Hello friends,
Somehow, September is here. There’s lots happening around Holm right now, including some very good (new!) coffees on the menu, a new neighbour serving lunch, and more and more of our coffee making its way out into the world.
Over the past few months, we’ve had a growing number of cafés reach out about bringing Holm into their shops. Every time it happens, we’re excited to know our coffee is heading somewhere new. And, the more it happens, the more we’ve realized how much goes on behind the scenes before a new roaster ever makes it onto a café menu.
Being a café that regularly features different roasters like ours takes extra effort! Owners and managers spend time finding and following us, reaching out, tasting samples and choosing what they want to bring in. Then there are orders to coordinate, new products and pricing to add to the till, and new coffees for staff to learn. Not to mention, if you’re rotating roasters regularly, you turn around and do it all again a few weeks later..
For small, up-and-coming roasters like ours, that kind of support means a lot. It puts our coffee in front of people in places we couldn’t easily reach on our own. That willingness to make room for different roasters is part of what keeps specialty coffee interesting because smaller roasters get a chance to grow and good coffee gets to travel a little further.
We feel so lucky to have some great cafés making room for Holm right now. Eight Ounce Coffee in Calgary carries our coffee both in their physical shop and online. Union Market in Vancouver and Heart of Bragg Creek have also been huge supporters. In Squamish, Fox & Oak has even handed things over to Holm for a full takeover until the end of October, serving our coffee alongside some seriously good donuts! And, multi-roaster operations such as Paquebot, Pleasant coffee, Ahh.. Coffee, Laneway Coffee, Mah Coffee, The Bench Bakehouse, United Strangers, September Cafe have all carried our coffees this year. It’s such a gift to see our coffees on the shelf alongside an amazing selection of roasters from across Canada and beyond, and we offer a huge thank you to the cafés putting in the work to make this happen for roasters like us.
Meanwhile, we have some pretty exciting things happening on the menu back home, too. There are three new coffees that we’re particularly excited to share.
From Ethiopia, a natural and a washed coffee from the Ayla processing station near Shantewene village. The washed tastes like creamed honey, fresh apricot and chamomile whereas the natural one offers a wine-like character: ripe plum, dark fruit and jasmine. We have the new harvest of Stiven Hoyos’ Gesha from Colombia, a structured and floral coffee with notes of black raspberry, potpourri and clementine.
We buy coffees like these in much smaller quantities, so they won’t be around forever. Having all three on the menu at once is pretty special, and we can’t wait for you to try them. As ever, thank you for your support!
See you soon,
Simon and Izzy
P.S. Reeno’s Deli is officially open! Alexis is serving sandwiches next door! Available Thursday through Sunday, 11am– sold out, we’re so excited to have his goodies available for Holm customers
