Category: News

We hope you are having a pleasant start to 2023 and thank you again for all the support and love last year!

This year we’ll be adding some evening hours. Starting Friday January 27th, our new Friday hours are 9am to 7pm! We hope this will give some flexibility to those of you that can’t make it during our daytime hours. We’ll have both caffeinated and decaffeinated pots brewed for our $3 cups of drip coffee.

On a different note, our shipping costs have increased some due to changes the postal service has made recently. Please know we are currently working to lower these costs as quickly as possible. If you ever have any questions about shipping costs, please feel free to call or email!

Now, on a good note again, we have been sampling several coffees lately and will have some great new arrivals coming in shortly!

The Kaffeeklatsch Crew wishes you all a very Merry New Year for 2023! We are so grateful for your patronage!

We are currently closed for our Winter Break and will resume regular business hours and shipping on Thursday January 5th, 2023. Orders placed between 12/23/22 and 01/04/23 will ship when we reopen.

Whether you’re prepared or not the holiday season is upon us. The roaster had it’s Fall deep cleaning in October and we are ready to roast all your holiday needs!

Gift Ideas

We have plenty of options for the coffee and tea lovers (or novices…or you) in your life. Our selections of coffee and tea cover many different taste profiles. If you need help with your picks, we are happy to assist or answer any questions!

Our popular seasonal blends are available. The Holiday Blend is a crowd pleaser with it’s nicely balanced notes and smooth body. For the flavored coffee lovers, Yuletide Cheer is the way to go with its festive blend of Bavarian Chocolate, Frangelico & Creme, and Irish Cream.

We have some nice Special Offers available as well. The Costa Rica Hacienda La Florida Natural Gesha is a gem of a coffee with such a unique flavor profile. The Holidays Fruit Tea is a pleasant herbal blend that really gives you that winter warmth feeling.

If you are looking to get a variety or just not quite sure what your gift receiver likes, we have sampler options for both coffee and tea. Each sampler comes with 3-4 small quantity bags for a little taste of multiple coffees or teas. Click the “Sample Options” tab to see the available samplers (please note these are preset with no substitutions).

Don’t forget we also have lots of options for brewing and drinking equipment, chocolate bars and candies, and ‘Kaffeeklatsch’ branded swag. Click the “Accessories” tab to see all of our non-drinkable products.

New Gift Cards

We have started using new gift cards recently. The new plastic gift cards have a card number so you can use them more easily at checkout! Just look for the “Using a Gift Card” box on the checkout page and fill in the details. Checking your balance is easy too, just scan the QR code on the back of your card. We have specified amounts available to purchase online but if you’d like a different monetary value just call us at the store. We will continue to honor our old style gift cards.

A Few Changes Coming Soon

We have a couple new things in the works that will be implemented over the next few months.

• The exact date is not set yet but starting mid/end of January we will be extending our store hours on Friday evenings until 7pm! The rest of our store hours will remain as are. Look for updates on this change at the beginning of 2023.
• Our checkout experience will be changing just a bit. Shipping options and costs be will shown at checkout for more clarity on the cost of your order at time of checkout. Again the date for this change is not set yet but we will give an update as soon as it goes live.

Our Holiday Hours

• The week of Thanksgiving the store will be closed on Thursday 11/24 and Friday 11/25. We’ll have regular business hours the other days that week.
• On Christmas Eve the store will be open 8:30am to 12:30pm. As is tradition for The Kaffeeklatsch we’ll have free cups of coffee!
• For our Winter Break the store will be closed Sunday 12/25 through Wednesday 01/04/2023. We’ll resume regular business hours on Thursday 01/05/2023.

We so appreciate all of our patrons and partners, old and new alike, and wish you all a most pleasant and safe holiday season! -The Kaffeeklatsch Crew, Joanna, Katie, Amanda, Mary, Paron, Graham, Grant & Kathryn

We are continuing to get some of our old favorites back in the store this summer. Both Tanzania Peaberry and Costa Rica La Minita are back on the menu now! We found these crops to be so nicely balanced with a mix of pleasant sweet and bright flavor notes.

Our Tanzania Ruvuma Peaberry comes out of one of the southern-most regions of the country, bordering Mozambique to the south and the African Great Lake Nyasa to the west. A collaboration between two companies, Soochak Bush and Tropex, acts as a type of cooperative for small farms in the Mbinga district. Having this type of group makes sure small farm-holders can get their crops to the international market and receive fair pay. This crop is smooth and rich, great medium body, with notes of dark chocolate, chocolate chess pie, orange, and grapefruit. On offer for $18.95 per pound.

We know so many of you will be happy to see Costa Rica Hacienda La Minita back on offer! Hacienda La Minita continues to be a pinnacle of meticulous coffee growing and processing. The high altitudes, location of the farm and how the land is worked all come together to create an excellent micro-climate for La Minita’s coffee trees. Elegant, balanced, and refined, this is a lovely crop and on offer for $20.95 per pound.

New T-shirts are in store now as well! It’s a soft and comfy fabric with our logo in color. Sizes small to extra large are available for $20.

Some great new teas are in stock, along with some “old friends” in our coffee offerings too!

We have three new teas, Brazilian Lemonade, Passionfruit & Peach, and Yangtze Green Maofeng, that are prefect for the summertime and these hot temps.

The Brazilian Lemonade has become an immediate favorite here at the shop! Lemonade in Brazil is typically made with fresh limes, so lime is the spotlight of this tea, with other fruit bits added to mellow and sweeten the blend. It’s got a wonderfully creamy body and will remind you of key lime pie. Caffeine free and delicious hot or iced!

The Passionfruit & Peach Fruit Tea is also naturally caffeine free and makes a great cup hot or iced. This straight fruit blend (no floral or herbal ingredients) is so refreshing and has a nice balance of juiciness and sweetness.

If you’d prefer something with caffeine try the Yangtze Green Maofeng. This green tea is light and sweet with notes of sweet peas, lemon, and honey. Using a lower brewing temperature (we recommend 160^oF to 170^oF) will bring out the best flavor from a green tea and help avoid bitterness and astringency.

Now to the “old friends”, we are very pleased to have both Honduras Liquidambar Honey and Costa Rica Dota Peaberry back on our offerings list!

Yet again, our Honduras sample from Finca Liquidambar was just delicious! We have bought from this farm the last few seasons and owner/operator Roberto Rene Gonzalez does an impeccable job with quality and consistency of his coffee. This years crop is focused and balanced, has a creamy medium body, and flavor notes of chocolate, cocoa, caramel, cherry, and apple, Certified Organic and Certified Fair Trade.

We were very pleased with the Costa Rica Dota Peaberry from CoopeDota as well. Although the co-op has grown to having hundreds of producer-members, quality coffee and commitment to the environment are always top goals, along with farming and social programs to better the lives of all producers in the group. This year’s crop is sweet and lush, with a nice chocolate aroma, smooth, medium body, nuances of milk and dark chocolate as well as hints of tart plum and lemon candy.

Such good drinks to be had so try something new or get back to an old favorite!

In April we introduced a new blend, the Love Your Library Blend (very delicious!) so it seems like a great time to highlight our other blends.

Our Single Origin coffees each have a set of flavor characteristics unique to their own country or regions. Creating blends brings those individual flavors together to make a new, and sometimes unexpected, flavor profiles. Some of our blends are more traditional and some we’ve created with certain people,places, or brewing methods in mind.

With more traditional types of blends, you’ll see many roasters and coffee brands with a Breakfast Blend or House Blend but that doesn’t mean you’ll find the same flavors from them. For our Breakfast Blend we mix medium and dark roasted coffees for a rich yet smooth, full bodied brew, whereas others Breakfast Blends may be created to be more soft and easy drinking. House blends vary greatly as most are created to give a shining example of the specific roaster or brand. Our Kaffeeklatsch House Blend was created long ago to be a crowd-pleasing introduction to specialty coffees, back when The Kaffeeklatsch was just about the only “coffee scene” in Huntsville. A blend of 4 different Central and South American coffees, our blend offers an easy drinking cup with interesting flavors, good body and balance.

Likely the first coffee blend ever created was Mocha Java. Don’t confuse this traditional blend with a mocha drink or chocolate flavoring. This blend goes back to the very first coffee growing regions, Yemen and Java, when they were about the only places coffee was grown. Yemen’s port city Mokha (Mocha) was a busy spot, with lots of travelers coming through from Java Island in the Indonesian Archipelago. It just made sense to someone to blend the exquisite coffees from the two areas. For our Mocha Java Blend, we use Yemen and Sumatra Mandheling, another Indonesian coffee, for this distinct blend with striking flavors. Very unique and complex!

Some of our most popular blends came to being through customer needs (and sometimes our own personal wants). The Brazil & French Roast Blend started as a suggestion for customers looking for a bold, yet sweet espresso blend with a nice crema. We found it was just as tasty using other brewing styles as well so we kept suggesting it, patrons kept asking for more, so on the menu it went!

The Cacao Blend was created by a former employee (thanks Aidan!). He wanted a super chocolately nuanced blend to use for making cold brew (fantastic hot brewed too). The crew all enjoyed the blend, and suggested it occasionally to customers. Everyone who tried it wanted more, so Aidan’s chocolate blend became Cacao Blend.

We put equal care in to creating blends as we do roasting our beans. So if you’ve never tried any of our blends, explore all of them under ‘Special Blends‘ on the ‘Coffee’ drop-down menu. Maybe you’ll find a new favorite. Also look out for some additional blends, created for our friends at WLRH (Huntsville Public Radio 89.3 FM), that will be added soon!

We have created a new Special Blend, the Love Your Library Blend, that is now available for purchase. April is Love Your Library Month for our local Huntsville-Madison County Public Library System so we made this blend to help celebrate the month and show our love for HMCPL. Besides giving our love, we are also using this as an opportunity to raise a donation. For the whole month, part of the proceeds of every pound sold will go directly to HMCPL for use in our local community. On top of helping the community, the blend itself is delicious too! A nice mix of coffees from Ethiopia Harrar, and Peru with a little bit of French Roast. So whether you’re local or not, this is a great new offering to try (and it will be staying after April!)

April’s coffee of the month is our New Guinea Siane Chimbu, available for $17.95 per pound. This coffee is rich and heavy bodied with prominent dark chocolate notes, very tasty! It’s also Certified Organic.

We received a truckload of coffee last week with some old favorites you might have been missing. For our decaf drinkers, the Decaffeinated Ethiopian is back in stock also bringing back our Decaffeinated German Blend as well as the Decaffeinated Mocha Java.

For the caffeinated drinkers, we have the Timor-Leste Ermera Eratoi back in stock and also a new crop from Peru Cajamarca Santa Maria, and Ethiopia Guji.

We are very pleased to have both Celebes Kalossi-Sulawesi* and Jamaica Blue Mountain back in stock at the store!

We had a bit of a wait on the Sulawesi but it was well worth it. This Sulawesi is a little different than the coffees we generally carry from that area as it is a naturally processed crop. So expect a touch of brightness in the cup along with the expected boldness, but don’t worry, it’s delicious! We’ll feature this Sulawesi as Coffee of the Month in March.

Jamaica Blue Mountain is back again from the Clydesdale Estate. As pleasing as ever, smooth, soft, sweet, and just so easy to drink! If you’ve been pining for Hawaii Kona give this Jamaica a try as it has a similar flavor profile.

Having this coffees back in stock also brings back our Coffee Lover’s Blend and Deluxe Coffee Sampler.

∗The name Celebes was originally given to the country by Portuguese explorers. Sulawesi came in to common use following Indonesian Independence from the Dutch/Netherlands in 1945 and is now the proper country name. Kalossi is a specific village in the main growing region of Sulawesi.

We had a bit of a rough start to 2022 but it’s finally settled down. We always appreciate how understanding our patrons are when we have to close unexpectedly!

We have several new coffee crops in stock:

• Brazil Mantiqueira de Minas
• Guatemala La Flor del Cafe Peaberry
• Ethiopia Harrar 4 Kubsitu Cooperative
• Mexico FTO Chiapas GRAPOS
• Peru Grade 1 FTO
• Sumatra Takegon IKA Mandheling

Both the Mexican and Peruvian coffees are Certified Organic and Certified Fair Trade. The new Guatemalan is a Peaberry type of bean (Peaberries occur inside the coffee cherry from a natural mutation that causes only one of the seeds to be pollinated. This leaves extra space for the single seed to grow larger and rounder creating a peaberry coffee bean). The Ethiopia Harrar and Sumatra Mandheling both offer different and interesting taste profiles. There’s something to please most any coffee drinker!

News on Accessories:

Our Kaffeeklatsch Logo Mugs were so popular we sold completely out before the end of 2021. Good news is we have more in stock now, so make sure to get one and show your Kaffeeklatsch love while you sip! Choose from a 15 oz. white mug with our logo in black or a 10 oz. speckled black mug with our logo in white, both $14.95. We also have enamel pins, stickers and magnets too!

We are introducing more coffee and tea making accessories from Fellow. We have more of their Atmos Storage Jars in stock. We’ve also got some of their great travel mugs and kettles in store, available soon through our website.