From day one, Necessary Coffee has existed to bring easy drinking, deeply satisfying specialty coffees to as broad a group of coffee lovers as possible. While the response to the original Necessary lineup has been incredibly positive since its launch in 2019, we have received many inquiries highlighting consumer demand for intentionally sourced coffees that are presented at a darker roast degree than our existing Necessary coffees. In response to this feedback, we are excited to add Necessary Dark Roast to the menu to support broader buying from coffee farmers and to add a great option for folks who enjoy their coffee on the bold and smoky side!
The first thing to emphasize here is that there is no universal standard for roast degree. With no objective reference for “dark roast”, “medium roast”, or “light roast” there will always be room for interpretation on the part of the roaster and personal preference on the part of the coffee drinker. Put another way: one person’s “dark roast” is another person’s “medium roast”; one person’s “medium roast” is another person’s “light roast”!
It’s also worth emphasizing that the outside color of a roasted coffee bean doesn’t tell the whole story of how that coffee was roasted, or how it will taste in the cup. Visual inspection is one piece of helpful information, but tasting is always the most important step to take when evaluating whether a particular coffee is a good fit for your personal preferences.
Necessary Dark Roast is our team’s take on this classic and nostalgic style and we hope coffee lovers who tend to prefer dark roasts will enjoy our interpretation. For us, the entire Necessary Menu falls in a general “Medium to Dark” zone when it comes to roast degree. Necessary Dark Roast is the most “developed” coffee on the menu: visually it is the shade of dark chocolate and there are small amounts of coffee oils on the surface of the beans that reflect its prolonged roast time. The other Necessary coffees are less developed, exhibit a lighter roast color, and are not roasted long enough for oils to be expressed.
One final thing to note when thinking about roast degree: as coffee is roasted darker its flavors tend to reflect the roasting process more and more and reflect the original ingredient, and the place and particulars of its origin, less and less.
As an analogy, think about the complex, deeply caramelized flavors that a tomato exhibits if you eat it after simmering it in butter for hours, as opposed to the bright, juicy flavors that you experience if you eat a perfectly ripe tomato fresh off the vine with just a splash of olive oil. Both experiences can be truly delightful, but one showcases cooking technique and one keeps the focus on the ingredient, and the garden. Darker roasts are more comparable to the slow-cooked tomato sauce, lighter roasts are more comparable to the minimally seasoned slice of fresh tomato.
Necessary Dark Roast is the coffee on our menu that offers the most in the way of “roast-driven” flavors. Necessary’s sister company >Passenger offers an amazing spectrum of coffees that are developed with a much lighter touch to emphasize “terroir-driven” flavors. With Necessary Blend, Necessary Burundi, Necessary Colombia, and Necessary Ethiopia we are choosing more of medium roast profile to offer a balance of these qualities: more roast-driven than Passenger, but more terroir-driven than Dark Roast.
Part of the reason behind our decision to not list a country of origin on the Dark Roast retail bags is that we want to retain flexibility to buy coffee, strategically and situationally, in support of our core sourcing partnerships. Put another way, the green coffee that we purchase for Dark Roast may come from a new producing country, or multiple producing countries in future years.
With that said, we are proud to share that this inaugural Dark Roast offering is from Brazil, purchased from producers in the region of Espíritu Santo. Our specific lot from the 2021 harvest is a regional community blend, composed of coffee bought from multiple small family farms - most of which are located in close proximity to Santa Maria de Jetibá.
Espíritu Santo has been on our radar as a fascinating coffee producing region for a number of years. Brazil is the number #1 country in the world in terms of total volume of coffee produced annually, a fact that reflects a particular model of coffee production. Many Brazilian coffee estates are incredibly massive in scale, and often feature production methods that are highly mechanized to maximize yields. Most Brazilian coffees are processed as naturals or pulped naturals - reflecting the dry, warm, low altitude climate that characterizes many Brazilian coffee producing regions.
Espíritu Santo is a fascinating outlier within the coffee producing regions of Brazil. In contrast to many better known Brazilian coffee regions, Espíritu Santo is quite hilly - making it impossible to implement the large scale mechanized production that is common elsewhere. This is a region of small family farms rather than sprawling coffee estates (think of farming approaches in the Appalachians as opposed to farming approaches on the Great Plains). Additionally, the region is quite close to the ocean which means that the climate is cooler, windier, and wetter. The humidity of the climate means natural processing is much more difficult to execute consistently, so fully washed coffees - usually a rarity in Brazil - are very common in this region.
Our sourcing team is still at an early stage of information-gathering on the Espíritu Santo front, and it remains to be seen what we might be able to build with our contacts there in the future. But for now, we have been incredibly impressed with the quality of the coffees that we have tasted from this part of Brazil, and hope that this initial Dark Roast project may be the first step towards a broader partnership in the region.
One of Necessary’s core supply chain partners is Osito Coffee, a specialty importing company that we work closely with to build ongoing sourcing relationships with coffee producing communities in Colombia, Ethiopia, and Burundi. Osito secured this particular lot for us in collaboration with a large Espíritu Santo-based cooperative named Coopeavi. Coopeavi has traditionally traded commercial-grade coffees (the Espíritu Santo region produces a large amount of robusta in addition to arabica), but are motivated to begin expanding their presence in the specialty market. This community blend for Necessary Dark Roast is a first step in what may become a broader collaboration with Coopeavi. To that end, Necessary’s sourcing team hopes to visit Brazil later this year, to explore possibilities for the future!
]]>At Necessary, we are committed to making choices that support the advancement of a more sustainable coffee industry.
Climate change is perhaps the greatest threat to this goal. While the devastating impact of rising temperatures is already clearly observable in many coffee producing regions, the coming years look considerably more ominous for coffee production according to many scientific models.
The Arabica coffee plant, the source of the vast majority of specialty coffee that is consumed around the world, is highly sensitive to temperature increases. As mean and maximum temperatures continue to rise throughout coffee producing regions, many existing coffee farms will cease to produce a viable crop and the total amount of land with suitable climate conditions for Arabica coffee production will dramatically decrease. Additionally, for many coffee farmers around the world, the direct impacts of climate change are increasingly accompanied by volatile weather events, unpredictable cycles of rainfall and drought, and the increase of pests and diseases that attack coffee plants and are also correlated to rising temperatures.
Necessary was founded to be a home for delicious, easy drinking coffees that represent a genuine investment in specialty coffee as a viable business prospect for producers. An important part of honoring that mission involves paying above-market prices for these coffees, and prioritizing ongoing purchasing with the same small group of producer partners. But paying better prices to farmers, while hugely important, is not enough. Given the scale of the challenge posed by climate change, a commitment to being part of the solution motivates our team to look at all aspects of our business, identifying new opportunities to decrease our carbon footprint, reduce waste, and continue to build a more sustainable company.
With the launch of Necessary’s new 100% Compostable Coffee Pouches, we take another important step on this journey. These beautiful 325g retail bags can be composted in a commercial composting facility or your own backyard in 90 to 180 days.
Certified by BPI® (Biodegradable Products Institute) & DIN.
From day one, Necessary has existed to connect as many coffee lovers as possible with beautiful, easy-drinking coffees that have been purchased fairly and sustainably.
The town of Agaro is located in western Ethiopia’s Jimma Zone, not far from the forests that are thought to be the original birthplace of coffee. Headquartered in Agaro is the Kata Muduga Union, an umbrella organization that serves as an administrative and marketing liaison between member cooperatives (groups of coffee farmers who process and sell their coffee together) and specialty coffee buyers. The Union’s stated mission is improve the life standard of member farmers by enhancing household income levels. Since its founding in 2016, Kata Muduga has become one of the most renowned cooperative unions in Ethiopia, thanks in part to the fame of some of its better known coops (Nano Challa, Duromina, Yukro, Hunda Oli) whose top scoring coffees are highly sought by importers and roasters year after year.
One of the lesser known farmer cooperatives within the Kata Muduga union is called Kokolla. This group of farmers had been on our radar for some time as our sister company Passenger Coffee has been buying coffees from Kata Muduga coops long before Necessary existed as a roasting company. While the Kokolla lots that we have tasted over the years have rarely been ‘flashy’ on the cupping table, they have always been notable for their deep sweetness and impressive quality consistency. With the founding of Necessary, we knew we wanted to buy from this group of farmers. Over the past two years we have purchased all the coffee that is presented as Necessary Ethiopia, as well as 50% of the Necessary Blend, from the Kata Muduga Union - and the majority of this coffee has been sourced from the Kokolla Farmers Cooperative.
Necessary’s approach to sourcing in Ethiopia is necessarily quite different when compared to, say, the continuation of our partnership with farmer members of the Divino Niño producer group in Huila, Colombia. But while the specifics vary, the central goal is absolutely the same: to offer stable, ongoing, and fair prices for as broad spectrum of these farmers’ total harvest as we can. While Necessary’s partnership with these communities is admittedly still at an early stage, we see nothing but potential on the horizon, and feel incredibly grateful to our friends at the Kata Muduga Union for their continued support. Thanks to the recent arrival of our latest container from the 2020/2021 harvest, delightful coffees from the Kokolla cooperative will grace the Necessary menu for many months to come!
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An ever-rising sea of waste has flooded our homes and workplaces. In the U.S. alone, more than 850 million tonnes of paper and cardboard are thrown away annually—equating to almost 1.4 billion trees. As a certified B Corporation, Necessary has made it a priority to seek out and implement ways in which we can reduce this burden on our environment.
Introducing Boox
Necessary has partnered with fellow B Corporation (status pending), Boox, in an effort to reduce the amount of waste we are creating. Each Boox is designed to be shipped, returned, and then reused over and over again resulting in a 75% reduction in environmental impact compared with single-use packaging.
How does it work?
"The grand vision is to never throw a box away and never make a new one"
Matt Semellak, CEO Boox
While we hope you are excited about this change we are making with renewable packaging, we are even more excited about the prospect of our customers taking part in this closed loop process! You can expect to receive some Necessary Coffee orders in “booxes” starting this April.
We will continue to seek out compostable, recycled, and renewable materials where reuse is not yet an option.
Onwards!
]]>From day one, Necessary has existed to connect as many coffee lovers as possible with beautiful, easy-drinking coffees that have been purchased fairly and sustainably.
The Cooperativo Divino Niño del Horizonte is a group of 42 coffee producers who live near the municipality of Suaza in southern Huila, Colombia. Our sister company Passenger Coffee & Tea began buying coffee from this community back in 2018 and we realized quite quickly that this was a uniquely dedicated group of producers who were consistently delivering coffees of truly excellent quality. Since our start as a roasting company, we have purchased all the coffee that is presented as Necessary Colombia, as well as 50% of the Necessary Blend, from the Divino Niño producer group.
Again and again, in conversations with coffee farmers around the world, we hear them say that perhaps the chief concern on their minds is whether they will have a buyer committed to paying a fair price for all of their coffee, on an on-going basis. Selling a small percentage of their harvest at a high price but not having a buyer for the rest is not a viable business model. Selling an entire harvest at a good price but not having a buyer for the next harvest is not a viable business model.
We continue to build our partnership with the producers of Divino Niño in the interest of continuing to offer stable, ongoing, and fair prices for the vast majority of the coffee they produce each year. The group is growing and expects to swell to 50 members in the near future. The coffees are tasting better every year.
The future is bright indeed!