The Cart

Enter The Cart

Our cart was hand made by our own Todd, out of reclaimed pallet wood which once transported our green coffee to us. He worked tirelessly hand planing the boards to uniform thickness and outfitting it with the best we have to offer.

Clean and simply outfitted, our cart is far from an eyesore. La Marzocco's GS-3 preforms under pressure and looks sleek and sexy. One cord runs to the cart, so no water hoses or tangles of extension cables will detract from what we are serving.

Perfectly pulled shots of espresso make for great drinks, and this machine is capable of doing just that.

Make your event more special by having New Harvest Coffee serving drinks brewed with love and attention. Our cart is furnished and ready to go to any event you can imagine.

Your wedding needs great coffee.
Your business needs great coffee.
We will provide.

Saturday Morning

Hey Everyone!
Cartoons aren't the only thing to look forward to on Saturdays. Come check out a killer farmers' market at the Hope Artiste Village in Pawtucket. We brew and serve our coffee freshly roasted right across the building. We would love to see you and hand you a fresh cup of coffee.

Here's the info!

Double-Double Shot, aka More NBA Coffee Fails

Check out this picture of Minnesota Timberwolves Forward Kevin Love serving drinks at a Starbucks! There is something terrible afoot in the NBA. These players are receiving the services of world class chefs and health experts and look at how weak the coffee situation is! Something needs to be done about this before the league falls apart. Although, Danny Ainge if you are reading this, Kevin Love looks pretty good in green, huh? Taking a Kevin from Minnesota has already proven to be a GREAT idea. Be greedy!

An Open Letter To Ray Allen

Dear Ray Allen,

WTF!? Flo Allen-Hobson didn't raise no fool!

Sincerely Concerned,

Eric Lepine

Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou

Here is something that was mentioned on our facebook page! It is a science fiction manga written and illustrated by Hitoshi Ashinano. The story is about an android that runs a coffee shop. If you like manga and coffee you can look at some of these comics on this site!

If you have something coffee related and fun to share with us we'd like to hear it!

Coffee Is Food!

Something that I think about often is that coffee is food. This idea is so simple and obvious that almost everyone takes it for granted. Working in the coffee industry, you realize pretty quickly that although coffee is everywhere, people don't generally put much thought past the grocery shelf or the coffee bar. Coffee is almost never further than a couple blocks from any of us. When you can buy it at gas stations, in vending machines, hell, you can buy coffee at TJ Maxx right now, it becomes pretty easy to lose sight of what coffee really is.

Coffee is the seed of a fruit, and not, as some would say, a fruit in and of itself. When you buy an excellent coffee from an excellent roaster or shop you can be certain that this coffee was treated as a food product, a fine food product at that. But how much of that coffee is representative of coffee as a whole? As it turns out, the specialty market is only 17% of coffee imported into the US by volume. That means the vast majority of coffee is of mediocre to low quality. I don't mean to presume that people dealing in these coffees are not treating their coffee as if it were food but I do think that it is certainly being marketed in ways that create a disconnect between farmers and consumers.

So much of coffee is provided in a setting of convenience rather than a culinary setting. Even when coffee does manage to find itself in a culinary setting it seems to more often than not be treated as an afterthought. How many times do you go to a great restaurant, the food is great and clearly of high quality, great care is taken in the preparation and then the coffee is horrible? Often a restaurant is serving stale pre-ground coffee that is prepared with little skill or understanding. Serving stale coffee is serving stale food! Preparing coffee properly should be important to a restaurant that takes pride in it's execution!

I'm not going to lay all the blame on restaurants. As consumers we would do well to treat coffee as a food. When you are buying coffee you should invest the same time and effort that you would selecting any fresh food. Also, because coffee is a food you will be rewarded for taking the time to prepare it properly in just the way that cooking a food properly is rewarding. I know convenience is not going to give up it's reign any time soon but if you've gotten to this blog it's certainly something you may like to consider.

If you haven't been to the roastery please let me extend this invitation to you. Feel free to come by and see coffee being roasted, see raw coffee from all over the world, ask questions and perhaps get a real sense that coffee is food.

Tuesday is Rik-Quote-of-the-Day-Day

Priceless.

My Crafty Mom

It's not Mother's Day yet but I thought I'd do a mom appreciation post today anyway.

Not only is my Mom, Michele, a coffee fiend (she drinks about 6 cups a day, that's about 5 times more than I can handle), and an awesome mom, but she is a crafting machine. If you come in to our Roastery Coffee Bar and look to your left, you'll see these fab coffee cozies that she made from recycled felted sweaters. There are little ones for coffee cups, and sweaters to keep your French Press warm. She also made that paper maché bowl that they're in. She's crazy.

My mom isn't selling stuff on the internet yet, but she and my sister and I have a little craft blog.

How does your Mom like her coffee? Michele likes our French Roast, made in a french press, with a little half-and-half, which she never stirs because she likes "clouds in her coffee".

I'm interested in hearing your family coffee stories too...does your family have some sort of weird coffee tradition that you've never experienced anywhere else? Or a cultural tradition that you still have an attachment to? My Aunt Susan makes her coffee every day in a drip machine with cinnamon in the grounds. I'd definitely couldn't do that every day (and also as New Harvest Coffee we wouldn't recommend it) but for me personally there's something familiar and comforting about drinking it once a year when we spend Thanksgiving in King of Prussia, PA.

It's a Mystery

Be the first person to successfully identify this in the comments below and get a free coffee drink of your choice at the roastery.

And try not to have any nightmares.

Summary of Roasting

Welcome to my little corner of the blog, friends! As my first contribution to this blog I thought I would keep things simple and just explain a bit about what I do here at New Harvest.

Coffee, as is often taken for granted, is an agricultural product. So before you get that bag of coffee at your favorite shop or market, we get it raw in an even bigger bag, about 132 times bigger. Coffee is the seed of a fruit and in it's raw state, it's not very useful to us. You can't really grind it and it's not very palatable. In fact, green coffee (as it's called) has "only" about 300 aromatic compounds (which would also contribute to flavor) but as it's roasted up to 600 additional compounds may develop via various chemical reactions and the order and time with which they occur. But let's not get too far ahead of ourselves!

Think of green coffee as pure potential. We source some of the best coffees in the world from all over the world and each one of them is different based on a variety of factors from what varietal of coffee it is, how it was produced, where it was produced, at what elevation it was produced, etc, etc... Our goal in the roasting process is to first identify the potential for qualities that we like in each coffee, second, to figure out how to achieve and maximize those qualities and third, to be able to repeat that process consistently each time that we roast a particular coffee.

There are a few different types of roasters but at New Harvest we use what is called a drum roaster. This is probably the most common type of roaster. The way that it works is that coffee is fed into a horizontal drum which sits over a flame and 2 heating elements. There are 2 S-shaped fins inside the drum that keep the coffee inside moving to help promote a more even roast and help prevent scorching. There is also airflow being directed through the drum which in our case would be used to control any quick response we need in temperature. When the coffee has reached our target temperature and time it is discharged into a cooling tray which uses airflow and agitation to bring the coffee to room temperature quickly enough to end the roasting process and prevent scorching.

As the coffee is inside the drum it goes through several stages. The first stage occurs when the chaff, the papery outer shell of coffee, similar to a peanut skin begins to separate. The chaff will collect inside a bin under the drum or else essentially be vaporized in our afterburner. In the next stage the chlorophyll has been burned off from the coffee and it changes from the original drab green color to yellow. At this point a significant amount of moisture has also been lost and the coffee begins to actually roast. Soon enough you'll begin to see some browning as various chemical reactions begin to take place such as the Maillard effect. Eventually the coffee becomes hot enough that the cell structure begins to breakdown and will start to crackle in what we would refer to as First Crack. There is also a Second Crack.

Any changes you make at any point during the roasting process will affect what changes can and will happen later in the roast. A simple way to think about this would be to imagine that a change in the coffee occurs that we will call Red and we make a decision to have a Blue reaction and so our end result is Purple. But say we decide to have a Yellow reaction instead. The our result is Orange. And therein lies the trick to coffee roasting in drastically oversimplified terms. In order to get a coffee to where we like it, we need to create a chain of causes and effects, further complicated by weather patterns, constant moisture loss in stored green coffee, etc, etc... AND it has to be repeatable.

In a way, what we are doing is polishing these coffees. We are attempting to refine something that already innately possesses something great. This was a very simple overview of the process and if you have any questions you can feel free to e-mail me and I will address them on the blog. Even better, you could always stop by the roastery and see it for yourself!

We heart Farm Fresh

Today, Senator Reed came through our building here at Hope Artiste Village to tour Farm Fresh's new warehouse space and home of Market Mobile. Market Mobile is an amazing program that allows chefs to purchase food grown and produced here in Rhode Island. Chefs go online and peruse the weekly offerings from each farm or producer, order what they want for that week. Farmers receive the order, pick, fill and deliver to the Market Mobile warehouse where it is sorted and then distributed by Farm Fresh. We have been thrilled to see our coffee landing in some of the best eateries in town. For more information and a list of farmers, producers and restaurants using Market Mobile go to www.farmfresh.org.
Thank you to all of Farm Fresh for continuing to support and nourish our local food culture.
Thank you to Senator Reed for spending so much time touring the building and.... we are thrilled to see the Senator drinks his coffee black!

Whisper

Happy Wednesday!

Senator Reed is coming through here today. I'm nervous.

Here's Whisper...this blend makes some killer espresso. Come see for yourself.

This little dude will be available on a t-shirt very very soon...

Public Cuppings!

Starting this Friday 3/25

Good Morning

It's a rainy Wednesday. I'm alone in the office listening to the new Kurt Vile, which is especially excellent on a gloomy day. We have peanut butter cookies for sale from Seven Stars at our Roastery Coffee Bar. Perfect.

(fyi this monster is also on hoodies and t-shirts, available for purchase at our headquarters, and soon on the website...)

Steam Roller Blend

"A solid blend for all: bittersweet chocolate from the aroma to the finish, complimented by toasted nuts, subtle lemon and creamy cocoa at the end. A Source Direct blend of coffees from our friends at COOPRONARANJO in Costa Rica."

It's also a tribute to the rich history right on our doorstep. You can read more about the fascinating story behind the Providence Steam Roller here, and more about the stadium they played in, the now non-existent Cycledrome, on one of our favorite websites: Art in Ruins. Look for another new blend in tribute to the Cycledrome soon!

The above logo is actually based on the Providence basketball team of the same name. The NFL team had this weird wolf-man logo, which none of us can explain, and apparently neither can the internet. Do you know why there's a wolf-man?

It's a blog!

Hello from New Harvest Coffee! And welcome to our new blog.

Lots of exciting things are happening around here...check back here and on our facebook for updates and more information.