Whether you're one of our regular café customers, or you buy Stumptown coffee online, chances are, you're familiar with our blends. Always available, our five blends – Hairbender, Holler Mountain, Founder's, Homestead, and Hundred Mile – form the backbone of our whole bean menu. What's more, each blend has been meticulously crafted, and maintains a remarkable level of consistency throughout the year.
We're incredibly proud of our blends, some of which have been customer favorites since day one. With that in mind, we've decided to shed light on our blends and the hard work that goes into ensuring your bag of Holler Mountain or Hundred Mile always meets our standards for quality. We'll look at how Stumptown sources coffee for our blends as well as how we craft a blend's flavor profile.
Along the way, we'll be celebrating all those working behind the scenes. From coffee pickers at source, to roasters and Quality Assurance specialists in Portland, these are the folks responsible for maintaining the quality and consistency of the Stumptown blends we all love so much.
What Are Stumptown's Coffee Blends?
Not sure how to brew it? Our Brew Guides walk through every method, from automatic drip to Chemex to cold brew.
How Does Stumptown Source Coffee for Our Blends?
At Stumptown we believe blending is an art. The beautiful coffees we source for our blends can all stand on their own, but together they create something truly special. Our skilled roasting and quality teams can discern how these coffees will work together, based on their knowledge and experience. And the result is a blend profile that's unique to Stumptown – one you won't find anywhere else.
Director of Quality Assurance, Jim Kelso, is quick to point out that Stumptown’s approach to blending has always been very intentional: “The Hair Bender profile was built on the back of long-term relationships like Honduras El Puente, Ethiopia Mordecofe and Guatemala El Injerto, as those single origin coffees would go into the blend as they came off the menu. The rhythm of blend recipe changes matched the seasonal cycles of single origin coffees.”
As Stumptown has grown, we’ve continued to develop and nurture long-standing partnerships with producers, allowing us to become even more intentional when it comes to sourcing coffee for our blends. Greater than the sum of its parts, a coffee blend offers a way to highlight the way specific coffees can contribute to an overall flavor profile.
Take Hair Bender, for example. Perfectly balanced, Hair Bender features a foundation of fully washed coffees from Central and South America for sweetness and a clean finish. East African coffees add complex, floral notes, while Indonesian semi-washed coffees contribute the all-important syrupy body and mouthfeel to our most popular blend.
But don’t imagine for a second that achieving this comes easy. As Kyle Larson, Stumptown’s Green Coffee Quality Control Specialist puts it, “A coffee that meets our threshold for quality, even though it's not on our single origin menu, still demands a lot of work. So much work goes into the coffees in our blends before we even see them in the lab for approval.”
Think about it this way: A shipping container carries over 40,000 pounds of green coffee, all of which has to meet our standards for quality. The work that goes into building that container of coffee is astonishing, involving a tremendous amount of calibration and quality control by our partners at origin.
All the coffee in our blends is picked by hand, with only a small time window available for harvesting. Once harvested and processed, day lots of coffee are then rigorously assessed and sorted according to quality.
When our requirements for volume have been met, we receive a pre-shipment sample. Fortunately, it’s usually the case that we approve the sample, after which the coffee begins its journey to Stumptown. And that’s thanks to the skilled work of our numerous partners throughout the supply chain.
Creativity and Craft: The Art of Coffee Blending
A blend is greater than the sum of its parts, with individual components working in harmony to produce a distinctive flavor profile. Sure, you can pull a wonderfully interesting shot of espresso with a single origin coffee. But an espresso blend has been thoughtfully crafted to provide the perfect balance of body, sweetness, depth and complexity.
We’re well aware that many folks are looking for a reliable and approachable coffee to brew each morning. That’s why a blend like Homestead is an ideal introduction to Stumptown coffees. Encapsulating Stumptown’s overall approach, Homestead features a rotating cast of fully washed Direct Trade coffees. We’ve been cultivating some of these producer relationships since the early 2000’s, and we’re thrilled that their business has been able to expand as our demand for their beautiful coffees has increased.
This blend also showcases the creativity and craft involved in coffee roasting. We feel like our highly skilled and experienced roasting team really captures the sweetness of each coffee, while maintaining a consistent profile for repeatable results. And that’s no small feat. Roaster, Cait Anders, sums up the skills involved: “You really get to know the coffee well, and it becomes a symbiotic relationship where the green tells you what it needs, and you respond. It can be humbling; it requires patience, attentiveness, and most of all intrigue and desire to learn where the coffee is trying to take you while in the drum, knowing you’re still the one at the controls.”
Quality Assurance: Consistency Reigns Supreme
We take great pride in the fact that all of our blends maintain a consistent profile throughout the year. Returning to Hair Bender, consider the fact that at any given time there are four or five different coffees in the blend, depending on seasonality and availability. Still, our talented baristas know that they'll get the same results when pulling a shot in January as they will in August. Likewise, our customers can expect the same delicious latte or straight espresso at any of our cafés, at any time of year. So, humor us while we give a huge shout-out to the teams working behind the scenes to make this possible.
Without the tireless work of the Quality Control team, who source and purchase our green coffee, to the Receiving and Handling team who carefully weigh each batch and set the roasters up for success, Stumptown wouldn't be able to do what we do.
Then there's the Quality Assurance team, who work closely with our roasters to maintain the consistency of each blend's profile. This involves monitoring the freshness of blend components, monitoring changes to the blends throughout the seasons, and carefully calibrating blend profiles for each of our three roasting machines. It also means tasting a lot of coffee in order to help roasters make necessary adjustments to keep profiles aligned. To put this in perspective, members of the Quality Assurance team are tasting both the individual components of Hair Bender and the blend itself on a continual basis.
Stumptown Blends: Try Them All!
We sincerely hope you've enjoyed learning about all the hard work and dedication that goes into our Stumptown blends. And if your daily pot of Holler Mountain tastes just a little sweeter now that you know what it takes to keep it tasting consistent, we'll consider it a win. So, let's all raise our coffee mugs, latte glasses, and demitasse cups in a toast to the heroes of this story!
