After a lot of user feedback, we’ve decided to change our shipping policies. All of our subscribers as well as those who order multiple bags at once will now receive free shipping! The popular $4.95 flat rate shipping will still apply for all those who only want a single bag.
Free Shipping
January 13th, 2011The First Evolution
November 1st, 2010So a pretty cool thing happened last week: we saw our first evolution! It’s neat how something as simple as a set of sliders can yield such a big difference in the cup. A majority of the users on Altitude Coffee moved the body and sweetness higher while reducing the brightness. The two primary increases in body and sweetness translated into a bean swap from Sumatra as the base to using our Peru, so the profile has changed from a smoky spice to more chocolate and nut. The reduction in brightness effectively reduced the Brazil component while bringing in the Zambia. This may seem counter intuitive, but we have observed the mix of the Zambia and Peru provide a stronger match than the Brazil was able to provide. The Zambia is playing double duty now in this blend as it also replaced the Ethiopia. The berry is still present, but requires less strength in the blend since it doesn’t have to fight its way over the smoky Sumatra anymore.
So what now? We suggest you give the newly evolved Evolution Espresso a try! What do you think? Where will it go next month? The only way to know is to participate and join the evolution.
We’re also working on a newsletter to keep you more informed about these things. Our first is set to go out in the next day or so. If you want to subscribe, you can check the box while creating your account or simply log into your account and subscribe on the left control panel.
How To Brew Espresso
October 11th, 2010For all our friends who are curious, we’ve put together a video on how to brew espresso:
While there will be variation from machine to machine, the fundamentals remain the same: temperature stability, uniform grind, and uniform distribution/tamp. The key is to hold tamp constant while you adjust your grind to meet the shot length and volume requirements. A popular method for calibrating your tamp is to use a bathroom scale so you get an idea for what 30 or 35lbs of pressure feels like. Once you are tamping with the correct pressure each time, making the shot shorter or longer is as easy as adjusting the grind finer or coarser.
Anything to add? Things you’d like to see changed? Leave a comment or take it to the forum!
(Press Release) Altitude Coffee Announces Wholesale Custom Coffee Program
October 7th, 2010Los Angeles, CA (Food-News.net) Altitude Coffee, the web’s first user-driven coffee roaster, announces the launch of their wholesale coffee program. Altitude Coffee’s wholesale coffee program allows coffee shops, cafes, restaurants, hotels, and other coffee serving establishments the ability to create their own unique coffee blends online in real time at affordable wholesale prices.
“Although the idea of providing customized blends to wholesale clients is not new, the ability to do so online, and in real time, is,” says Aaron Walls, Vice President of Development for Altitude Coffee, “Specialty coffee roasters have been providing their clients with customized blends for a long time now and the process of creating the blend and changing it down the line can be a long and expensive one. However using Altitude Coffee and Ascension, clients can create new blends or change their existing blends online, in seconds.”
“It’s very important to note that unlike other custom blending services online, we do not use flavoring syrups,” says Walls. “Ascension collects the underlying qualities of single origin coffees from our users, such as berry and citrus of an Ethiopia Yirgacheffe, or nut and chocolate of a Brazil”.
Ascension then creates a best fit blend using only the single origin varietals stocked by Altitude Coffee.
“The main difference between Altitude Coffee and other specialty coffee roasters is that we are entirely data driven. With the attribute information we collect about each bean from all of our online users, we are able to do a lot of things that other roasters can’t, like algorithmically combine those single origins into custom blends in real time using their underlying attributes. The result is a more accurate blend,” says Walls, “And instead of going back and forth with the sales rep if you want to adjust the blend for more or less of a certain characteristic, you can simply log onto the website and click the sliders to tune the blend, Ascension does the rest.”
While Altitude Coffee offers the ability to purchase custom coffee blends on their website in 5lb and 25lb quantities, contacting a wholesale account representative is the best way to get one on one assistance in creating a coffee program that works for the unique needs of your establishment. Programs consist of preferential pricing, regularly scheduled coffee deliveries, 12oz retail bags of your custom blends for customers to purchase, and much more. Altitude Coffee also provides single origin coffee and community coffee blends at wholesale prices.
To get in touch with an Altitude Coffee wholesales representative, send an email to wholesale@altitudecoffee.com or call (866) 698-8795.
So Much Has Happened
September 24th, 2010First I want to thank Theo of En Coffee Blog who I had the pleasure of speaking with at length last week, and he posted the interview on his site a couple of days ago. Second, we launched! In all the excitement and work to get things moving, I realized I hadn’t written at all about the beta we just went through. It was, for the most part, a smashing success. We had over one hundred participants and served up some 650 4oz bags of six different single origin coffees, all free of charge. We had a number of users post extensive reviews on the forum and they were overall well received. We collected hundreds of data points defining the attributes of each, and we had a few users submit blends. We had a vote and those few who still had coffee left after all was done elected the three best blends to be the Evolution Espresso, Evolution Drip, and Evolution Press blends for the main store.
The feedback overall was great. Everyone really loves the idea of making the coffee their own. Since all participants were sent six single origin coffees (Altitude Origins), they were able to put six unique coffees side by side and truly understand what makes a Peru different from a Brazil from a Colombia. Although the countries are adjacent, the cup qualities vary so significantly and for many of our beta testers, this was the first time they had analyzed the differences side by side. Without a point of contrast, we really have no basis to understand, let alone judge, anything.
Not all went smoothly though, which of course is the purpose of beta testing. We found some bugs in the programming which have either been smoothed out or soon will be, as well as some procedural issues on the roaster side of things. We were using Atlanta Coffee Roasters to handle the roasting on our behalf, but they just weren’t set up to handle what we were asking them to handle, so we took our search for a new roaster nation wide. After interviewing a large portion of the Specialty Coffee Association of America’s Roasters Guild, we feel we’ve found our match with Newhall Coffee in Valencia, CA.
We’re getting the roasts started again early next week. There are a lot of exciting things coming down the line, we hope you stick around to see – you very well could be part of it.
~Aaron
(Press Release) Altitude Coffee – The Web’s First User-Driven Specialty Coffee Roaster, Opens Today
September 13th, 2010Los Angeles, CA (PRWEB) September 13, 2010 – Altitude Coffee, an entirely user-driven specialty coffee company, opens its virtual doors today. As the first online community driven coffee company, Altitude Coffee uses online tools that give users direct access to the entire creative process of coffee and coffee development. “We’re trying some pretty radical ideas” says Aaron Walls, Vice President of Development for Altitude Coffee, “no one else in the world is doing anything like it.” While Altitude Coffee delivers freshly roasted coffee to online buyers like other third wave coffee roasters, Altitude Coffee differs by giving the users complete control over which beans are offered and how the blends are composed. “We’ve created a set of tools that we call ‘Ascension’ which allow customers to directly influence all aspects of the coffees we offer,” says Walls, “By establishing the taste characteristics of each single origin, our users are able to use those attributes to create and alter custom coffee blends.”
The patented Ascension system works by giving users control over the most important taste attributes of a coffee blend: the body, brightness, sweetness, primary taste attribute, and secondary taste attribute. If the user tastes the coffee and he or she enjoys the body, but wants more brightness and sweetness, he or she logs onto altitudecoffee.com, and adjusts the blend to suite their tastes. Once per month, Ascension will analyze the feedback and re-blend to match the most popular tastes. “If we see half the people prefer more body, and half prefer more brightness, the blend will branch into two. That’s Evolution Espresso,” says Walls.
Altitude Coffee will also sell individual coffees from a single producer, farm, or community, known as single origin coffee. “For those who want to explore the component coffees, we have Altitude Origins where the user will receive a quarter pound of all single origin coffees we roast,” says Walls, “We have a spot in our forum for our users to share their thoughts, reviews, and home made blends. Once per month we will hold a vote for the best blend, and that user’s creation will be featured in the store with all the other coffees we roast.”
At the end of July 2010, Altitude Coffee began its public beta program where over one hundred coffee geeks around the internet we able to log on and test out Ascension as well as all six single origins coffees. The results were overwhelmingly positive despite the bugs which inevitably exist in pre-launch products. The users posted reviews on the forum and held votes for the best blend for espresso coffee, drip coffee, and press coffee, the winners of which are now being featured as Evolution Espresso, Evolution Drip, and Evolution Press.
Altitude Coffee has developed an aggressive shipping program where all users’ orders will be delivered via USPS priority mail for a flat rate of $4.95, regardless of how many bags ordered. For those who sign up for a reoccurring subscription to any of the coffees sold by Altitude Coffee, a flat rate of $2.95 will be charged, again regardless of bag quantity. “The biggest hurdle to online specialty coffee is shipping” says Walls. “Some roasters charge almost as much for shipping as they do for the beans themselves. We needed to fix that.”
Altitude Coffee is offering a different take on wholesale coffee. Through the tools developed by Altitude Coffee, wholesale account holders are able to create blends online in real time. Select the body, brightness, sweetness, as well as two taste characteristics and a unique blend is produced. Account holders can then request a free sample before buying in bulk. If at any point adjustments need to be made to the blend, simply log on to the website and adjust the sliders, it’s that simple. Altitude Coffee also provides one on one guidance to all wholesale accounts.
Evolution Espresso, Evolution Press, and Evolution Drip, as well as Altitude Origins and its single origin component coffees (Brazil Pedra Roxa Estate, Peru Fair Trade Organic, Sumatra Mandheling, Colombia Monserrate, Ethiopia Yirgacheffe, and Zambia Zambica Estate) are all available for sale today.
For more information including a press kit, visit our press page in the “Our Story” section of our site.
For sample requests, contact press(at)altitudecoffee(dot)com.
Ranking
July 29th, 2010What is ranking?
How it works:
For each coffee you evolve or rate, you will increase in rank. Rank gives you a number of privileges, such as increased weighting when evolving blends and being invited to cupping where we decide which coffee gets sourced next.
Weighting
What’s the point? The reason is twofold. First it’s a way to reward our most frequent users by giving them the keys to car if you will. Those who have high ranks are the most involved, and the site just won’t work as well without a strong involved core. The second reason is experience. Coffee is, as I’m sure you know or will soon find out, a very complex thing. Being able to parse its unique characteristics into distinct tastes can be hard, but with practice, anyone can do it.
The Weights Themselves
Each rank gets a 5% addition to the baseline. Or in plane english, for each rank you increase to, you gain 5% more weight. Here’s a table:
Rank -> Weight
1 -> 100%
2 -> 105%
3 -> 110%
4 -> 115%
5 -> 120%
… …
100 -> 500%
101 -> 505%
and so on. There’s no maximum, so if you want to be a blending master, you have the power.
What is Altitude?
June 10th, 2010So what exactly is Altitude Coffee? Altitude Coffee is a specialty coffee company under development, with a complete focus on user-generated coffees. We’re a roaster, but not a roaster as you know roasters. Yes, we will be selling freshly roasted specialty coffee online, and that will be a core function, but what we roast will be very different.
Coffee roasters have this habit of keeping blend construction, coffee sourcing, and evaluation away from their customers. Blends are treated as company secrets, and the sourcing and evaluation function as a super star position that only the most well versed professional with 20 some odd years of experience is permitted to partake in. Some people in the specialty world may agree with this. Customers of specialty coffee companies may also agree I don’t agree. Why keep these aspects shut off from the very people who you rely on to keep your roasting business alive?
Altitude Coffee is different. And it begins with Ascension. Ascension has been under development for a while now and is very close to being complete. Ascension is a patented tool that allows Altitude Coffee members to influence the composition of all blends at Altitude Coffee.
Evolution Espresso & Ascension
Here is how it works: lets say you’re interested in our espresso blend, Evolution Espresso, so you purchase it from the web store. It is then roasted, packed, and shipped via USPS Priority Mail, and arrives in 2 to 3 business days. You open the bag, brew a cup, and taste. If you enjoyed the brightness level, but felt the body could be increased, and the sweetness could be lessened, just log onto the website and adjust the taste sliders:
Your input will now be used to recalculate the blend composition using a set of algorithms that we maintain. If say 50% of the users prefer a coffee blend with more pronounced body and sweetness, and 50% prefer more brightness, the blend will split into two. That’s Evolution Espresso.
Market Research
May 22nd, 2010In order to pick the best coffee in the world, and really understand what makes it great, so points of comparison are necessary. I recently got back from a trip to Chicago, and I was able to sample the complete offering at Intelligentsia. Having never been to an Intelligentsia cafe, and only ever trying their coffees through their website, I have to say I was impressed. The end product wasn’t too different from our local Atlanta gem, Octane (they serve Counter Culture), but they are surprisingly playful with their coffee. I always had this view of Intelligentsia as being a pompous, know-it-all sort as its namesake would suggest, however while this is still mostly true, something turned my eye. The Colombia Escuela Vieja. Or for our non-spanish speaking friends, the Colombian “Old School”. I laughed when I saw this. ‘There’s no way this is the name of the farm, or even region’ I thought. And it’s not. The notes begin as such:
“Old School. I’ve got some Keds, some linen bell bottoms from Hong Kong circa 1972, some Steely Dan vinyl. We’ve all got something.” Bad ass. Coffee is a serious thing to many people, but I’m glad that a place as serious as Intelligentsia (in my mind at least) can be playful. So how was it you ask? Surprisingly complex, light on the pallet, ginger undertones, with a citrus head. I was at the Broadway store, so it was made in a Clover.
So I’ve been buying tons of coffee. Espresso blends, more precisely. Intelligentsia Black Cat, Stumptown Hairbender, Paradise Nuevo, Vivace Dolce, Counter Culture Toscano, even Sweetmaria’s New Classic to name a few. The best? Dolce for the first day the bag was opened, but it faded quick. Even the second bag I had that remained sealed was nothing like the first bag which was fresh, 3 days after roast. Hairbender came in a strong second. Sweetmaria’s New Classic came in third (but you have to roast it yourself if you want to try it). What I admire about these espresso blends is their phenomenal sense of balance. Dolce was on the high end of my sweetness threshold, and Sweet Maria’s New Classic was on the high end of my brightness threshold. The Hairbender sat very well balanced, but I think it lacked the finesse to really make it a top choice. So I’m curious as to how many people feel the same way, “If only I could increase the brightness JUST slightly…”, or “Wow, this is great, but if they could just dial the body down, it would be stellar”. I think I’ve found a way. But, more on that next post.
First Cupping
May 15th, 2010A few days ago, we had our first cupping – which I have to admit was a bit overwhelming. In good way of course. We had 18 coffees from three different importers to evaluate. So a few phone calls later, we had a healthy group of enthusiast cuppers to take on the task of parsing the coffees. We also had a photographer from LeahAndMark.com who documented it all in pictures. Check out her blog.
The Coffees:
Three Brazil
One Bali
One Colombian
Three Ethiopian Yirgacheffe
One Ethiopain Sidamo
One Guatemala
One Honduras
One Indian Monsooned Malabar
One Mexico
One Peru
Two Sumatra
One Tanzania
One Zambia
The results:
One importer’s coffees scored consistently higher than all the others. It was shocking actually, especially considering the reputations the importers who scored lower. That’s not to say that we won’t consider them again, but it makes our jobs much easier to know there is such a consistently high quality source of green coffees that we can pull from.
Looks like the first round of single origins will consist of a Brazil, a Zambia, a Colombia, a Peru, and a wild card that we haven’t yet decided on. More later. Aaron.