RiSE tell us why they loved it, and shares feedback from featuring in the RiSE coffee box subscription.
We are Alice and Ben, the founders of RiSE coffee box and we first met Mark from Stewarts at The Nottingham Coffee Festival held in St Mary’s Church in Oct 2022. RiSE coffee box and Stewarts were alongside each other at the one day coffee event and Mark made sure to keep us fully caffeinated! There was a constant que at their stand of people wanting to try their coffee! Apart from needing the caffeine with a full on day ahead of us talking to fellow coffee lovers, we thoroughly enjoyed drinking the Colombian Finca La Roca. With a host of great roasters at the event, it was definitely one of our faves. We also enjoyed the local and family feel of the Stewarts coffee business and decided from then on that we had to feature them!
We launched RiSE coffee box because we believed that everyone should put down their Starbucks caramel lattes, throw away that instant coffee, and start drinking specialty coffee from a variety of independent roasters from all over the UK. Variety is the spice of life and with so many different origins, farming methods, and processing methods that affect the flavour profile, why confine yourself to the same coffee every time? The way that we choose our coffee selections for our multi roaster subscription is by blind cupping them alongside a dozen other roasters and selecting only those that are the highest quality. You can watch the process on our YouTube here. We do this in house, with founders Alice and Ben being the key taste testers, as well as inviting our coffee club members along to see which coffees make the cut!
We were incredibly happy when the washed Finca La Roca from Colombia came out in the top 3 during our cupping session!! We loved this coffee as it has incredibly deep flavours of dark chocolate and vanilla with a beautiful fruity sweetness coming through. It is an incredibly versatile coffee, smooth and well rounded and we enjoyed it as an oat flat white at the festival, but it also worked really well as a V60 / pour over option.
The coffee itself comes from the Finca La Roca, Planadas community region in Colombia, which is a collection of 48 coffee producing hamlets across 14,200 hectares. Within this region are nearly 7000 family run smallholder farms producing 9 million tons of cherries each year. The area used to be classified as a red zone due to conflict, but is now safe and a new lease of life is forming for these coffee producing families. This coffee is produced by Jorge Elías Rojas Vásquez, is a 33-year-old producer who has dedicated more than 20 years to the production, processing and marketing of specialty coffee. When he was just 13 years old the war in Colombia took his father away from him and he dropped out of school to manage the farm. The farm is located in Finca la Roca at 1,600 metres above sea level, a region that is difficult to access and at the time of the war was controlled by guerrillas such as the Farc. Now, many years on, Jorge was awarded 39th place at the last Cup of Excellence competition for his exceptional Geisha Honey bean. This coffee is made up of different bean varietals including the very high quality and highly regarded Geisha.
The packaging has a really cool funky design and more importantly it is recyclable which we are very passionate about. Some of our coffee club members have also reused the well designed bags as plant pots, which we loved!
We featured the coffee from Stewarts in the February box, 2023 and our coffee club members LOVED IT! A number of our subscribers have come back to order 1kg at a time and it has become their staple daily coffee that they enjoy alongside their discoveries from RiSE. A quote from one subscriber via email said:
“WHICH COFFEE was that!? I absolutely loved it and NEED to re order this coffee!”
Overall we really enjoyed this delicious Colombian coffee. The aromas coming from the bag when you first open it are delightful and it has a good strong base with beautiful floral notes coming through with each sip. The aftertaste was smooth and no bitterness left in the mouth. It’s super versatile and can be drunk black or with milk.
