By Calum Taylor

You may have noticed something new and different over the last few weeks, in our coffee bar, or wherever else you may see our coffee. A little more life and colour on the front of our coffee packaging. These here are the new symbols we have introduced to stand alongside our coffees. Each of the four symbols highlights the different category of flavour and the different kind of experience you can have when drinking that particular coffee.

We would like to think that our coffee can be accessible to anyone and everyone, so we want to group different coffees into different broad sections, allowing our guests to more easily choose the certain flavour profile they would like to enjoy. Not everyone loves every individual kind of coffee, and so we want to point our guests as easily as possible in the direction where they are going to get the absolute best personal experience. The symbols themselves are a fun and lighthearted way to highlight the existence of the different categories that we have chosen and make it clear and easy to see that a certain coffee belongs to a certain type of flavour profile.

So, what are the flavour categories that we have chosen, and what are the new symbols that stand alongside them?                                                                           

 The first is Round and Sweet. These coffees are typically very balanced, low acidity coffees with flavour descriptors that are very traditional when you think of coffee. Flavours like dark chocolate, marzipan, and honey.  This type of coffee that is very crowd-pleasing, that is enjoyed by young and old alike. Just like our coffee Jorge Vasquez Honey from the Roble Negro farm in Costa Rica.

The symbol we have chosen for this category is the humble bee. The bee is such a generous and graceful insect. It goes about its day collecting nectar and pollen and produces wax and honey as a collective.  The cyclical nature of this process is what makes it so round and sweet for us.                                                            

 We have chosen the category of fruity to be represented as a flower.  Any fruit you can name, they all originate from nature first as a flower. These coffees are of course fruit-forward, clean tasting, and elegant. The world of coffee is so diverse and expansive, you can think of Kenyan coffees that can taste of blackcurrants, Ethiopian coffees that can taste of peach, or Colombian coffees that can taste of orange. A coffee under this category that is just shining right now is Kiangoi AA from Kenya.                                                

 Lastly, we have crazy. For us, these are truly special coffees. Crazy in a way that makes you believe that it could not coffee you were drinking at that moment. Flavours that, at least in a traditional sense, you wouldn’t associate with coffee at all. These types of coffees are generally very limited edition, and generally varieties under the arabica family that are both very low yielding from an agricultural viewpoint, and also very sought after. Geisha variety coffees are ones that quite often fall under this category, just like Daniel Monge Geisha Washed.

The symbol of the colourful rainbow depicts this perfectly. Something so unusual and unique, shining down towards you from the heavens. That is just like these coffees.

What all four symbols have in common is that they are all elements of the natural world. All exist inside an interconnected ecosystem, depending on other elements of the natural world for them to thrive. Just like coffee. Coffee plants thrive best in a diverse environment, surrounded by forests with other plants species and wildlife. In this environment, all the interconnected systems contribute to rich, healthy soil, from which the coffee plants can receive the nutritional value they need to produce abundant, sweet fruits.

It’s the quality of this that ends up in your final cup when you drink your morning coffee. We want to appreciate the natural world and the gifts that it gives us. That’s why we’ve chosen these new symbols to appear on our coffee bags.