Over the past couple weeks we've started to pack and fulfill the large demand from our Kickstarter campaign. Last week some orders started to arrive to many of you. It was a special moment for us to witness... a lot has gone into those packages.
Speaking of which, it has been an incredibly exciting, fun, and if we're honest with ourselves a challenging endeavour to ensure each of the coffees we ship are something we're proud of. To be quite frank, we've thrown away more coffee than we would have ever wished due to the never ending pursuit of perfection, the belief we could get more out of a coffee, or simply minor imperfections many roasters would label ordinary. Every bag of September is a product of ourselves, and we plan to ensure it is of the highest quality we can produce. Thankfully, we've created and adopted an effective process and we believe our coffee is better because of it.
We realize this is part of the difficulty as a roaster growing its legs and sharing space and time with another roaster and their equipment. We are very grateful for these options (that's an understatement!) but it also means that we are limited in how many hours a week we can currently roast, and the environment we have to roast in (including transporting green coffee and QCing, different locations, etc.) Thankfully, this will change soon. We have an update we believe to be exciting regarding September's future.
September HQ
Over the past seven weeks, we've been diligently seeking a larger and more permanent home for September. We realized the location we originally had in place, we would have out grown quickly after our Kickstarter success (again, thank you) and it was time to dream bigger. So we did.
September now has a home.
September HQ (as we like to call it) is a short drive from downtown Ottawa in a commercial area of the city. It's neighboured by a brewery and a dance studio. So yeah... it's going to be a party.
We received the unit in a less than ideal state. It was a carpentry workshop before us. And so much of our spare time has been painting, renovating and preparing September HQ to be a place for our community to call home. While September won't open as a traditional Cafe, and we don't have the space to operate as a large cafe and roaster in this location, we will have cafe elements open at our front of house on select days that will operate similar to a cafe. More on that later.
Truthfully it'll be the home to our new roaster (again more on that soon!), a place for QC, cupping, packing, shipping and all the traditional elements of being a coffee roaster. But we want this to be a place where education is foundational, community cuppings are common and maybe even host a local competition or two...
Final Thoughts
We are excited for many of you to experience September for the first time. If you purchased coffee within our first phase of Kickstarter without merchandise you should expect to receive coffee soon. If you purchased merchandise than please hold tight... they're being printed as I write this and should be shipping in the next few weeks. We had to wait until we received sizes back from you before we could finalize the order. But they're on their way! Regardless if you're a kickstarter backer you will receive an email with tracking information when your order is packed and shipped. If you are not... please keep reading!
If you're wondering if you should rest your coffees upon receiving them, we addressed this on a recent Instagram post. But in short we recommend Shower series 14 days rest from the roast date and 7-9 days for our Storm series. Please refer to that recent Instagram post for more information on why.
We are nearly ready to launch our web-store. We are waiting to ensure we can get as many kickstarter orders fulfilled before we launch the site. We hope to list our Kickstarter coffees on the store at launch (some without the ability to purchase) so that we can share more infomation about the coffee, producer, farm and information we found too difficult to include on the label. Stay tuned for this as we hope this will be helpful.
And lastly we have a few brew guide videos in the works after popular request. We will launch these in the next few weeks if all goes as planned.
