We have been so thankful for all of our customers continued support during the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic. As of today Gov. Kay Ivey has issued a shelter in place order for the state of Alabama. For the safety of ourselves, our customers, our community and the country as a whole we feel that closing the store is the best option at this time. Health and safety are top priority for everyone now and we can only beat this by working together to stop the spread of COVID-19.

Please know that this is only for the time being and that we can’t wait to be back to work and getting our coffee to you as soon as is safe. Again we thank you all so much for your support during this time and throughout the years. We pass on all our love and care to you and hope that you may stay safe and healthy during these difficult times – The Kaffeeklatsch Crew, Grant and Kathryn, Joanna, Katie, Rita and Ross

*Orders for shipping and pick up that are received through the website by midnight on 04/03/2020 will be honored*

*Monthly Mail Order Customers orders will be shipped on 04/04/2020*

We have been blown away by our customers loyalty and need for coffee! We are so thankful for all the love and support and so pleased that we can provide a product that gives some comfort and normalcy during these uncertain times.

Between our workload and our desire to protect everyone we do need to make some more changes to our operations. These changes will go in to effect starting Tuesday 03/24/2020.

At this time the store will no longer be open to in-store shopping or payment.

Orders can be placed on our website, www.kaffeeklatsch.com, or by phone, (256) 539-1636. Orders can also be placed through Grub South in Huntsville.

Shipping Orders

Shipping orders will continue as usual as long as there are no disruptions to USPS or UPS services. Orders may take up to 24 hours to be shipped. You will receive an email confirmation once your order has shipped.

Delivery Options:

• Orders may be placed through Grub South. They are able to provide no contact delivery, follow instructions on their website for this service.
• Our staff is able to deliver to the 35801 zip code. We may consider an address outside of 35801 if you are still in close range to the store. Ask when you call or order online and we will check your address. Your delivery will be no contact. If you are ordering through the website please note your request for delivery in the ‘order notes’ area at checkout.

No Contact Pick Up

We are still offering order pick up at the store but will have a new process. Orders must be paid ahead. Once your order is complete we will call to let you know and give you further instructions about pick up. Please do not come to the store if you have not heard from us.

At this time we will continue to operate within our normal store days/hours. We are working very hard to get orders processed same day but we just can not guarantee it at this time. Please understand it may take up to 24 hours and that we will contact you via email confirmation or phone call as soon as your order is ready for shipping, delivery or pick up.

We will continue to serve you as long as we can. Due to the uncertainty of what may happen, our shopping options may change at short notice. We will post updates on our website and social media. We offer all our hopes that everyone can stay as healthy as possible and we thank you so much for your continued support.

– The Kaffeeklatsch Crew – Grant and Kathryn, Joanna, Katie, Rita and Ross

For 44 years our commitment to quality, consistency and service have been driving factors of our business. Most important to our continued ability to operate, though, is our customers. Without you we wouldn’t be here today. Considering the current world situation regarding COVID-19, to protect you the customer and our staff, family and friends we have made some changes to how we are going to operate. We will update any further changes as they happen. We offer our sincerest hopes that we can all weather these tough times as best as possible.

In Store Policies:

• We are following rigorous cleaning/disinfecting procedures for all areas, especially areas with more chance for multiple person contact.
• To-go coffee cup service will be discontinued until further notice.
• No public restrooms will be available until further notice.
• We request that anyone who has any signs or symptoms of any illness or anyone who may be immunocompromised please refrain from coming to the store.
• In order to keep a minimum number of people in the store please try to only send one family member in or only those making a purchase.
• For the time being we ask that all in store shopping be “look, don’t touch” and only items you are going to purchase be handled. We can answer any questions regarding items to assist you.
• Only staff members will handle coffee/tea jars and work equipment. Unfortunately, we need to discontinue allowing customers to smell coffees and teas for the time being.
• We will be using a no contact payment method. For debit/credit cards only the customer will handle the card and no signatures will be required so you do not have to touch the Square screen, the card reader will be sanitized between all customers. We will still accept cash and check and ask that customers place payment on the counter for staff to pick up, change will be placed on the counter for customer to pick up.

Coffee Buying Options:

• The store is currently still open for in-store shopping Tuesday thru Friday 9am to 4pm and Saturdays 10am to 3pm, please see policies above.
• Orders may also be placed via phone: (256) 539-1636, our website: www.kaffeeklatsch.com, email: klatsch@bellsouth.net or through Grub South in Huntsville: www.grubsouth.com.
• We will continue any shipping orders in Huntsville and throughout the country as usual unless there are disruptions to USPS or UPS services.
• Grub South is offering no-contact delivery service, please see their website for more information.
• During this time some local delivery is available via our own staff. Customers located in 35801 zip code are eligible for this service. Orders must be paid ahead and will be delivered with no-contact.
• Customers can request no-contact pick up orders as well. Orders must be paid ahead and will be placed by the store entrance when ready.
• While we are usually able to have orders ready the same day, during this time please allow up to 24 hours for your order to be ready for pick up or shipment. Please do not come for your pickup order until you have received confirmation that it is ready.

Remember to consider not just how COVID-19 affects you but how it affects all those around you, people you know or not, we are all in this together. Again we offer our love, care and hope that we can all get through this with as minimal impact on our lives as possible and that we may handle the impacts as best we can as they come. Take care of yourselves and help others as you can

– The Kaffeeklatsch Crew, Grant and Kathryn, Joanna, Katie, Rita and Ross

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.