OUR PHILOSOPHY

We are a team of coffee professionals aiming to understand what perfection means in the ever-evolving agricultural product we call “Coffee”.

After experiencing thousands of roasters and personally testing over 10,000 high quality competition-grade single origin coffees extensively, we’ve gained a truly rare perspective in our industry. Over the years we’ve found that too many coffee professionals are brewing with defective brewers, uneven extractions, misaligned grinders, and/or terrible mineral profiles in their water to be making great cups. On top of this, too many roasters are purchasing low-quality green, some aged beyond saving, and are roasting it to a point of loosing all of the acidity we work so hard to get and love so dearly. It’s truly mind boggling to see these mistakes happen so often. If coffee professionals aren’t capable of making great coffee, imagine the quality of coffee the majority of the consumer market is drinking.

We aim to spread awareness to make and provide truly incredible coffee to those who seek it out. Pit Stop Coffee Co. is a representation of the years of knowledge we’ve gained and the quality, taste, and experience that comes from this endless search of perfection in a seed.

If you love Specialty Coffee, and are constantly chasing the perfect cup, we can assure that you’re in the right place!

After all, helping people get to where they want to go is the goal here at Pit Stop Coffee Co.!

We roast with really small batches at a time to find our “ideal” flavor profile to then translate on a bigger roaster. We roast on the Nucleus Link to sample a wide variety of coffees, which we cup all of them blind side-by-side and then choose our favorite/s and purchase them.

We roast each coffee many different ways on our Aillio Bullet 1kg roaster (using 600 grams at a time) to learn the coffee inside and out, allowing us to discover the wide range of flavors for every profile. Once we find a roast profile (think of it like an extremely precise recipe), we save it in order to recall it with precision at any time we choose. This helps us constantly check ourselves and our process throughout the time we have that specific green coffee available. We store a bit of our green in 600 gram, vacuum sealed bags to prevent oxidation, moisture loss, and aging. Once we think our coffee needs a profile adjustment, we can pull these vacuum sealed bags to make sure it’s not our roasting enviornment that needs tuning instead. We will often tweak our profiles over the weeks if we notice any of these changes (this is surprisingly uncommon in this industry, and is one of the greatest detriments to Quality Control).

Then, when we’re in our busy summer season we roast a couple ~17 pound batches on a Probat Probatino 12 Kilo to fully dial in the coffee for production roasting. Constantly tasting our favorite profiles from each roaster, ensuring we are bringing out the desired traits of every coffee in a way that best pleases us.

Of course, this method takes much more time, but this way we can focus on maintaining a higher level of quality and consistency in our product compared to other roasteries.

Look at the image above. You have three different shapes that represent single origin coffees. In the last image, that collage of shapes (aka “blend”) compromises the beautiful color and defined shape these objects could have standing on their own. Think of these shapes and colors as defining your coffees flavor. We believe the individual colors/shapes are more interesting on their own. That’s exactly how we feel about 99% of coffee blends out there.

The idea of blending has become very confusing and lucrative. It was a marketing ploy for roasters to have their own proprietary blend and not tell anyone what was in it. It allowed producers to become unknown and underpaid, roasters could hide the defects of cheap coffees they bought, the old and staled coffees could be mixed in and disguised (happens all the time), and the coffee blend would be so under- and over-extracted due to all the different coffees it would have a ton of off flavors (or just taste boring, bitter and “brown”) no matter how you brew it.

Sometimes blends actually taste better than a roasters single origin coffees because they blend before roasting, leading to underdeveloped beans becoming “not defective” in an overdeveloped roast profile…So you can actually taste some flavors in a “baked” roast….It’s funny how this works.

Blends are used to purchase cheap coffees so they can be used in milk and especially sweet lattes here in the USA. Nearly every café has them. Roasters that decide to sell them can instantly become 5-10X bigger nearly overnight. It’s cheap, its “coffee”, and it’ll easily sell to give shops higher profit margins and stabalize their Cost Of Goods…

…It’s a no brainer for most, but for some people like us, blends often don’t improve the flavor experience of Specialty Coffee — they destroy it.

We want our customers and baristas to have fun experiencing new coffees all the time: discovering new flavors, regions, terroirs, varieties, and having an awareness of treating producers like music artists. Knowing their “genre”, what they find interesting, their personal style, and how this all impacts their cup. All too often, baristas and the average consumers aren’t as informed about these things because they’re drinking coffee that has been marketed as a blend rather than a single, unique product. We see each coffee as an exclusive product which holds value because it has its own story to tell.

All this being said…We believe blending can provide another unique experience to Specialty Coffee, but only when it’s done with care and precision. We expect to see the same amount of attention given to these blends as the single origin coffees, along with a story to tell its consumers about where it’s from, who created it, and why those coffees were specifically blended together…beyond just getting rid of expired green, hiding bad quality coffee, making higher profit margins, etc.

We’ve been known on our coffee bar to occasionally create blends using different roasters and origins of what is on our counter or in our freezer. Sometimes they taste fantastic, however most of the time we have to brew differently with defective brewers/methods to accommodate for the uneven extractions taking place in the brewer. For instance, a conical brewer provides an uneven extraction, so it makes sense to use one over a flatbed brewer that relies on consistency of drawdown/flow-rate all across the brew bed. With different coffees and roasts, you will have different flow-rates and extractions, so the idea of an “even extraction” brewer actually will do more harm than using an “uneven extraction” brewer.

For now, we’ll keep it simple and stick with highlighting the beautiful complexities of incredible single origin coffees.

A WORD FROM THE FOUNDER

First of all, If you’ve managed to read all of this, I am incredibly thankful for you to be here. It truly means the world to me that one person may read this and become inspired to create something new, wether that’s a new experience with our coffee, or it sparked a new passion to be creative, to venture into the unknown, to create or share something new, exciting, and beautiful.

I think coffee is all about helping others express themselves in that way - continually developing who they truly are through a connection with this diverse beverage. I believe drinking great coffee is an incredible way to help you live your best life.

Cheers to all of the wonderful experiences we’ve had, and the ones yet to come!