Went Fishin'

Happy Monday friends! This week we're back from vacation and ripping on a couple fronts: packaging has taken a huge new step in a rad direction, and a new coffee is officially in the works! Let's get to it.

This week in Smooth Coffee...

Packaging Design

The world of design is a crazy one. I knew going into the process of designing packaging for Smooth Coffee Co. that there would be many iterations, many unforeseen challenges with the shape of the container, and many "bruh" moments along the way. The last container design I posted about (see Short and Sweet) was a great step which was followed up by this:

I loved the idea of using the "S" shape for the container as well, plugging in new colors, breaking out certain words to draw someone's eye to the most important information first, etc. Late last week, Brennen and I met for a work session that started from this point. We kept adjusting spacing, sizing, font settings, and we kept not liking how it was coming together. I was getting disheartened, doubting that I could think of a way to make the design work and that we'd have to default back to a simpler, more traditional layout to get the information across. But leave it to the artist to find a solution:

There is still so much to play with and refine, expanding the blown out S shape to cover the whole container, messing with fonts for the origin of the coffee, working out how to afford unique containers for every offering or if we need to switch back to some kind of design that uses stickers instead. So much is under consideration, but I am STOKED at the direction these are moving. The next round of revisions are gonna be TIGHT.

New Coffee In Progress: Washed Burundi, Masha Washing Station

Just before leaving for vacation I decided to drop some cash on a new a coffee: a Washed Process coffee from Burundi. We talked about this coffee back in April and put it on the buy list, and after the initial success of sales of the Lucas Tulcan Washed Colombia (which is still available!) I decided it was time to expand our offering list.

The picture above was from the first round of roast profile development tasting. Similar to the initial review process we talked about before, I tasted through a range of roast profiles for this Washed Process Burundi, testing a range of roast times to see how much moisture loss the coffee can withstand before tasting dry in the cup. 8:45 seemed to be a golden zone, so the next round of tests will be explore the development level of the coffee to find an optimal balance of sweetness, acidity, and body.

TTFN

That's all for this week. Remember to hit me up for some delicious Colombian coffee over on Instagram or via email at noah@smoothcoffeeco.com. Peace and love ya'll!

Cheers,

Noah