Reunion Island, Toronto & TGITC Pop Up
AROUND THE WORLD IN 8 WEEKS
For eight weeks I am curating a host of world coffees at Stone & Crow, starting in London. So far we started with Alchemy Coffee Roasters (available throughout the duration) featuring Nomad Coffee (Barcelona), Five Elephants (Berlin), Coffee Supreme Melbourne (Australia) and Coutume Coffee Roasters (Paris), DoubleShot (Prague) and last weekend I had something smooth from North America!!!
It's coming up to my penultimate weekend at Stone & Crow, and last weekend I had Reunion Island from Toronto in Canada. I have already tried a lot of coffee from America, and find it relatively accessible so I wanted to get something from an area we don’t have a lot of involvement with in the UK – North America. Originally I was looking at Vancouver roasteries because I know their coffee industry is quite developed and already have some reputable roasteries sourcing good beans. But it wasn’t until I was talking to my friend who mentioned that Toronto might be worth sussing out too… and indeed it was.
Reunion Island got its name from the island itself because it was an important trade route for coffee. It used to be called Île Bourbon before 1789 and a lot of varietals such as bourbon were created there. As a roastery, Reunion Island has been operating since 1995. It was opened by Peter Pesce who has been in the coffee trade in Canada for over forty years. As a result, his son Adam (being around coffee for most of his life too) is now the director of coffee and oversees all of the coffee buying, roasting and sustainability programs. He admits though that it wasn’t something that he thought would be a ‘forever’ kind of job until he started sourcing and going to origin, which changed that attitude for him. It has given him an enormous respect for coffee producers and this is what keeps him inspired.
The Toronto coffee scene seems to be picking up the pace. Even Adam commented that it is really developing and getting better, notably so, by the month. Where once-young baristas are now new shop owners and are closing the gap between Toronto and other great coffee cities around the world. It must be pretty exciting to see the progress and development of an educating market. Apparently there are number of “coffee pros” in Toronto too, that he says are really pushing for high quality and good standards hoping that they too can be on the top lists in the world of coffee.
Though Reunion Island are already leading the world in their own unique way – I knew that they believed in the idea that quality coffee and sustainability aren’t mutually exclusive concepts, but rather that they go hand-in-hand but I didn’t realize how active they are in facilitating this core value. It was only just in the weekend that I was speaking to a customer who specializes in environmental science that got me thinking more about the future of coffee in terms of it's sustainability and it's effect on the environment, when demand for coffee seems to keep rising. This is definitely food for thought. But rather than gobble up resources, Reunion Island have been using 100% green electricity generated by wind farms and other eco-friendly methods since 2008. I was well impressed!
They also use a combination of direct trade, fair trade, organic and rainforest alliance certified coffees and are consciously moving toward ethically grown direct trade. I’ve never seen such an open disclosure of results and projections which can be seen by all on their website. It is clear that there is a balance between their passion in sourcing great coffees and their need to create a sustainable industry for the future, which is pretty cool for a relatively large roastery.
It was also really cool to be in contact with the roaster who actually roasted the batch of coffee I used at my pop up in the weekend. Seth Taylor, a Toronto local actually spent about a year in the Uk judging UKBC competitions before being lured back by Adam to roast on a Loring Roaster for Reunion Island. I was really impressed by his involvement and his attentiveness to what he was supplying me.
I found the coffee actually really close to its tasting notes. Quite often I might describe coffee tasting notes slightly differently to the producer notes even though I might still see where their description may come from – but this was particularly very accurate for me; “Juicy, with flavours of grapefruit and plum and sparkling acidity”. I did actually get all that! The beans themselves looked juicy! They were big and plump and nicely browned. I particularly liked the Kenyan as a filter in all the filter methods – Aeropress, V60 and batch brewed.
Adam is super grateful to his team and his customers for sticking with them and supporting them through the growing pains of new business especially since they just opened their first café 6 months ago after all these years in roasting, so I’m really excited to see how that side of Reunion Island develops. I hope to make it over there sometime soon to check it out for real myself. If you are, you definitely should!