Brewing The Chronicle Blend at LOCAL NCL
At LOCAL, we keep it simple. Our main objective is keeping our house espresso dialled in for dependable quality all day, every day. We’re busier than ever, but we have to admit this means we don’t get to talk about coffee half as much as we’d like.
Our other focus is the big selection of retail coffee on our shelves. We started out celebrating the North East’s blossoming coffee roasting scene, but gradually broadened our scope to include the best independent roasters from every corner of the UK - now stocking around 40 different roasters in the shop and online.
LOCAL NCL, 18 Acorn Rd, Jesmond, Newcastle upon Tyne
Here, blends are traditionally what we recommend to those customers looking for a consistent home brew, who come back time and time again for their reliable morning coffee. These customers prioritise consistency and reliability over seasonality, origin details, or processing methods. Skip the specifics, just deliver the flavour. Our specialty coffee buffs expect more than these ‘mundane’ or ‘unsophisticated’ blends and look to more exciting, boundary-pushing single origins that can challenge their tastes with every cup.
But what could be more exciting than a dynamic coffee that is constantly changing and evolving, bringing different origins together and combining them into a consistent product?
Blends allow us to open up conversations with customers about the fluctuations in the market and the price of their coffee, about climate volatility and its impact on harvests, about sourcing ethics and logistics, about the roasting process and the care that goes into crafting high quality blends.
A change in the blend components offers a new opportunity to engage with customers about the background of their cup and some of the forces at play behind their daily flat white.
It helps start the conversation when the coffee is as interesting as Exemplar’s Chronicle Blend. We first brewed The Chronicle with a Kalita to get a real sense of the profile. The Brazilian Starmaya, though only 20% of the blend, makes itself known straight away, pulling the punches on the nose and in the cup. It hits the palate with vibrant guava, some tartaric grape flavour and a syrupy mouthfeel, piqued by the citric acidity that Maria Gaspar’s Guatemalan portion brings and lingering with an Oolong finish. We knew straight away that we wanted to bring out the sweet body and tropical fruit flavour on espresso, and it sits perfectly as a standalone shot or as a long black.
Pulling espresso at LOCAL
With the – often well-founded – view of blends as a way to mask flaws or stretch supply, some skepticism or snobbery is understandable- and we’ve certainly been there. The Chronicle disrupts these expectations, leaning into the characterful nature of both featured coffees and celebrating quality components in a coffee that is full of flavour. These complexities prompt exactly the sort of conversations we should be having with customers about the coffee industry.
You can learn more about our shop and browse our current coffee offering on our website:
