Tonight's Coffee Selection

Story

Monarch is one of two blends we recreate year-round specifically designed for espresso. This is the darker roasted, more chocolatey counterpart to Geometry Blend. We wanted an espresso that intentionally worked with higher amounts of milk and would represent a more traditional style of espresso. Monarch is bold and defiant and tends to stand out in beverages of milk that have a volume of 12oz or more. When tasted as pure espresso or in large amounts of milk this coffee shows sugar caramelization in coffee roasting to the fullest. Roasting and human-made flavors in coffee are what Monarch represents. It’s a beautiful image of what traditional espresso truly is even when we are sourcing at a modern level. It’s higher in sweetness and developed in the roast to take fruit flavors to caramels, brown sugars, and chocolates. For this blend, we use a combination of seasonal natural processed coffee from Ethiopia and a washed coffee from Latin America to showcase sugar and complexity. When tasting find bittersweet dark chocolate, a mulled wine acidic sweetness, molasses, and a hint of dried berries on the finish. The coffee is extremely heavy and dense with a velvety-like mouthfeel.

BLEND APPROACH
Our approach to creating blends is a bit different at Onyx. Instead of choosing coffees from specific countries or regions that will, in theory, intertwine well to create complex & cohesive flavors like most, we start from the end and work our way back. This perspective means we choose to create a particular flavor profile first, deciding which acidities, sugars, and fats we want to accentuate for the coffee. Once a flavor profile has been set- in this case, dark chocolate, red wine, molasses, and orange peel for Monarch- we then start cupping blind through many coffees to find these specific attributes. For Monarch, we use a natural Ethiopia roasted longer than normal to take bright fruits to a wine-like sweetness. Then we use Guatemalan coffees to find extra chocolate and caramel notes and create a dense, heavy body. The purpose is that once a flavor profile is created, we update the coffees that make up Monarch every 3-4 months. This allows us to have a year-round blend and flavor profile of high quality while retaining our commitment to seasonal coffees. This vigorous amount of cupping and blending takes a considerable amount of time, but we think it makes the difference and is a system we use for all our blends. Currently, this blend is Ethiopia Gedeb Chelchele and Colombia The Queen.

Feel excited that the coffee you are drinking is always in season, and therefore, it is cupping and tasting to its full potential. We will never compromise our commitment to high-quality coffees and blends, whether it’s a single origin release or a blend component. You will not find Onyx buying “blender” coffees to save cost or prolong a good coffee. We also always keep blends to three coffees or less and maintain ratios in the build. This way what you extract is the flavor profile we designed.

Monarch is in the hopper at all our Labs and is our house espresso for beverages 12 ounces and larger. Used by many cafes as both an espresso and a more developed drip option.

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The Story

There are a few signals that the season is changing here at the roastery in Arkansas. First, the leaves begin to change, and a slight chill in the air will creep in each morning. Just as significant, if you’re a roaster or green buyer, is the arrival of micro-lots from the harvest in Inzá, truly marking the beginning of the autumn/ winter season. In keeping with the markers of time, we have worked into a rhythm with our friends at Pergamino. Each July we fly to Medellin to visit a few farms and cup through micro-lots at the newly renovated Pergamino lab. Throughout the harvest the team there flags coffees that we have existing relationships with, or new coffees that align with our sourcing values and quality standards. This is truly the backbone of much of what we do at Onyx, as we build lots that will make up most of our Monarch blend, as well as Southern Weather and Geometry. This season, we partnered with the team there to raise the level of our decaf offering by sourcing and building a regional blend, consisting of micro-lots from San Antonio, Inzá. This is not a new coffee for us by a long stretch; we have been buying coffee from this region for almost a decade. The new partnership is the intentional sourcing in order to create a high-quality decaf offering from a direct partnership. Once we put together several micro-lots at the dry mill to build this regional lot, we sent it off to the EA Decaffeination facility so it could be decaffeinated and returned. Read more on that process below.

EA DECAFFEINATION
Sugar cane ethyl acetate or commonly known as EA decaf is a natural process of decaffeinating coffee. It is usually found in Colombia where sugar cane is readily available and starts with making molasses from sugar cane. Once created, it sits in vats to ferment. The bacteria produce acetic acid, much like fermenting coffee, and at the peak of fermentation, alcohol is added to make something called ethyl acetate.

For it to be applied to coffee first, the green coffee is steamed in tanks to elevate the moisture level — the beans swell, which allows the extraction of caffeine. Ethyl acetate is added to the mixture, and it dissolves the caffeine in the coffee. The coffee is then washed with water and laid to dry. In theory, the coffee should reach the same moisture content as it arrived in, which is somewhere between 11-12%. The most important part of EA coffee, and why it tastes so sweet, is it avoids high pressure and high heat, which degrades coffee quickly. This allows the natural terroir flavors to come through, making it a sweet and bright decaf.

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