Firsts This Week...

This week packed a bit of a wallop.  There were a number of firsts:

First, we shipped our first web order; congratulations Helen French!  Even if it was decaf.  Our decaf Sumatran SWP is damn good.

Second, Nabeen completed his first week on the road juggling both service and deliveries.  In our pursuit of excellent service in the field, we're assessing our accounts/ troubleshooting any issues with equipment with every delivery.  Nice work, Nabeen.

Third, we received our first delivery of the creamiest, most delicious single origin, Turkish grind Fair Trade/organic Sumatran ice cream ever--from our new friends in the neighborhood--The Brooklyn Ice Cream Company.  Thank you Mark!!!  When our 25 Jay St. Cafe opens (mid June?), we're planning to offer scoops of this to customers, perhaps with a shot of Sumatran Two Ways Espresso on top.  Mark explained that using brewed coffee to make ice cream is dicey--the liquid forms ice crystals in the ice cream.  So most people use freeze dried or instant coffee for flavoring.  Not us. We roasted the coffee, ground it extremely fine in our Malkonig, then passed it along to Mark to work his magic.  Within a few days he returned two precious tubs of the tastiest ice cream ever (imho).  Our cupping spoons are definitely doing double dipper duty.

Apprentice roasters Dan Sheppard and veteran coffee pro German Meneses roasted and packaged more than a ton of coffee this week, marking another "first."  This week's volume was boosted in part by Colin Devlin and the Dumont gang, flipping the switch on the newly minted Belshaw Donut Maker Mark II and serving mouthwateringly delicious, hot homemade doughnuts alongside cups of a BRC custom roast (brewed by presspot) at Dumont Doughnut on Bedford Ave and South 1st in Williamsburg.  Get 'em while they're hot!

And we made our FIRST deliveries to support the amazing new coffee program (focused on both highest quality and sustainability) to the Chocolate Rooms on Court St. and Fifth Avenue in Park Slope.  Willy Wonka would be jealous.  Go Mark!!

We took a nice step forward by installing our FIRST shelves in the downstairs service department this week.  Cleanliness is next to godliness, we always say.

We had an excellent FIRST meeting with the folks from NY Waterway.  Very exciting.  Commuters deserve great coffee!  (Everyone knows that fresh roasted coffee floats...)

Construction on the Cafe continues apace.  Ben is polishing our counter (an intermediate step, apparently, in Rob's "welding, blending, bending, blackening and waxing" treatment.)  It looks like very hard work, but the result so far is stunning.

LAST, send your latte art photos to phog@brooklynroasting.com.  In fact, send any photos related to coffee, preferably BRC coffee.  We"ll post what we like on our Phog (ie. photo blog) page.  If your photo is selected and you call us, you'll win special treatment at the Cafe when it opens.