Profile: Seven Stars Bakery

It's safe to assume that if you're a local and you're reading the New Harvest blog that you've heard of Seven Stars Bakery. Heck, you've probably stopped into one of their three locations a few times this week. Since 2001, Jim & Lynn William's bakeries have become staples in Providence, churning out some of the finest baked goods around as well as a few hundred thousand cups of coffee.

You read that right, they sold over three hundred thousand cups of hot and iced coffee in 2012 and that's not even counting espresso based drinks. Considering that Seven Stars is first and foremost an artisan bakery they sure go through a LOT of coffee. Over 40 thousand lbs of coffee to be exact and they hold their coffee program to the same high standards as their award winning baked goods.

All Seven Stars baristas must go through a certification program before they can make you that delicious cappuccino you love so well. 3 weeks of classes on properly extracting espresso and milk science, coupled with 10-15 hours hours of bar practice, leads into in-store training with that locations head barista (each store has one). After their training program each barista is tested on every drink that Seven Stars offers and once they can hit 5 stars on each drink they become an official Seven Stars Certified barista. So next time you're in there and you see that phrase on the back of your barista's shirt, get stoked, because you're about be served a certified top-notch drink.

 

These outstanding baristas fall under the watchful eye of coffee director Mark Hundley, who stresses that across the board, consistency is key for 7 Stars. "We have customers that will visit all 3 locations on a regular basis and their drink needs to be the same in Rumford as it was at Hope St." says Hundley as we chat at the Broadway location. "We're committed to serving the best whether it's coffee or food."

Seven Stars is also committed to serving the local community. Each year on their anniversary, January 2nd, they donate 100% of their sales from all three locations to the Rhode Island Food Bank. Since starting in 2006, this tradition has raised over $60,000 for the food bank. In the fall of 2012 they introduced a new program called Community Giving Days. On the first Tuesday of every month a portion of sales from all locations is donated to that months charity.

You can read more about Seven Stars on their website or better yet, stop into one of their locations and chat with the friendly staff. While you're there, grab a tasty treat and pair it with a fresh cup of coffee or a perfectly extracted shot of Whisper Espresso, you won't regret it.

Coffee Clubs for all! Give 3, 6 or 12 months of coffee joy.

Question: How and when did you first start getting into coffee? Answer #1: Jim

Here's the first installment in a series of questions to get to know all of the New Harvistas better. Today Jim "Tuff Guy" Connolly, our main Tech Services Man (he can fix anything, people. ANYTHING.), tells us about how he first got into coffee.

I had been working a job with very long hours for a few weeks and eventually just "got in" on one of the many daily coffee runs. I started, like a lot of New Englanders, with flavored coffee with lots of cream and sugar. Over time i just started using less and less cream and sugar and eventually stopped with the flavored coffees in general. The next step was becoming a "dark roast guy." also, around this time I had started drinking coffee black. I was also drinking coffee more for enjoyment and flavor and not just to get through the day.

Getting a cup a coffee was becoming more of a social thing as well, meeting up with friends for coffee and such. I sought out local shops and tried to stay away from chains, not for any sort of political reason but the smaller shops just seemed to serve a better cup of coffee. A chance encounter with a furious headbanger named Devlin led to me learning a little about the New Harvest name and that really started me on the path to drinking better coffee. I guess if you think about it it also started me on the path to working here at NH. That means now it's my turn to headbang furiously until someones asks ME about coffee.

Kia Ora Estate, Nyeri, Kenya

When you grind these beans you will quickly note an aroma of sweet citrus and marzipan that progresses to dried apricot and tomato as the coffee and water begin in interact with one another. The earthy wine-like acidity and light honey body of this coffee are truly delightful and create a stable environment for the notes of date, apricot and red wine to exist in a perfect balance. Please take all the time that you need to enjoy the long, smooth finish.

Kia Ora is a very rare coffee indeed for it is an organic Kenyan coffee. How rare? Less than 1% of Kenya's coffee exports are certified organic. Kia Ora is one of seven farms owned by Kenya Nut Company (KNC), who are one of the top five producers of macadamia nuts in the world. The coffee itself is, in fact, intercropped with the macadamia nut trees. In the 1970's the Kenyan government tasked KNC to develop the macadamia nut industry in Kenya and they have since expanded to cashews, tea, wine and coffee.

This is a very limited offering from us so please do not miss the boat on this!

Finca Los Mangos, CooproNaranjo Microlot, Costa Rica

Beginning with a sweet aroma like milk chocolate and cinnamon that offers a slightly savory peak while it steeps, this coffee offers a clean and soft acidity and a very pleasant nectar-like body. Notes of milk chocolate, malt, citrus, and crisp apple will delight you on the way to a very clean and dry finish.

Finca Los Mangos is a source direct offering grown by the Blanco Family on a single hectare of land. We are proud to be the only roaster to offer this beautiful coffee. Because Los Mangos is so clean and sweet it is a great "all day" coffee. We love making iced coffee with it at the roastery but for hot coffee you might find that a chemex or other pour-over method works best to really accentuate the crisp and clean sweetness of this coffee.

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.

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.

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!