Sometimes when you’re in deep shit you have to call in a few favours to get you out of said deep shit. Imagine you are about to ship your biggest coffee box ever and one of your roasters has to pull out at the last minute due to some unexpected personnel changes. The clock is ticking, it’s 11:58 and you’re either going to sail through it with a brilliant solution or you’re going to crash and burn your way into the new year.
Thankfully, we have learned to plan our boxes a bit further ahead and, as it turned out, one of three roasters scheduled to make an appearance in our March ’17 box is based in The Netherlands. After a short explanation of our dilemma, we were able to pick one of Keen Coffee’s finest beans and the guys immediately got to work to roast their outstanding Guatemala, El Rincon for our latest coffee box installment. Phew!
But who is / are Keen Coffee?
Keen Coffee is the birth child of experienced coffee roasters Jan Schuitemaker and Tosca Schuitemaker, and of Dutch barista legends Bonne Postma and Rob Kerkhof. Before Keen emerged onto the local coffee scene, Jan and Tosca already built a name for themselves as one of The Netherlands’ leading private label specialty coffee roasters CoffeeXperts. Many of our most favourite coffee bars in Amsterdam used to roast their coffees there (Headfirst and Rum Baba) and others continue to have their coffees roasted by the skilled team that now also runs Keen.
They initially launched in time for the Amsterdam Coffee Festival in 2016 and have quickly garnered a reputation that has won them fans far beyond Dutch or even European borders. Its charismatic founders regularly competed in competitions and are currently helping Dutch Barista Championship hopeful Dagmar Geerlings with her bid to secure this year’s crown.
A few weeks ago the guys reached out to us to ask about being featured in one of our upcoming boxes and we we’re thrilled by the prospect of featuring yet another great Dutch roaster in one of our boxes, following Friedhats’ appearance in our December ’16 coffee box.
The coffee we picked to replace The Visit’s Colombia, Jhon Leguizamon is a delicious, well balanced and clean Guatemalan coffee from El Rincon. El Rincon sits in the corner of a valley of limestone hills; protected from the warm and drying wind, this little farm enjoys a very stable climate with high humidity. Together with the chalky soils of Huehuetenango, these conditions define the cup character of this wonderful coffee.
We’re thankful and happy that Keen Coffee was able to jump in at short notice and we look forward to hearing what our many customers and subscribers thought of this outstanding coffee.
To find out more about Keen Coffee and to order their coffees, visit their website.
