The second city we visited during our whirlwind tour of Scandinavia in September 2014 was the Swedish capital Stockholm. I have been to Stockholm a few times in the past and had fond memories of its coffee culture. This time around however, we we were on a mission to meet some of our earliest supporters. The wonderful people of Drop Coffee.
These Swedish coffee moguls aren’t just some of the most highly regarded coffee roasters in the world (co-founder Joanna Alm came third in the world coffee roaster championships this year – amongst many other awards), they’re also supplied one of the most popular coffees from our coffee subscription service so far. Their stunning Hunkute from Ethiopia was featured in our August ’14 tasting box and just burst with incredbile flavours. Luckily Joanna managed to find a little gap in her busy schedule to welcome us to her café in Södermalm and invited us to take part in the staff cuppings that happen there on a regular basis.
The shop itself is what you’d expect from a Swedish café. Warm tones, colourful furniture and plenty of little rooms to hide away with your laptop or group of friends. We were thrilled to see the place filled with such great energy and the baristas, we had to admit, were just amazing. After our cupping, during which we even got to taste two different roasts of said Hunkute, we sat down with Joanna to catch up with her over a cup of their excellent and brand new Marimira from Kenya.
Of the things she said during our chat, this really stuck with us: “I’ve always been super interested in the flavours of coffee. As in, trying different ways to highlight different nuances of a particular coffee. That’s what I’ve been doing since I got into roasting and that’s also why we have these weekly cuppings. It’s really important for me to know what our guys think and get their feedback on what we need to change in order to get even more out of each and every bean.”
She also told us about her relationships with the various farmers who supply their famed coffees. “Again, I cannot stress enough how important it is to work really closely with the guys who grow our coffees. For example, we have one farmer in Guatemala who has been producing incredible coffees for some time already but since we started working with him three years ago and continuously tried to find ways to improve his quality, the coffees we get from him today are literally mind blowing.”
Like Tim Wendelboe in Oslo and other roasters who we have met along the way who spend a great deal of time visiting the origins, Joanna confirmed how important it is to transfer as much knowledge to the producers because at the end of the day, if you don’t get a great product from them, there is very little you can do at this end to produce a great coffee.
Since Drop Coffee was also one of the first ten roasters to be featured in one of our tasting boxes, we were also keen to get some more insights from Joanna on why she chose to work with us. Her answer was humbling and incredibly rewarding at once. “It’s quite simple. I think what you guys are doing is fantastic. The box looks so beautiful it reminds me of a Macbook and your packaging is incredibly classy. The fact that you strip away the branding and packaging from the different roasters makes it 100% about the product that’s inside. And at the end of the day, that’s what matters the most.”
After Joanna said her goodbyes we ended up spending quite a bit of time with one of the baristas, Jacob. We tried our hardest to create some latte art that should resemble the logo of a certain company we are currently working with but goddam, it just wasn’t happening. We tried pouring the milk, using a pipette and even a pen. Turns out, there’s a lot you can do with latte art but without practice, certain things are just too tough. So we came up with an alternative solution that looked just as good and just enjoyed another perfectly brewed cup of coffee while the rain was pouring down outside. A typical Swedish autumn afternoon then. Well we didn’t complain.
