When it comes to coffee packaging, trust me when I say that I’ve seen A LOT. When I started The Coffeevine ten years ago, most bags were either brown or white and generally featured overstuffed and ugly stickers with logos that resembled a boring interpretation of the coffee bean or cup. Boy, how things have changed. These days, if a specialty coffee roasters doesn’t have custom printed bags with elaborate and intricate details, they are usually shunned by the social media conscious coffee crowd.
Natually, this means that coffee packaging has taken some interesting turns, shapes and forms. I’ve seen coffee packaged in tubes, in boxes, in bags and in tins. Not every direction is particularly practical nor is it per se very pretty. Sometimes, people just try so hard to stand out that it looks clumsy. Not so Dalston Coffee, a fine little roastery from Barcelona that was founded in 2015 by former chef Borja Roselló.
Borja spent some years in London where he first discovered specialty coffee in the borough of Dalston, which lends the roastery its name. Prior to the redesign, Dalston used pretty standard looking mint green bags that didn’t really tell much of a story. This new packaging, however, is just WOW. It was created in collaboration with fellow Barcelonian creative Ingdid Picanyol whose studio took a deep dive into Borja’s past and London’s architecture. The little boxes are inspired by Dalston’s typical red brick buildings and colourful awnings. The individual drawings on the front were created by Porto based illustrator Lourenço Providência who has previously worked for the likes of Monocle Magazine.
What I paricularly love about this redesign is how the creative team driving this process didn’t look at the product inside first and went from there. Instead, it looked at the heritage of the brand and its founder to conceive a unique identity that speaks volumes with just shapes and colours. For each coffee they created a different colour combination for the lids and Lourenço illustrated various individual characters to grace the fronts of the packages. Though the coffee inside is obviously the star of the show, it almost plays second fiddle. In a way, I like this idea because packaging is absolutely vital for story telling. In the past, coffee bags were so ugly and boring that you wouldn’t have wanted to put them on display. This packaging, however, is something you want to show off.
For Dalston’s first-ever Coffeevine feature, it will roast for us a really lovely and fresh washed Tanzanian Kent cultivar from Tembo Tembo. It has been years since we last featured a coffee from this East African giant and this coffee really sparkled on the cupping table the other week. It’s floral and tea like, almost a bit herbal. It’s the kind of coffee you want to enjoy on a sunny afternoon.
One really fun fact that connects me to this origin is that this coffee was produced on the foothills of the Ngorongoro crater, a huge wild life refuge and conservation area that I visited in 2004 after climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro with my dad. This was a really incredible and challenging experience that I’ll never forget. The crater is home to the big five animals and lots of other species and since it offers incredibly rich volcanic soil, it is also an ideal place to grow specialty coffee. Tembo Tembo was taken over by a Swiss family in 2010 and it has since transitioned to producing super high quality specialty coffees in close symbyosis with nature. This coffee is a great example of that hard work.
To receive this excellent coffee or to order any of our other offerings, just visit our shop now.
Pre-orders close on 15.09.2024 / Ships globally on 20.09.2024
