Brazil and Honduras

Thanks to Extract Coffee Roasters, our delicious house espresso, Rocket, is from two incredible places in the world, combining the dedication of farmers in Brazil's Minas Gerais and Honduras' Lepaterique regions. 

Served in all of our cafés, you can try Extract Coffee Roasters' exclusive Brazilian blend that's packed with flavour, including Belgian chocolate, intense black cherry and treacle. But what is the story behind your cup?

Brazil: Hunting the Curadoria blend 🇧🇷

Wanting to learn more about the process behind their exclusive Brazil blend that makes up part of Rocket and their Original house espresso's, Extract Coffee's head roaster Tommy and one of their coffee specialists flew to Brazil to work with the local quality teams. 

They were on the lookout for beans that tasted like dried fruit and chocolate, with a sweet and clean finish. They visited farms, tasting stations and warehouses, picking out the best of the best to make sure each batch met their standards. 

Once finalised, the beans were shipped from Santos to the UK, ready to be roasted into the Rocket espresso blend that makes up part of the coffee you're drinking right now on campus. 

Honduras: The other half of the story 🇭🇳

Searching for a finishing touch to balance out the Brazilian base, Extract Coffee headed to Lepaterique, Honduras to meet small-scale farmers who they knew could find a bright acidic top note for Rocket.

Here, the small-scale farmers are part of an improvement programme, supported to level up their farming skills from better pruning to better infrastructure, so you can have a better coffee and they can have access to the speciality coffee market, selling through the right channels to benefit and support them in return. 

The cherries here that contribute to Rocket coffee are processed using the washed method, a prized for its ability to produce clean, consistent flavours. After the ripe red cherries are picked and sorted (either by hand or by density in flotation tanks), they go through a meticulous process:

1. Pulping: The skins are removed to reveal the beans.
2. Washing: They sticky mucilage from around the beans is washed away using water.
3. Drying: The beans are left to dry, then shipped to roasters. 

This water-intensive process results in a coffee that is uniform in quality and flavour, meaning you can get a delicious, speciality coffee every single morning.

Why choose Rocket coffee? 

When choosing to drink Rocket coffee on campus, you're not only supporting dedicated small farmers and businesses who take quality coffee seriously, but also coffee roasters who ensure fair wages for farmers and put sustainability first, all while delivering a speciality product. 

This is why it is so important to think about the work and care that goes into your food and drink behind the scenes. It's more than just coffee. It's a community of people who care about what they're serving.

Crafted using Extract Coffee Roasters' Probat roasters, this coffee mirrors the equipment it's roasted on: reliable, consistent and bold. So whether you're team flat white, iced latte or straight-up espresso, Rocket is the perfect choice. 

Find out more about our house espresso, Rocket, and take another sustainable step by taking part in our Ground to Ground Coffee scheme where you can take a bag of our used coffee grounds from our cafés and turn them into something great - all for free!

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