McMenamins

The newest product to come out of McMenamins Coffee Roasters is our seasonal offering -- Fireside Blend. This is a mixture of two of our finest coffees that work together to enhance the warm, nutty chocolate tones in one another and combine to create the ultimate beverage to enjoy throughout the chilly winter months in the Pacific Northwest.

This new blend required much research and experimentation to develop. Here at the Roasters, we are continually working to create new products that represent our commitment to quality. One important tool we use to achieve this is coffee cupping. This is a traditional coffee industry technique and can be seen as our equivalent to the more widely known art of wine tasting.

At the end of last summer, we represented McMenamins coffee roasters at the Hawthorne Street Fair in SE Portland by providing samples of our iced coffee at the Bagdad Pub. Although everybody we met that day was very pleased with the smooth, strong taste and the refreshing qualities of the product, they were often unfamiliar with it. So here's the story...

Three factors lead to success in making an extraordinary iced coffee: 1) bean quality, 2) coarseness of the grind, and 3) extraction method.

With all coffee products, the first step is to select and roast the beans. For our iced coffee we use McMenamins house blend, a mix of Sumatran Mandehling and El Salvadoran Santa Rita beans that are brought to a medium roast in small batches using our L25 Probat roaster. The result is a blend that possesses a smooth taste with hints of chocolate and hazelnut. Once our beans are roasted and blended, we have the base needed to achieve the desired result. The next thing to do is grind the beans coarsely. Since coffee begins to oxidize and lose flavor immediately after grinding, this is done directly prior to brewing.

It takes a good 13 to 14 minutes to complete a medium-to-full city roast. There are two stages that punctuate the transformation of the product from green, turgid beans to fully roasted aromatic coffee.

As you may or may not know, McMenamins roasts its own coffee, and for nearly a decade we have been providing the entire company with our own distinctive blends and single origin coffees. Each year we craft and process about 50,000 pounds of Arabica coffee, which is carefully selected from the major growing regions of the globe. One might ask, "How do they do that...how do they roast their own coffee?"

My old friend Palo Alto is back in our coffee roaster. I first cupped this coffee when I was an apprentice and fell in love with its robust flavor, bright acidity and incredible balance.