Single Serve Coffee Visits Baronet Coffee

A few weeks ago we had the pleasure of visiting Baronet Coffee in Hartford, Connecticut. They invited Single Serve Coffee.com to come down (we're Boston based) and sample the new roasts they had just released under the One Cup coffee brand. We were also invited to see the coffee roasting plant and watch them make single serve coffee pods and sample their new espresso line of ESE pods.

After the jump - making single serve coffee and a movie of making single serve coffee pods!

About Baronet Coffee

Baronet Coffee has been around a long time. They have been importing and roasting high quality coffees since 1930. The business was started by two brothers at the time of the great depression, and when other companies struggled, Baronet Coffee was a success because coffee was one of the only luxuries people could afford. They have been adding new products and coffee roasts over the years, including last year's purchase of a very cool coffee pod making machine.

Tasting Single Serve Coffee at Baronet
We started our tour in the Baronet Coffee cupping room. If you're not familiar with cupping, cupping is the technique used by cuppers to evaluate the flavor profile of a coffee. To understand the minor differences between coffee growing regions, it is important to cup coffees from around the world side-by-side. Cupping is also used to evaluate a coffee for defects or to create coffee blends.

At Baronet Coffee, they roast their own coffee daily. They have to constantly evaluate and also match blends of coffee they have created in the past. This is the same method they use for any of the coffee blends or coffees used in their coffee pods. Once they create a roast, it's paramount the roast maintain the same flavor and be consistent over the length of the roast offering.

In their tasting room Baronet Coffee had no less than 10+ single serve coffee machines, along with standard coffee machines to test their coffee on. Before we started to try out roasts, we went into the plant to see the green coffee beans prior to roasting and also the coffee pod making machine.

Making Single Serve Coffee Pods

The coffee pod machine Baronet uses came from Italy. It has nitrogen filled chambers to ensure that no flavor or freshness is lost when making the coffee pods. The machine can make 120+ coffee pods per minute and can make both espresso and standard coffee pods.

It's truly a wonderful thing. The coffee gets sucked up from large barrels of freshly roasted coffee, ground, and then stamped into coffee pods. Next the pods are packaged into single envelopes, and then boxed. What was really remarkable was how fast and how efficient the whole process was. They can also swap out coffees rather quickly and make small runs for new flavors easily.
View Quicktime Movie of Making Coffee Pods

Tasting Espresso Pods & Single Serve Coffees

We headed back into the cupping room to try out some single serve coffees. We started with the Dark Kenyan roast using the Aquabrew single serve coffee maker. I've never tested this brewer, but was very pleased with the coffee it made. The Dark Kenyan was delicious. Each Baronet Coffee pod is 10grams in weight and for the 8oz cup of coffee I tasted - this was more than perfect.

Next we decided to try out a variety of their new espresso pods. The Baronet Espresso pods are compatible with E.S.E. machines. They have a light, medium, and dark roast version. We sampled the light version first and I have to say it wasn't bad. I prefer my espresso very short - meaning very little water and a lot of crema. They next whipped up a nice dark shot of espresso - and very short. Yum. A great dark little shot of espresso with a nice amount of crema.

Wrapping Up

We had a great time at Baronet Coffee! If you're in the area you can visit their company store any time during business hours. It's got over 100 roasts and all of their Baronet Coffee Pods for sale.

Thanks to everyone at Baronet for making this happen!

Read More in: Coffee Pods | Coffee Visits | General News

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