Let me lead off with the fact that this is probably the best multi-roaster shop I've ever been to…read more I've loved specialty coffee since before it was cool to love specialty coffee, and I've hit hundreds--if not thousands--of coffee shops all across North America looking for golden pourovers.
This place is absolutely IT. They have a rotating selection of specialty roasters such as DAK and B&W, and the experience and expertise to do them justice.
The ambiance is warm and amazing, and I feel incredibly welcome here.
If you're looking for an amazing place to get a true cup of specialty coffee, and you happen to be in Omaha, you don't need to read anything else--just give them a try.
However, if you aren't really sure what I mean when I say "specialty coffee," or why this is such a big deal for me ("It's just a cup of joe!?"), please read on.
WARNING: Coffee geek out ahead!
"Coffee" is a berry, much like a large, firm cherry, that grows in equatorial climates. The seed of this berry, when the "meat" is removed, is dried, stored, shipped, roasted, and ground; water of the appropriate temperature is introduced for an appropriate amount of time to achieve a partial extraction of the acids and oils that make up the structure of the seed.
Every step of that process, from the nutrients in the soil of the growing region to the precise duration of the pour / the partiality of the extraction changes the flavor substantially.
Coffee, roasted until it dries and its proteins have just begun to undergo the mailliard reaction, ground evenly to a consistency somewhere between table salt and ground pepper, combined with 94-95°C water at about a 17:1 ratio by weight, and then filtered to remove the partially-extracted ground coffee, will yield a cup with remarkably wild flavors--berries, flowers, and explosion of floral aroma. It can taste like strawberries and cream, or blueberries, or caramel and peach, depending on any or all of the factors above.
As a crop highly subject to the variation of its growing season, however, sometimes those flavors can trend to less pleasant, or not mix well in milk, or dominate a beverage that they're mixed into. Further, the coffee harvest season is not a single time of year--you need to follow the coffee calendar around the world to know what's in season at any given time.
For large coffee shops, or roasters that specialize in "coffee beverages," or even specialty shops that exist in a market that requires them to maintain a consistent base espresso or blend for their regular, non-specialty customers, or who are subject to a pricing cap that rotating lots will exceed, that level of variation is often undesirable, and the cup results will likely be unappreciated by the body of the clientelé.
So it can be desirable to "unify" that wildness to focus on round, caramel notes and big body.
The one thing that unifies the flavor of coffee, more than any other single factor, is the roasting process. When you want to use coffee as a beverage base with a "generic coffee flavor," you want to reduce the wildness of the flavors and enhance the body flavor, and so you subject the seeds to a more prolonged roasting process that results in the evulsion of oils, and gives you a body that milk settles into for that "roasty toasty bold rich" flavor.
People like me, who are looking for those wild, sweet, floral, mind-altering cups refer to all of these as "over roasted," although we can appreciate roast variation and coffee blending for espresso beverages.
With the preamble out of the way, 99.9% of coffee in North America is what specialty coffee enthusiasts refer to as "bad." That includes Dunks, Folgers, Horties, Chock full, and so on, ad nauseam. Worse than that, for us, is what we consider "gross"--Starbucks, Peet's, Philz, and so on, that is roasted so dark that it tastes, at its best, like bitter, undrinkable char.
If you like any or all of these coffee brands, that's totally ok--I enjoy the "bad' coffee as a nice, warm beverage with milk and sugar. (I can't drink the "gross" coffee, though). And as I said, it's almost certain that, despite the exhortations of people you know about how "good" their favorite coffee is, that you've never had true specialty coffee.
That's something I'd like to help change--even if people try it and find that they prefer sweetened milk drinks, I think everyone owes it to themselves to try a pourover from an epic coffee shop.
Astute is such a shop.
These guys absolutely rule.
