees that will be landing this Fall (Stay tuned!).

And sometime in between all of that, our annual delivery of green coffee from Honduras arrived. All 65,000 pounds of it. If you haven’t heard, we self-import the majority of our green coffee from the Lempira region of Honduras with the help of our nonprofit, Aldea Development, who ensures the coffee is specialty grade and that all producers are paid well-above Fair Trade standards for their coffee. It’s an enormous logistical, physical, and mental exercise, but when you finally get a chance to roast and taste the fresh harvest and share in that level of a challenge with others, it all feels so worth it.

Big shoutout to the President of Aldea Development himself, Charlie Heins (aka Carlitos), for all the hard work in getting the coffee to Michigan (including his own wonderful coffee lots) AND helping us unload and palletize a whole container of coffee. I also want to send a big, special thanks to Phil Kennedy of KIN Coffee and Craft House, Aldea customer and all-around awesome guy, Anthony Lack, and Aldea’s own, Andrew Basset, for your strength and high spirits throughout the unloading process. To everybody else: Way. To. Get it.

I can’t wait to share this freshly harvested coffee with y’all. It’s fantastic. Some lots will be hitting the shelves over the next few weeks. I’ll keep you posted!

AUGUST RELEASES & RUNOUTS

August Runouts

Karolina Alvarenga |

Estimated Runout Date: August 15.

Expected Return: Early December.

Ramon Enamorado |

Estimated Runout Date: August 9.

Expected Return: Spring 2025.

Weathering the Storm Blend | This was a wonderful collaboration, but all good things must eventually come to an end. Get this special blend--and visit the John Steuart Curry Exhibit at the Muskegon Museum of Art one more time--before it ends!

Estimated Runout Date: August 30th.

August Releases

Victor Deras | Victor is back, back, back, with a fresh harvest. He is a graduate of Aldea Development’s specialty coffee training program in Honduras and has partnered with Aldea Coffee since 2013. Roasted medium-dark, Victor’s coffee is smooth and chocolatey with subtle notes of citrus and nut. It’s perfect for filter brewing or aeropress-ing at camp.

Release Date: August 16th.

Cleanup, Cleanup:

Reflections from an Aldea Beach Cleanup and Other Related News

On a windy afternoon in April, 22 Michiganders got together to clean up an estimated 33.7 pounds of trash from the beach at Grand Haven State Park. Mostly, it was plastic and cigarette butts, but there was the occasional sock and reportedly one melon (or was it a squash?) and a Jimmy Johns sandwich.

I arrived characteristically late and met the organizer of the event, Brittany Goode, a Team Lead with the Alliance for the Great Lakes and Director of Operations at Aldea Coffee, at the check-in table. Despite her hair whipping in circles and sand likely in her eyes, she was smiling. She gave me rubber gloves and a trash bag and pointed to the fence line—the park boundary—about a half mile away so I knew when to stop and turn around. There wasn’t much more to say. It was simple. Pick up human trash. And try not to get carried out into the surf!

I was off on my own, with many teams already scouring the beach ahead. The breeze was harsh—the kind that hurts the inner ear—but it mellowed the heat of the late morning sun. With my back to the lake, I got pretty good at using the wind to help keep the trash bag open while I tossed in countless amounts of tiny, unrecognizable bits of plastic and pop cans and candy wrappers and it was oddly pleasant. Meditative. And then, pensive.

I spend a lot of time at the beach as many West Michiganders do (woot-woot Muskegon State Park) and see this jetsam of litter almost daily, colorfully studding the tideline, but I never take the time to pick it up. Instead, I often just scoff in disbelief—how could we be so messy?

And perhaps we are. Trash doesn’t always make it to a landfill or recycling center. Too often it finds its way into our waterways. According to data collected from over 20 years of beach cleanups by the Alliance for the Great Lakes, 86% of all trash found in and around the Great Lakes is plastic, a type of waste that can never truly break down in water. It only gets churned into smaller and smaller microscopic tidbits called microplastics. It doesn’t really go away.

However, as I lifted yet another red piece of plastic into the billowing trash bag, I found the cigar-shaped scat of a raccoon in the sand. Then, the remains of a northern flicker, a type of woodpecker, strewn across the beach, likely by a hawk. Then fish heads. Gull droppings. Crow droppings and feathers, lots of feathers. What I saw amongst the trash were other signs of life leaving things behind.

The logic is fuzzy, no doubt (since all the items listed above are biodegradable), but it got me thinking about how cool we were in a way. Us humans. I mean, yeah, we bugger things up from time to time. But look at us, all 22 of us, one barely a year old (Shoutout to Gus!), taking some time on a Saturday morning to clean up after one another, together. There were even three humans dumping out all the buckets and trash bags to count and categorize all the garbage we picked up (1000 pieces of litter, it turns out).

I don’t know of too many animals that take the time to clean up their environment intentionally, let alone go through all the waste to learn from it. Now I know at least 22 of them and that’s kind of cool. There’s some hope in that: learning from our mistakes and trying to make things right, collectively.

That’s as human as it gets.

Future Cleanup Opportunities

Aldea Coffee has been organizing beach cleanups for years, partnering with the Alliance for the Great Lakes and the City of Grand Haven to pick up the shoreline near our cafes. It’s a big part of our sustainability and community initiatives, and speaking for all of us, we get a lot out of the effort. It just feels good (even when it is blustery outside).

This summer we’re partnering with businesses in Muskegon to clean up the city’s downtown area and parks like Heritage Landing and Kruse Park. Members of our marketing team, Elly Kuyt and Emma Versaw, have organized cleanups with Rake Beer, DTE Energy, and Pigeon Hill Brewery, with one already in the books: on July 26th, a couple dozen people cleaned up 53 pounds of litter from Western Avenue, most of which were cigarette butts!

If you or your family want to take part in our fun clean-up efforts, please join us at one or all of the following events!