dose.

To kick off our monthly coffee tastings at dose., we’re starting with a basic question:  “What makes coffees taste the way they do?”

On the table will be coffees from different growing regions, different varietals of the coffee plant, processed using different techniques, and roasted to differing degrees of roast. We’ll get a glimpse at how each of these factors influences the flavor, body, and aromatics of the coffee!

Fresh out of beta testing, we are proud to announce the version 1.0 release of our lunch menu – for consumption by the general public.

Chef Steunebrink (a.k.a. the Keith-meister) has outdone himself on this one – carefully planning this first iteration of the menu for a couple of months now. It includes grilled and cold sandwiches, served with home-made hummus and bagel chips – with a seasonal selection of soups and salads to follow shortly (v. 1.2.1.8?).

All sandwiches are made-to-order and are available for dine-in or carry-out, Monday-Friday 11am-1:30pm!

We’re excited to have our first order of Ethiopian Sidamo Dry Process from Humphreys Street Coffee in! It is grown/harvested/processed by the largest fair trade cooperative in Ethiopia, Oromia Union Cooperative, and is full of the ripe fruit flavors that you would expect from a Dry Processed Ethiopian coffee.

Humphreys Street is Nashville’s newest specialty coffee roaster. It was born out of Brian Hicks interest in coffee and his involvement with Harvest Hands, a community development organization that operates in South Nashville. This project is aimed at providing local, neighborhood based jobs to young men in order to benefit the community in a dynamic and lasting way.

However, as this coffee proves, Humphreys Street isn’t cutting corners. Brian has invested well in top of the line roasting equipment and training, and truly has a passion for providing the best product possible.

We’ll be brewing this coffee as a Coffee of the Day, as well as having it available for Aeropress and in 1lb. bags to take home!

Due to the snow, we will opening at 9am tomorrow (1/30) and closing at 5pm.

Enjoy the snow!

We’ve completed our expansion of tea offerings this week with the arrival of a fresh delivery from TeaSource. This shipment includes several new herbal infusions as well as a unique and rare Yellow Tea:

“Wild Kwan Yin, Sparrow’s Tongue” impressed us with it’s delicate flavor and natural sweetness. Our first casual tasting evoked comments on it’s flower-bud-like flavors, including rosebud and clover. Yellow Tea is basically a green tea that has been allowed to sit and, well, yellow. There was perhaps a hint of the green tea “grassiness” in the finish, but we felt that overall “Wild Kwan Yin” was more reminiscent of a White Tea because of it’s delicate and refreshing flavors. Certainly something to try!

Other new offerings:  Yerba Mate (herbal), Honeybush (herbal), Lavenderberry (herbal blend), Lapsang Souchong (black blend), Reena’s Chai (black tea blend), and Houjicha (green).

I returned this week from a trip to visit our friends at Finca Manzano in El Salvador. The harvest, which starts in December at the lower altitudes and continues until March, is going well and the results are looking (and tasting!) good.

El Salvador, along with other Central American countries, received rainfall an unusual rainfall in December. This has caused an overall decline in production (down 30-40% by some counts!). Lower supply on the market may cause prices to go up for producers, but not enough to compensate for the lower volume. Regardless, higher prices are warranted for Finca Manzano’s coffee, which is tasting even better than last year.

The reason for this is the continued attention to quality by Emilio Lopez, sixth-generation coffee farmer, manager, and owner. The first year I visited the mill at Finca Manzano, he was proudly displaying new processing equipment. The next year, mechanical dryers stood in a once-empty spot next to the drying patios. This year a water purification system has been implemented for the coffee processing – a somewhat unprecedented step that allows for the reuse of water and keeps the processing very clean.

Also, under Emilio’s direction, the farm received Rainforest Alliance certification this year! This certification is awarded to farms/mills that use environmentally and socially sustainable practices. Unlike other certifications, the RA certification takes into consideration the unique circumstances of each operation it certifies. The use of most pesticides and herbicides is allowed, but record must be kept of when and where they are used and to show there was good cause.

Overall it was a great preview of what we can look forward to in a couple months as the new crop coffee hits the US market. In the meantime, our 2008-2009 crop Finca Manzano is still tasting great – in both it’s light and dark roasted form… but we’ve only got two sacks of green coffee left to roast, so enjoy it while it lasts!

Well, the Christmas season came and went all too quickly  – but not before we sold out of AeroPress coffee brewers and just about all of our are ForLife teaware. Not to worry though -  we should have more on the shelf by the end of the month…

As for other updates from the past month or so:  we have bolstered our tea offerings, have been the subject of articles in the Tennessean and the Green Hills/West Side News (pdf file; 6.7mb.), and finally completed the repainting behind the bar at the shop. It looks purdy good, if we do say so ourselves

This month we are focusing on getting open on Sundays, which is set to happen on January the 23rd. Our Sunday hours will be 9-5pm, and like Saturday mornings, we will be serving hot breakfast sandwiches.

Speaking of food, we do have a full lunch menu in the works – pretty much done in fact. There are just a few final details that need to be ironed out before we’ll feel comfortable offering it on an everyday basis (which should happen later in January as well).

If we haven’t had a chance to say it to you in person yet, happy new year! And thanks for making the first few months and the holiday season a good one at dose. We hope that 2010 will continue the trend.

Keith and Heath

Just in time for the holiday season, we’ve stocked our retail shelves with some of the best coffee and tea accessories we can find…

AeroPress Coffee Brewers – $26
These travel-friendly coffee brewers make approx. one 8-ounce cup at a time. They are super easy to clean (the spent coffee grounds “pop” out of the bottom when your done), and only takes about 30 seconds to produce a piping hot cup o’joe.

Chemex Coffee Brewer (6-cup) – $35
Featured in the Museum of Modern Art, this visually appealing (albeit somewhat retro) coffee brewer produces an equally beautiful cup of coffee. It uses extra thick, proprietary paper filters that slow the extraction process down to the optimal 3-5 minute time frame and reduces the oils in the cup. The result is a super clean but full flavored cup of coffee.

Baratza Maestro Grinder – $105
A grinder is the single most under-rated piece of equipment in home coffee preparation, and this is the best “home grinder” you can find. High quality conical burrs give your coffee a consistent grind to reduce uneven extraction, no matter what brew method your using. With one of these and a $5.00 filter holder you can make a better cup of coffee than a cheap blade grinder and a $200 brewer.

We also have everything else you need to brew the best cup possible at home:  filters, scales, scoops, air-tight canisters, and of course fresh roasted, whole bean coffee!

Oh, and keep an eye out for our soon-to-arrive teaware…

Just found out today that our first order of green coffee has arrived at the MST Roastery in Cannery Row!

We’ve started roasting most of our own coffee over the past couple of weeks, but this coffee from El Salvador represents the first one that we’ve personally selected for offering at the shop. Look for it on the shelves starting Friday!

Finca Manzano has been a part of the Diaz family for 150+ years and their family is one of the original growers of the “bourbon” Arabica varietal in El Salvador. Bourbon coffee has since become a mainstay for coffee growers in El Salvador, due to its highly prized sweetness, soft acidity, and full body.

We have had the privilage of visiting their farm several times in the past few years, and have been impressed with the level of attention given to every step in the “seed-to-cup” process.

If you’ve looked at our “About” page, then you know WHO we are. However, we haven’t really had the chance to sit down and explain WHAT we really want to do with dose.

The first and primary goal of dose is pretty simple:  to be a place that people like being at. The space and environment created at great cafes and coffee shops was the gateway for both of us into the world of coffee. Despite discovering and falling in love with the many other facets of specialty coffee, we still believe it’s important to have a clean, comfortable environment that caters to multiple types of customers.

The second goal of dose deals with the product we serve in this space. We want everything to have integrity and be very intentional, so that we can stand behind it 100%. It may not be perfect every time, but that doesn’t mean we can’t aim for perfection with everything we create, buy, and sell. This applies to sourcing ethically produced coffee, to buying local produce for our food menu, to have only the very best accessories to help you brew coffee and tea at home.

The third goal of dose is the interpersonal aspect of running a coffee shop. We hope to be, and want our staff to be, friendly and helpful in facilitating the customers enjoyment of our place and product. We also want to share what we are passionate about. This means helping folks choose the perfect coffee to take home for Christmas dinner, showing them how to grind and brew it, and even giving them the opportunity to learn more about where the coffee comes from.

So if you’ve made it through these three paragraphs:  thank you. We put a lot of hard work into the people, place, and product that is dose. and plan to continue doing so – not because we want to be coffee snobs or rock star baristas, but because we love the work and think it’s a lot of fun.

To the journey ahead, and the many cups of coffee that will keep us going,

Keith and Heath