Oh it’s news alright! We now have pods. Pods with our coffee, sourced and roasted by us, ground and packed for us by our lovely friends at Dualit. They are available now. We have La Piragua from Colombia and Malacara A from El Salvador. More will follow and there will be a decaf.
Now for the full story.
You must imagine you’re at a lovely country pub, with an amazing kitchen garden, and what deserves to be an award-winning bakery upstairs. It’s in Wiltshire, it’s all green-and-pleasant land territory. The pub has rooms down the road on a bed and breakfast type rate. And the rooms look out over an idyllic trout stream, where the fish jump in the evening and it’s a thrill every time you spot one. You wake up in the morning, having slept one of those sound sleeps of a long weekend break, and need a little something to perk you up a bit before tackling the big breakfast. And in the little cupboard above the mini bar you find the coffee set up which consists of pods (capsules for their correct name) and canelé.
Suspicious for sure, a little prejudiced maybe, you make a pod into the tiny cup, open the canelé and set out to the deck to watch the light brighten over the stream and the day start. And it is wonderful. The canelé are the best since you tried the ones from Babelle, and the coffee? Well the coffee is pretty good! The only thing, you think, that could make this better is if it was Monmouth coffee in the pod. And then, it would be awesome. This was part of the We Must Have Canelé journey, and the beginnings of thinking we could have pods too. We have had canelé for a while, and now here we are with the pods made and ready to go. We’d like to tell you about some of the choices we have made along the way.
The pods are made by Dualit. We have known the team there for some time and are fans of their family-owned business, small grinders, and repairable toasters. We decided on the aluminium pods instead of the compostable for a couple of good reasons. Firstly, there aren’t many of us who have access to food waste bins or compost facilities that will take compostable pod casings, whereas we pretty much all have access to aluminium recycling; it is exactly the same as can recycling. For it to be accepted in recycling the pod needs to be emptied of its spent coffee and rinsed off and then it can go in your normal collection. We have a great gizmo to make that happen easily. And secondly, we feel the coffee tastes better from the aluminium pods. We don’t know why, just on our tastings of various varieties this is what we found, for us.
The coffees we select for the pods are the exact same coffees we buy for our shop counters. The first two coffees will be really familiar to you if you have been buying our coffee for some time. We have had coffee from La Piragua and Malacara A for years. Next up we will pod our new shipment of decaffeinated coffee from La Bolsa, alongside one of our all-time favourites from the new crop out of Brazil.
We think pods are a super way to drink coffee. There is minimal mess, lots of convenience and you can travel with them easily. One of the most encouraging aspects of the pods is how well they keep the coffee. Your writer is still drinking one of the samples we had made in spring 2021 and is still pleased with them! A canelé is sometimes liberated from the shop and one or two pods used in the name of memory recreation.
So, if you have a pod machine at home give them a try. You may find our pods run slower than some other brands. To get the flavour we wanted from these coffees, we aimed for a longer extraction time. There are several machines to choose from for your pod goodness. We did all our testing on the basic Dualit model. If you don’t have a machine don’t worry as we still have all our coffees on the counter to choose from and can send them out whole beans or ground as usual.
Monmouth x
