Last month we were delighted to announce that our Aviator Blend had been awarded 3 Stars at this year’s Great Taste Awards
The brief was clear, to create a coffee that was lighter (but not too light), brighter (but not too bright) and more complex than anything we had done before, while still appealing to our loyal customers and of course new clients too
After a few months of research and development, we figured out that if we blended just the right amount of Washed Arabica coffee from Honduras and Indonesia to our fabulous Natural Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, we were onto something. It then needed our Head of Coffee, Steve to develop the flavours by experimenting with new roast curves on our Diedrich IR-12 coffee roaster and before we knew it we had hit the sweet spot.
If you are not familiar with this award – Great Taste is the largest and most trusted accreditation scheme for fine food and drink. This year, 12,000 products were blind tasted by panels of specialists: top chefs, cookery writers, food critics, restauranteurs and fine food retailers. This involved over 500 judges tasting products over various categories over 60 days between March and July.
The judges can choose to award 1, 2 or 3 stars to a product to illustrate the level of quality it delivers when tasted. In 2018 only 192 products across all categories tasted won the coveted 3 Star award.
The judges comments included;
There’s an intense juicy acidity to this espresso that gives up an amazing aroma of dried fruit. The bitterness is very well balanced – earthy bitterness and notes of chocolate and tobacco. A very well rounded espresso with delicious, mouth puckering, funky, fermented notes lurking in the back.
Scott Rogers, our Speciliaty Coffee Director who headed up the project commented ‘the thing with coffee is the ingredients; the fabulous coffees grown by amazing producers across the world, are the real stars to shout about. However, the challenge we face is how to communicate this to our customers – therefore we needed a name!
I don’t know why, but naming a coffee always feels harder than naming a child – and I have two children. Firstly, coming up with a name that isn’t already taken is hard enough, then to link in images, colours… wow it made our heads hurt.
Then one Friday night, after a few craft beers (purely for research purposes – yeah right), guess what classic 80’s movie started… yes… Top Gun. After finding out that Maverick was already taken, we were then set on Aviator as a name and it stuck!
We describe this coffee as Vibrant, Sweet & Tropical on the label, but it is everything both Steve and I set out to achieve when we asked that simple question.
