Last Friday, me and mom went to the Hasbean roastery for a tour – I’d been considering having these guys as a house coffee, and I was not dissapointed!
I first tried Hasbean coffee at Dukes, a coffee house on the Penn Road . They serve Blake blend (in case you wanted to stalk Hasbean or Dukes and try it for yourself!) and I fell immediately in love. Mom bought some coffee from Dukes, and we later ordered a whole selection of their other blends direct from Hasbean, which of course were all delicious. I decided I would like to offer Hasbean coffee as at the very least a speciality espresso, because it’s just so damn good! They really give a crap too, which I’ll go into later.
The roastery is in Stafford, on an industrial estate (which took me a good while to find!). It doesn’t look like much from the outside, but inside is as stylish as you’d imagine from a modern, family run, eco conscious coffee roastery! We were met by Martin, who watched me struggle to park for a while, and we followed him and his impressive beard up to the Google office-style upper deck. The airy room was decked out in Hasbean’s signature red, and lined with toys that would make any coffee lover swoon! There were shelves full of books, awards and experimental alcoholic brews made from coffee cherries and flowers, distillation apparatus made from spare parts, and the biggest cold brew jug I’ve ever seen!
We were treated to a Chemex brewed Bolivian single origin – Las Alasitas, which was light and fruity and delicious (tasting notes of speculoos biscuit, cashew nut and milk chocolate) which Martin told us a bit about the company, and Steve who’s obsession founded it. You don’t necessarily get it from their website, but this family run business really care, about each other, amazing coffee, and their customers.
We got to have a play on the coffee machine while Martin told us all about how to brew the perfect espresso – a feat of chemistry and physics that will admittedly be difficult to pull off in a van, with different surfaces to park on, different temperatures and air flows! We drank some more coffee, and then had a tour of the roasting room, which you could see from the upper deck.
We met some of the team, who all seemed very pleased to see us! Then, we went downstairs to see some of the process and meet some green coffee beans. Martin explained to us the different processes the beans can undertake in order to reach the different end products we had already tried, while we were surrounded by the smell of freshly roasted coffee beans. Natural process, he explained, is when the whole cherry is dried, before the cascara (flesh) is removed, washed process is when the cherry is removed before the bean is dried, and honey process where some of the flesh, or the remaining mucilage is left on the bean and left to ferment. These all produce very different tasting coffees, and I’ll talk about these processes more in another post.
Finally, we had a tour of the warehouse, where the green beans arrive, the roasted coffees are stored ready for shipping, and the retail items are stored. We bought a Chemex jug, because we couldn’t resist after experiencing how different the coffee can taste after different preparations (something else I’ll talk about in another post)! We were gifted several coffees to try at home too!
I was very impressed by our welcome, and how generous Martin and the team were with their information and gifts! Hasbean is a living wage employer, and they are moving towards more sustainable packaging and ways of doing things. If you’ve not tried their coffee already, check them out here. I can’t wait to try all of the roasts we came home with, and have a play with the Chemex!
Liberation Coffee 