Well here we are in the busiest season at The Kaffeeklatsch for our 43rd year! We always look forward to being here for all your holiday needs, whether it’s entertaining, gifting or receiving.

Our Holiday Schedule:

During December we will have normal store hours through Saturday 12/21. We will be Open Monday 12/23 from 9am to 2pm and Tuesday 12/24 from 9am to 1pm (in case of last minute needs!). As is tradition at The Kaffeeklatsch all cups of coffee are on the house on Christmas Eve, so if you’re in the neighborhood drop on by!

From Christmas Day, Wednesday 12/25 through Friday 01/03/2020 the store will be Closed for our winter break. Don’t forget to stock up before we are closed! We will return to regular business hours on Saturday 01/04. Any orders received during our break will be shipped by Tuesday 01/07.

New Coffees & Teas Available:

We’ve got some lovely new coffees in stock, great for sharing with holiday guests.

Timor Fair Trade Organic is back in stock. We’re pleased to offer a crop from Cooperativa Cafe Timor again. It’s a lovely, rich coffee with a full body and a bit of sweetness. Notes of chocolate galore, toffee and subtle fruit notes. Available for $15.95 per pound. In December we will feature Timor as Coffee of the Month for $14.95 per pound.

Another great coffee back in stock is our Panama Los Naranjos Volcancito. This crop comes to us from Finca Lerida and is produced by Sonia Amoruso, one of the few women involved in specialty coffee in Panama. This coffee has a sweet aroma and a soft, medium body. Notes of cocoa, stone fruits, subtly floral and a pleasant sweet brightness like a lemon pound cake, just delicious! Available for $17.95 per pound.

We’ve got some fantastic new teas in stock as well. They’re so new they haven’t all made it to the website yet but we wanted to give an introduction.

Simao Organic Yellow, $18.50 per quarter pound, is a great tea for anyone trying to get in to green teas, it’s delicate with more subtle notes.

Masala Chai, $5.50 per quarter pound, lovely spiced tea. Winter Walnut, $6.25 per quarter pound, a scented black tea, nutty and floral. These are great choices for the cold weather season.

Rose Corolla, $7.95 per ounce, is beautiful and full of flavor. One of the best dried flower teas we’ve tasted in a while, it also looks so pretty in a glass teapot!

Gift Ideas for Coffee Lovers:

If you are looking for something special for a coffee lover in your life we’ve got some great picks.

Our Coffee Lover’s Blend is always a treat. Exquisite aroma, exceptional flavor and great body. Available for $29.95 per pound.

Our Costa Rica Geisha is distinctive with several different flavor notes. Different notes will come through at different temperatures making a wonderfully entertaining cup of coffee! Available for $49.95 per pound.

Our Yemen Mocca Sanani is unique and highly flavorful. It’s unlike any other coffee in the world! Available for $24.95 per pound.

We have some great t-shirts available. Our Jabez Burns Roaster is featured on long and short sleeve styles, the short sleeve styles are on sale! We also have some of our past stock gray long sleeve with a cup and bean design on sale as well.

As always gift certificates are available in any denomination or a “Coffee of the Month” delivery is available for up to one year. Please call us with any questions or assistance with ordering and gifting.

We Appreciate Your Patronage and Wish You a Wonderful Holiday Season!

Our Coffee of the Month is our new offering from Tanzania, Edelweiss Estate Peaberry RFA. This lovely, focused coffee is sweet and smooth with a good medium body and notes of rich chocolate, citrus and stonefruit. The beautiful Edelweiss Estate is perched on the slopes of the Ngorogoro Caldera, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Three generations of the Vohora family have cared for and expanded Edelweiss Estate since 1969. Available for $14.95 per pound for the month of October, regular price $15.95 per pound.

We also have a lovely new offering from Guatemala, Quisache El Volcan. Farms located in the Acatenango volcanic growing region tend to have ideal coffee cultivating conditions. Distinctive climate patterns, forest covered peaks allow coffee cherries to ripen slowly and develop more flavors, and volcanic ash that enriches the soil. Traceability and coffee processing are strictly managed in this area to uphold the distinctive Antigua coffee profile. A creamy body with notes of chocolate, a hint of cinnamon and subtle, sweet fruit notes. Available for $15.95 per pound.

Available for a short time only we have a special offering from Mexico, Finca San Carlos Maragogipe. Alfred Klein, owner and operator of Finca San Carlos, has had quite the journey in bringing the farm and Maragogipe varietal back in action. For a more in depth look at Alfred’s story check out this three-part article by Royal Coffee. This coffee has nuances of fudge and milk chocolate, caramel, juicy stone fruit and subtle tart berries. Wonderfully rich and creamy body. Available for $17.95 per pound while it lasts!

Check back for more new coffees arriving in the next few weeks as well. For those customers that have been missing the one-of-a-kind Bali Kintamani, you’ll be pleased to know we approved our sample so it’s on the truck as well!

Looking for something different to try? We have a few new coffees in store that are sure to deliver some great flavors!

Our new Honduras crop comes from small farm, Finca Liquidambar, in the community of Guascotoro, San Jose, La Paz. This micro-lot is Certified Organic and Fair Trade and is processed in the Honey style. It’s sweet and juicy with lots of fruit notes and hints of cocoa and caramel.

If you are a fan of coffees from Costa Rica be sure to try the Costa Rica Mariposa Fancy. This crop is sourced from farm La Mariposa, spanish for butterfly, near the community of Birri, Santa Barbara, Heredia. It is rated as SHB and EP. Strictly Hard Bean (SHB) is a designation for growing altitude (1,200 meters or more above sea level) and bean quality (usually a denser, higher quality than Hard Bean) used in Costa Rica and Guatemala. European Prep (EP) shows the coffee has undergone rigorous sorting, usually done by hand. The coffee has a pleasant full body with nuances of tart fruit, honey and chocolate.

We are pleased to be offering a crop from Nicaragua again, it has been several years since we have had one in store. It comes to us from a farm located in Las Sabanas municipality, Madriz. Nicaragua 5 de Junio is designated Certified Organic and Fair Trade (FTO) as well as SHG and EP. Strictly High Grown (SHG) is a very similar designation to SHB. It also defines growing altitude (at least 1,200 meters above sea level) and bean quality (again usually a denser bean and higher quality than High Grown) but is the classification generally used in Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Panama. This crop is rich and creamy with notes of dark chocolate, marshmallow, berry and orange.

Our new Ethiopia Yirgacheffe has a really interesting profile. Sourced from a farm located in Worka, Gedeb, Gedeo, Southern Nations Nationalities and Peoples’ Region that has been producing coffee since the 1960s. Owner Bedhatu Jibicho takes great pride in the fact that she has managed farm operations for over 50 years at the farm and is passing on this rich tradition to her adult children. This Yirgacheffe is fully washed with a complex profile. Lemon forward, rich and syrupy body with nuances of ginger, jasmine, melon, herbs and chocolate.

We hope you’ll try and enjoy one of these new crops soon. Don’t forget to check out our new t-shirts, featuring our 1929 Jabez Burns coffee roaster, as well!

If you’ve been to Downtown Huntsville, you may have smelled it’s great aromas wafting through the streets. If you’ve been in to our shop you definitely saw it, even if you might not have known what it was. Whether you’re familiar with our Jabez Burns Roaster or not, it is an integral part of our business and we’re proud to have it and work it every day we’re open. This year marks it’s 90th birthday!

Jabez Burns was quite the engineer and developed multiple ideas and inventions during his life but most notable to our industry was his first roaster patent in 1864. He created the first machine that the roasted coffee could be discharged from without moving the machine itself from the fire source. This was quite an evolvement at the time and was the beginning of modern coffee roasters. Jabez Burns & Sons went on as a commanding force of the coffee roasting industry and continued to create new and more useful types of equipment.

Our Jabez Burns Number 7 Roaster was built in 1929 in New York City. The Kaffeeklatsch came in to possession of it in 1977. After one year of business, owners Grant and Kathy felt that they wanted complete control over the quality of their coffee and having their own roaster was the best way to ensure that. On a weekend trip to Norfolk, Virginia Grant took some whirlwind lessons from a gentleman named Harvey at First Colony Coffee & Tea. Harvey was able to help find our Jabez Burns Number 7 in New Orleans, where it had been used for roasting peanuts. It showed up in a large crate and had to come through the front window to be placed where it still sits today. The Kaffeeklatsch was on it’s way to becoming one of the first (if not the first) specialty coffee roasters in Alabama.

The Number 7 can handle 30 kilos (about 66 pounds) of coffee at a time, making it a “half bag” roaster. An average bag of raw coffee beans weighs 60 kilos (around 132 pounds). It uses natural gas as the heat source for roasting which happens from ~400 to 450 degrees F on this machine. There are two belts and a chain, powered by an electric motor, that turn the two drums on the roaster. Raw coffee beans are loaded through a hand-operated gate on the front side of the top drum, which is perforated and has large fins all along the inside. This design results in better airflow through the drum and thus better heat transfer through the bean. It also keeps the coffee beans in constant motion, as they would stick to the sides of the drum and burn otherwise. Once the beans have reached our ideal roast level they are discharged to the cooling drum underneath. The top drum has a hand-operated gate that feeds in to a hand-operated funnel piece on the bottom drum (lets hope whoever is roasting remembered to open the funnel as you’d have a pile of hot beans on your feet at this point!). The bottom drum is also perforated for airflow, allowing the beans to cool fairly quickly. Once the coffee is cooled enough the “magic” lever is pulled and dial turned forcing the beans up to the hopper.

There’s a lot more that could be said about our roaster and our process but we’ll save that for another day. In celebration of it’s 90th birthday, we will soon have new t-shirts available! We’re very excited to offer a new design, “The Kaffeeklatsch” logo at the top and a depiction of our Jabez Burns roaster. Look for these to be available in store and online in the next few weeks for $16.95!

New Coffee Arrival

We are expecting a coffee shipment this week from our friends at Royal Coffee and we think you’ll really enjoy our new offering from Honduras! An exquisite micro-lot, Honduras Finca Liquidambar Yellow Honey, from Roberto Rene Gonzalez and his family, who own 37 acre farm Finca Liquidambar. This crop is processed in the honey style, Certified Organic and Certified Fair Trade and is wonderfully sweet and full of delicious fruit nuances. Read more about Roberto and this micro-lot once it arrives in store! We’ll be offering this coffee for $16.95 per pound.

As always we invite you to visit us at our locally owned and operated shop, The Kaffeeklatsch, Inc. serving coffee and tea lovers since 1976, roasters of fine coffees since 1977. We hope to see you soon!

You may have noticed our new look around here….We’ve been working on this update for the last few months and are excited to have it up and running now!

Our old website served it’s purpose well for several years but unfortunately the functionality on our back-end was somewhat tedious to deal with so we felt it was time for an update. It’s been truly amazing to see the changes in what you can do with an e-commerce site as a small business compared to when our website was first created!

Once the update started moving along we decided it was time for a new look as well. As you browse our new site we hope the addition of images with our products will add to your experience. We’ve always loved being able to provide information on the farms our coffees originate from (a BIG Thank You to our coffee importer, Royal Coffee, and Hacienda La Minita for all the info and pics they make available to us!) and think the addition of pictures and maps gives more perspective of those countries. Our tea selection tends to draw the eyes of customers in the store, whether they came for that or not. We have some really beautiful teas and we are so happy our web customers can have an up close look now as well!

We really hope you enjoy our new website! Please feel free to give us your feedback or questions.

Our coffee is now available for Huntsville locals via Grub South! You can order our coffee or teas for same day delivery to your home or work address. Orders can be placed via http://www.grubsouth.com or on the Grub South app. If you can’t get in to see us have Grub South bring The Kaffeeklatsch to you!

We invite you to shop at our locally owned and operated family business, The Kaffeeklatsch, Inc., serving coffee and tea lovers since 1976. You may shop at our brick and mortar store, online where we offer shipping via USPS or UPS or via Grub South.

Shop at our locally owned and operated family business, The Kaffeeklatsch, Inc., serving coffee and tea lovers since 1976.

If you would like to please someone special in your life with a truly unique coffee blend, we recommend our Coffee Lover’s Blend. Exotic sweetness from Jamaica Blue Mountain, fruity and winy pungency from Ethiopian Harrar and rich body from Celebes Kalossi combine to create a romantic blend that is intriguingly complex and unique to our shop.

For an easy drinking coffee, we suggest our new Brazil Fazenda Palto Azul. It’s soft and smooth with nuances of caramel and chocolate and subtle hints of fruit. This fine coffee is very affordable at $14.95 per pound.

How about a treat that is luscious and non-fattening? Try one of our flavored coffees! Our Caramel Decadence is delightful, our Frangelico and Creme is a nutty, creamy mouthful of goodness, and our Pecan Praline is divine.

FOR A BETTER CUP OF COFFEE

If possible, buy your coffee beans from a local roaster who takes pride in purchasing the best quality available. At The Kaffeeklatsch, Inc. we have established relations with coffee brokers whom we’ve known for over forty years, and we sample each coffee before purchasing. If you don’t have a local roaster, try some coffee from different sources to find a roaster that suits you.

The correct grind is essential to a great cup of coffee. If you are grinding your own beans, make sure to use a burr grinder and the proper setting for your brewing method. Check our the recommended coffee grinders in our store, or investigate burr grinders on various websites.

The best of coffees can be ordinary if you don’t have a great coffeemaker. We carry a line of Moccamaster automatic drip brewers made by Technivorm. Each model, made in The Netherlands, has a five year warranty and makes an amazing cup of coffee. Also the Bodum French Presses are available in our store in a variety of sizes and styles. This immersion style of brewing creates a rich cup with wonderful mouthfeel. If you have a little time and patience, the manual drip (also known as pour-over) method can offer a terrific way to get your favorite cup. We suggest bringing your water to around 195 degrees F., which is just below boiling point, and pouring so the brew time is about four minutes. Brewing espresso is another way to enjoy coffee — but we’ll discuss that another time.

Have fun exploring the wonderful world of coffee! And if your pleasure is a cup of tea, look over the selection here on our website. There are even more to choose from in our store in Downtown Huntsville! Hope to see you soon.

Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee returned to The Kaffeeklatsch after being absent for many years. Jamaica Blue Mountain Grade 1 from the  Clydesdale Estate is packed in 30kg barrels. This fabled coffee has notes of tamarind, chocolate and orange and is exceptionally smooth. Coffee produced in the Jamaican Blue Mountains has a protected designation of origin (PDO) because of the renowned reputation of Blue Mountain coffee.

Coffee is intercropped with banana, Inga, mango and many other shade trees. The Clydesdale wet-mill is the most modern in Jamaica with technology to recycle and treat water before returning it to the environment. The dry mill, located in an economically underprivileged part of Kingston, employs over 600 women to hand sort coffee.  In addition to the social impact from stable employment, funds are also invested in projects to support over 30 schools.

• Ethiopia Guji 3 Natural Banko Baya is another new arrival, and it has beautiful berry notes as well as hints of spice and herbs balanced by chocolate nuances.
• Kenya Nyeri Rumukia Thunguri AA is the highest grade of Kenyan coffee available. This assertive coffee has fine acidity with a lot of fruity flavors, such as lemon, berry and green apple, balanced by a rich, heavy body.