Dog and Hat Blog

Hello

Firstly we hope you all had a very merry Christmas and a happy new year.

New Roasters

We currently have over 15 rosters on roster and between our 2x and 3x boxes plus the extra bags, we tend to cycle through those pretty quickly. Over the Christmas break we’ve been contacting a host of new roasters and gathering samples… so keep a close eye on the website, as we plan to rotate new roasters in as often as we can!

November's subscription included two 40g bags of unidentified coffee for our subscribers to taste test – One bag was speciality coffee from an independent roaster and the other was a commodity coffee from a well-known worldwide brand.

We’ve just got back from an excellent day at the Manchester Coffee Festival… it was great to see so many enthusiastic and knowledgeable coffee lovers there!

This week Dog and Hat was lucky enough to meet with Ricardo from Finca La Lomita, a coffee farm in Colombia that supplies Direct Trade coffee to Vagabond Coffee Roasters in London...

Today we ventured down the cobbled streets of Hove to meet with Carola, head roaster at Pharmacie Coffee Roasters in their amazing converted mechanics garage.....

For those out there that like the idea of improving the quality of the coffee they drink, but think they'll need to buy a lot of fancy equipment first... think again.  You don't need to spend hundreds of pounds of a state of the art bean to cup espresso machine... but you certainly can if you want to!

Today we had the pleasure of being hosted by the good people at Vagabond Coffee Roasters in North London. I got to spend time with Paul, the Vagabond head roaster, as he took me through the art and science of the roasting process along with the insane number of variables that need to be tightly controlled through each roast (frankly I'm surprised his head doesn't explode)...

How do we choose which coffee will make it onto the Dog & Hat list?

Well, firstly we look for a Roastery that is independent, friendly and aligned to our ethos - the highest quality raw ingredients, ethically sourced from sustainable farms ensuring the best product for you and the best deal for the local farming communities.

Here at Dog & Hat we’re not Coffee Roasters, we leave that magic to the experts.  What we are though, are lovers of good coffee - especially on a morning while doing the to-do list for the day. For us that’s the best coffee of the day.