Coffee from it's roots

Posted on: 2015-06-17 12:00 AM

Africa is home to all coffees in the world. It is the place we source our coffee from. Africa is also our home.

Our coffees are hand selected and direct sourced from origin. With years of experience in buying green coffee beans, we select only the very best Arabica coffees from Ethiopia, Kenya, Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda,DR Congo and other African coffee growing nations. Those selected are roasted on inhouse roasting profiles to produce our range of Black Mamba Coffee brands.

Many of our coffees are sourced from the mountains of Ethiopia - the birthplace of all coffees and the place coffee chose to grow long before man walked these ancient lands. Every coffee growing area of Ethiopia is searched and scoured to find the finest coffee; Yirgacheffe, Sidamo, Harrar, Lekempti, Limu, Djimmah and more...the search never ends. Each season brings a new crop with new cupping characteristics. It is truly a treasure trail.

Ethiopian coffees are heirloom coffees. Grown by small scale family farmers, high up on distant mountains, they carry on family traditions going back hundreds of years. Naturally selected for their excellence in taste and aroma, untouched by pesticides and fertilizers, grown using farming skills and practices developed over generations, these are handcrafted, hand grown coffee treasues.

Our purchasing standards are matched to a fair pricing policy for these family farmers. We do not pay less than $3/ lb for these green beans. By paying a fair price, revenues are generated in rural communities of Africa desperate for hard currencies to overcome poverty and suffering.
Sourcing green coffee beans of excellence is a good start but is just the beginning of a process to present the finest selection of African Arabica's to our customers. The next steps involve the logistics of shipping the green coffee beans out of the heart of distant African Highlands to our roastery in the Lake District of Illinois (USA), the roasting of the beans and finally the packaging and distribution of the roasted beans.

Before leaving Africa, Dave worked for several years working with a major African logistics company handling container shipments in and out of African ports and distributing them to inland locations over very tough road and rail conditions.and through difficult border crossings. This experience, so specific and so necessary when dealing with shipments of containers out of Africa's hinterland, is critical to the overall quality of the green coffee beans. Delays at border posts or at humid African ports can seriously destroy much of the beans' flavour and character.

Our focus on roasting only African Arabica coffees has enabled us to develop a great understanding of how best to roast these coffees. Roasting profiles developed in-house from this roasting experience, are critical to realising the full potential of these handcrafted coffees. Roasting quality into poor quality green beans is an impossibility. However, to realise the full potential of these coffee beans is the challenge of every artisan coffee roaster.

Even our roaster is selected for its capability to balance the incredible flavours and aroma's of these beans with the necessary body and mouthfeel. The Roaster was hand-built in Italy by a manufacturer whose many years of experience in the industry - combined with their natural, Italian flair and ingenuity -has created demand for their Roasters throughout the world. Using its distinct direct heating approach to the drum roaster, our coffee beans are roasted on in-house roasting profiles to create a coffee roast perfecting their body, balance, flavour and aroma.

With every step along the logistics chain, our focus is on providing our customers with the very best range of African Arabica's we can produce.

Our coffee is only roasted on orders placed keeping our coffee fresh and flavourful. Once the orders are collected together, the coffee is roasted, stored in bins to release the roasting gasses and then packed in custom-designed packs of 225g (1/2 lb), 450g (1 lb), 1 kg (2.2 lb) and 2.27kg (5 lb). Orders are received either via email, telephone or online through our online store.