With the newest addition to the CETO team, the one writing this very blog post in fact as well as the launch of our subscription [which you can read more about here https://ceto.coffee/blogs/news/subscription-coffees-for-the-month-of-june]. There has been a marked shift in how we approach coffee here at CETO, from sourcing, roasting and even to quality control. The details of which we will be getting into with this post.

Sourcing

With the latest addition to the CETO team, there has been a marked shift towards primarily cleanliness forward sourcing and more interestingly, finding more unique and novel washed greens to add to our offerings. Expect drops from less commonly sourced origins like China, India and El Salvador, a continuation of our efforts to source newer varieties to the scene like Syrina, SL09, Java and many more in the future. In addition to buying more standard known good coffees from the origins you’d expect, we’ve been particularly keen in trying as many unique process/varietal and combinations we can get our hands on [expect a lot of clean honeys from regions you wouldn’t typically expect them from]. Unique varietal/origin combinations have also been of particular interest to us as you may have gotten a small taste of with the notably high altitude little swamps Kenya that was composed entirely of Batian [which surprised us when we cupped it and honestly gave us a new found respect for the varietal]. We hope to majorly expand on that approach with varietals like Mejorado, SL28 and Ethiopian landraces sourced from origins you wouldn’t typically associate them with.

We’ve also been deeply invested both personally and financially in auctions from organizations and countries newer to the scene and we're actively looking to get our hands on a lot more. We have a few more Long Miles coffee coming down the line and this year's edition of the Best Of Rwanda and many of the Cup Of Excellence competitions will be of particular interest to us. These lots however will likely be quite limited and not always survive making it through the sub drops, something we’ll expand on more when we get to the availability section of this blog post.

Our sourcing in regards to funk has also pivoted a decent bit with a current emphasis on finding interesting processing/varietal combinations and generally brighter and more tame profiles when it comes to the processed coffees we do stock. However there are still plenty of very “out there” coffees and a few co ferments coming down the line for the truly disco inclined, all of which we are roasting extremely light to minimize any of the off fermenty notes that have become a hallmark of this sub genre of coffee. All of this will be greatly expanded upon with our next blog post ‘The absurdists guide to heat death: How to ride a neutron star’, a more fun full length blog post where we’ll really be delving into the details of our approach to funky coffee and how we intend to best tailor them to suit the preferences of our very earthly taste buds, ones notably not engineered to withstand the crushing gravity of a neutron star.

If our sourcing and roasting approach for funk interests you but you don’t want your taste buds to be cosmically irradiated by coferments, we will always put our interesting process/varietal combo coffees in the “little bit of both” subscription alongside our favorite clean offering to make approaching processing in coffee lower risk and generally more fun to the funk averse among you.

Roasting

Roasting at CETO is a constantly evolving process but we’ve really become quite fond of pushing our coffees quite a bit lighter as of recently. We’re currently sitting at a little over 2C of development time in 25seconds for most of our washed coffees with a fairly short roast overall. For those unfamiliar with these terminologies. It essentially means we're roasting straight wheatgrass you wouldn't want to fathom brewing till 6 week mark.

We batch, vacuum seal and freeze all our coffees shortly after arrival at CETO so we don’t have to worry about fade and the green changing as much post profiling, something we’re going to get further into in another blog post ‘A Song Of Ice And Fire: Roasting Coffee From Frozen’. Our current roast approach is a short soak followed by a full yeet at beyond 100 power [one of the neat features we unlocked via our stronghold overhaul which you can learn more about here https://tinyurl.com/4f9v6a96, a blog post that actually already exists] while maintaining as low of a drum temperature as we can [something that wouldn’t be possible without the overhaul]. This maximizes the S7X’s convection ratio and lets us keep to one of our core ideals at CETO, that of making our coffees fairly accessible and easy to brew while still being extremely light.

This approach to roasting enabled by our stronghold overhaul keeps our coffees quite soluble even as we experiment with dropping coffees as early as 9 seconds after first crack. That being said, those things among many others are still in the experimental phase and not making it to production till next months sub drop. For this months subscription drop however, we’re sticking to our standard ultralight profile that was described earlier in this section.

That being said, there are still a lot of things we’re experimenting with when it comes to our profile like soak heat, duration, yeeting harder, development time and heat approaches when coming to first crack as well as entirely retooling our approach to funk, something that we will get to in more detail in a future blog post and also something our customers will get to taste side by side in a collaboration drop that's coming out soon. As always, we’re very open to feedback and would love to hear what you think of our coffees and the ways in which you would like to see it improve.

Availability

As mentioned earlier in roasting, we’ve purchased, batched and frozen all of our coffees in preparation for the sub and have the first few months of our subs already planned out. We’re very thankful for the support our inaugural drop has received and it was frankly much more than we expected to get when we first purchased the coffees we had planned for the subs. As a consequence of our woeful underestimation of the support we’d get, a lot of the auction coffee as well some of the more unique offerings we had initially planned to release for both the subs and standard retail, might not make it to retail in any significant capacity if at all. But as a thank you for all the support we’ve received from our subscribers, in addition to launching these coffees via the subscription first, we’re also giving subscribers early access to all our drops, including the ones they received in their subscription so that our subscribers don’t miss out on drops that catch their eye from a subscription plan they’re subscribed to or if they simply just want more bags of the coffees they’ve received. As a consequence of our gratitude however, this may largely prevent a lot of our smaller lot coffees from ever hitting retail. However, unless they sell out in early access [which isn’t super likely], we will still have a lot of our geshas and big bag Ethiopian and Kenyan coffees up for sale on the site.

Once again, thank you all for your amazing support to both us and the charity we’ve partnered for our first sub drop [more here, https://www.instagram.com/p/DWgwnCnDnKU/]. The cut off for this month's sub drop is the 21st of June after which we’ll get started on roasting and packing the month's coffees to be sent out. We hope to have your continued support as we go into the future and also probably purchase more green to have it make it to our standard web store.