Where our beans sleep before they meet you
A short walk through the back room, the burlap sacks, and the two weeks that decide how your morning tastes.
The room behind the counter is colder than the one you are sitting in, and it smells like hessian and dried fruit.
Green coffee arrives in sacks of sixty kilos, and it does not taste like anything yet. It rests here for a fortnight before it goes anywhere near heat: long enough for the moisture to settle, short enough that it does not go flat.
Layla roasts on Tuesdays, in a 12 kg drum that was second-hand when we bought it and is now, she says, "third-hand and better for it." Each batch is about eleven minutes. She cups every roast the following morning, before the room opens, with whoever is on shift.
Nothing goes on the bar until it is four days old, and nothing stays on it past ten. In between is the window where the coffee tastes the way we meant it to.
If you want to see it, Tuesday mornings between eight and eleven. Stand by the door, not the drum. It gets hot.