Ahoy!
Your Pact Coffee handbook
Welcome to Pact Coffee
Explore the world of coffee with Pact.
At Pact, we believe getting your hands on incredible speciality coffees should be easy. We source top-notch beans from the best growers in the world, so you can enjoy hand-roasted coffee delivered directly to your home or office.
Because coffee tastes better when it’s fresh, our beans are packed and shipped within seven days of being roasted. Tell us what you’ll be using to make your coffee, and we’ll grind it to suit. Or, if you fancy, we can leave them as wholebeans.
How does your coffee get here? When we say that we go to the source to find our coffees, that’s exactly what we mean. Although we prefer to call it “harvest to home”. Our Head of Coffee, Will, travels the world to find the best beans. While he’s away, he meets with farmers and tastes hundreds of different coffees. He’s looking for incredible beans he can keep buying year after year - so forming friendships with farmers is important. Last year, on average, our farmers were paid 51% more than the Fairtrade price, and we’ve made a promise to never pay less than 25% more than these prices. Put simply, we love and respect what they do, and we want them to keep doing it.
Harvest to home.
Meet the guys keeping it fresh It’s Will’s and our Grand Master Roaster Aissa’s job to make sure our incredible beans are as fresh as they can be. After the coffee Will’s sourced has arrived at Pact HQ, it’s up to Aissa to roast it to perfection. You might have noticed that our coffees are roasted lighter than your average supermarket or high street brand of bean. This is down to Aissa’s mastery.
Freshness and roast matter
How coffee is roasted and how fresh it is have a dramatic impact on flavour. Unlike supermarket coffee brands, we focus on freshness and roast to make sure you get the best-tasting coffee.
Did you know coffee can go stale? We grind and pack everything at the last minute (and within 7 days of being roasted). That’s when it tastes the best. Our zip seals mean it keeps perfectly fresh in your cupboard for longer.
Unfortunately, supermarket coffee isn’t this fresh. Many of them have a used-by date of up to a year, which means it can sit around for quite some time before it makes it to your cup.
Our Roasting process wheel Our bean cycle, from parchment to green, right through to our final roast.
Supermarkets over-roast
We like to use a toast analogy. It goes like this: burnt toast always tastes the same, regardless of whether it’s a white bread or rye. Generally their beans aren’t great quality, so supermarkets use overly dark roasts to mask natural flavours with smoky ones - it’s also why their beans tend to look oily.
Lighter roasts is where it’s at
Each coffee has its own complex flavour. Aissa recognises the potential in each bean and roasts them lightly, bringing out the coffee’s natural sweetness.
How we taste our coffee: Mouthfeel:
A coffee’s taste and flavour profile is made up of four main categories. When Will is tasting our coffees he’s able to pinpoint these qualities.
Acidity:
This is literally the way the coffee feels in your mouth. It sounds abstract, but it helps to compare it to the textures of other food and drinks.
This is the sharpness you might feel when you take a sip. Some coffees will be more acidic than others. The trick is to think about what kind of acid it reminds you of.
Mouthfeel ranges from juicy to tea-like. A coffee could coat your mouth like syrup, feel buttery or even silky.
Some acids are light and crisp like apples (this is called “malic”) or grapes (this is “tartaric”), then there’s a range of citric acids similar to orange, lemon and lime.
Will’s tip: “Anyone can taste coffee like a pro at home. Try rolling the coffee around in your mouth before swallowing. Think about the different elements of taste and see what you find!”
Sweetness:
Flavour:
Different types of sugar have different types of sweetness. Same goes for the sweetness in coffee.
Flavour is a big one. Coffees can include an enormous range of flavours. Basically, if you can imagine it, there’s likely to be a flavour to match.
Sweetness can be unrefined like cane sugar, or rich like honey or syrup. There’s also jammy sweetness, ripe fruit, sherbet or brown sugar among a whole lot more.
All flavours fall under the sub-categories of chocolate, fruit, biscuit, spice, floral, tea, nuts and miscellaneous (which are things like earthy and creamy). Coffee beans with imperfections can also include negative flavours like popcorn, burnt and vinegar.
How do
Brew methods
you brew? Picking a brew method is very personal. Deciding which one suits you can come down to a number of factors, like the kind of flavours you like, ease of use, or you might even choose depending on how it looks. At Pact, we see the beauty in all brew methods. That’s why we grind your coffee specifically to get the best out of the kit you’ve got at home - we can even recommend which coffees suit your brew method best! Read on to see what we like about each one.
Coffee Dripper / V60
Cafetiere
An easy one to perfect. The paper filter increases the clarity, which makes it really simple to pick up on flavours, acidity and sweetness. The iconic V60 dripper is a great way to get into filter coffee.
Easy to use, and master. The ground coffee is immersed rather than having water forced through it, giving it the heavier mouthfeel and richer flavour. The long brew time means a higher caffeine kick.
and their perks
Espresso
Stovetop
Aeropress
Naturally, espresso brewing is quick. Because it produces such a small quantity, the flavour is incredibly intense, with a thick mouthfeel. Add steamed milk and get creative with your lattes.
It’s an early take on an espresso machine. So if you like the rich, full flavour and heavy mouthfeel of an espresso without the expense and bulk of a machine, this is for you.
Makes a mean coffee quickly and easily. The Aeropress combines total immersion with filter paper and gets really consistent results every time. It’s hard to go wrong brewing with an Aeropress.
From coffee cherry to green bean There are three different types of processing used to take coffee from the cherry that’s picked off the tree to the green bean that’s ready to be roasted: ‘washed’, ‘pulped natural’ and ‘natural’. The way beans are processed can alter the taste of a coffee. Here’s how:
Washed coffees… ...have clarity of flavour. These coffees tend to have the crisp, fruity acidity of fresh fruits like apples and pears or blueberries. They also often have richer flavours, like dark chocolate.
Pulped natural coffees… ...are a little bit sweeter. These coffees have good cup clarity and lower acidity, and tend to have sweeter, ripe fruit and nutty flavours. Think plums, cherries, hazelnuts, almonds and cashews.
Natural coffees… ...can be intensely sweet and low in acidity. The flavour generally isn’t as clean as washed or pulped natural coffees. The flavours resemble stewed fruits, milk chocolate and cocoa powder.
And this is how it’s done
Washed
Flotation
Depulping
Fermentation
Washing
Drying
Dehulling
The beans are separated in a tank of water (ripe ones sink, unripe float to the top). Two large cylindrical graters then remove the majority of the pulp, before they’re placed in water tanks and left to ferment for 18-36 hours. Next they’re rinsed and dried in the sun for a week or two. Lastly, the beans pass through a machine called a dehuller to remove the papery, ‘parchment’ outer-layer left on the beans.
Pulped Natural
Flotation
Depulping
Drying
Dehulling
This process is the same as the washed method, except that the beans aren’t fermented. Instead, after the pulp is removed they go straight onto the drying beds. They’re left to dry in the sun for two to three weeks. They’re then passed through a dehuller, removing the remaining parchment layer.
Natural Sorting
Drying
Dehulling
Naturally processed coffees don’t come into contact with water at any point. They’re sorted by hand and laid out to dry on patios for more than three weeks. Finally, the dried cherries are put through the dehuller, which reveals the green bean inside.
Meet our Customer Champions... Although, chances are you already have. Have you had an email welcoming you aboard to Pact? Maybe someone gave you a call to make sure your coffee arrived safely? Our team of Customer Champions are those helpful souls, at the ready, answering whatever questions come their way, and making sure your Pact experience is smooth sailing. They’re also some of the nicest people we’ve ever met, so if you’ve got a question or issue, give them a shout on ahoy@pactcoffee.com. They know how to help.
Tips for getting the most from your Pact Account Flexibility is key to Pact. Log on to your account page at www.pactcoffee.com/account to access these features.
Adjust your deliveries
Tell us exactly how frequently you’d like your coffee stocks topped up with our Cup Calculator feature. Going on holiday? You can also skip deliveries at the press of a button.
Teach us your tastes
Only receive coffees you really love by giving us a thumbs up on the coffees you enjoyed. We’ll then be able to send you coffees in future we think will match your taste.
Tell your friends
Love Pact? Why not spread the word with your personal invitation code? It’ll let your friends try Pact for £1 and you’ll earn £1 bags as well.
“Hello” from our Founder I launched Pact in my kitchen back in September 2012 with a dream of introducing the UK to better coffee at home, improving millions of mornings and transforming hundreds of growers’ lives in the process. As a young business, we’re learning more every day, and we thrive on feedback; if there’s anything we could be doing better, please reach out and let me know! You can get to me directly on stephen.r@pactcoffee.com. Until then, thank you and welcome to the community!
FAQs We get a lot of questions about our product. Here are a couple of the more frequently asked ones: Why is Pact more expensive than a supermarket? The quality speaks for itself. But just in case, they’re all covered by a no-quibble, money-back guarantee.
Are your coffees flavoured? None of the coffees we stock have artificially added flavours at all. The flavour notes on the bag, and any strong flavours you pick up yourself, are actually naturally occurring and emphasised by the roasting process. If you’ve got a question for Pact, why not send us a Tweet @pactcoffee or pop us a message on facebook.com/ pactcoffee? Alternatively, you can email our Customer Champions on ahoy@pactcoffee.com.
For more FAQs visit www.pactcoffee.com/faq
@pactcoffee /pactcoffee /pactcoffee
In the area? Come and say “hi!” The Mint Building, The Biscuit Factory, 100 Clement’s Road, Bermondsey, SE16 4DG
www.pactcoffee.com
#LoveFreshCoffee