Here at Social Espresso we take great pride in the care we put into our brews! It may seem simple when you have that warming cup of coffee in your hands, but it’s a long and thoughtful process from the farm to your cup.
Our main goal when we started crafting our house coffee at Social Espresso was to generate and cultivate a positive impact in the lives of the communities we sourced our single origin coffee from. We do this through our meticulous sourcing process, working closely alongside our coffee suppliers, Kamba Coffee to make certain that all our green beans are sourced through direct trade means. This means the price of our coffee is set by the farmers themselves, with no middle-men in between. Bruna, Kamba’s general manager, grew up in a small town called Espirito Santo do Pinhal, Brazil – an amazing region for coffee! This means that the farmers that we work with are people Bruna has built relationships with and known her entire life, including farms run by her very own family! These close familial relationships are rare in the coffee industry and allow us to have complete transparency throughout our supply chain. Through this, we can also bring coffees to our customers from incredible producers that might previously not have had access to the specialty export markets.
All of the farms we work with focus on reinvesting profits back into community led projects, which help with healthcare, education and sustainable agricultural development in the local areas. All of this is incredibly important to us, as well as making sure it consistently tastes amazing whatever event we’re involved with!
About the farm:
Andrea Costa, the lead producer of our house coffee (Daydreamer), is the mother of our supplier’s General Manager, Bruna Costa. She takes care of their all women run farm which belonged to their father in the early 1970s, as he was once a big coffee exporter in Brazil.
The farm, Chacara Santo Antonio is where Bruna herself grew up and where Andrea has lived most of her life. It has an incredibly well preserved nature reserve with a beautiful river where you can spot the Guara wolf, Tucans and even the Brazilian Jaguar!
The family has always produced the finest quality coffees since Bruna’s father, Mr Decio started his export business in the 1970s. Mr Decio was always a pioneer in coffee, investing in different varietals and processing methods, however, Andrea and Luis took this passion one step further once Bruna took the lead at Kamba. Their ambition was to produce incredible specialty lots for her to sell and showcase around the UK and Europe. In 2017, they started growing the experimental Arara lot and the result after three years is the incredible coffee we serve today.
How we roast our beans:
Every bean of our delicious event coffee is hand roasted with care in our South East London roastery and we always roast to accentuate the wonderful flavours that occur naturally in our specialty grade beans.
Daydreamer is a real crowd-pleaser, and that hasn’t happened by accident! Coffees with a Brazilian origin often have characteristics most people have come to expect from good coffee, such as chocolatey-ness and a tasty nuttiness to the profile. We aim to please not only the specialty coffee buffs but the average joes as well and this is why we’ve carefully selected and roasted our beans to appeal to the masses! Roasting the coffee plays a huge role in how it will taste in its final liquid form and we’ve fine tuned our roasting profile meticulously, tasting each batch again and again until we were happy. We opted for a medium light roast to give our coffee a complex depth of flavour whilst remaining balanced and well-rounded. This means our roasted coffee will result in a smooth cup, cutting through milk well whilst standing up on it’s own in espresso form or even as a pour over! All our event coffee is roasted to order specifically for each event, this means it’s always as fresh as possible and rested and ready to go all year round, lovely.