Who are Muttley & Jack?
The short answer - We are one human - Jack - who roasts coffee, and one dog - Muttley - who doesn’t, but who contributes in other ways (such as inspiring our bean logo with his lovely ears).
The slightly longer answer - We are a micro coffee roastery on a small island in the Stockholm Archipelago. We roast coffees that we love to roast, brew, drink and share. We tend to focus on microlots, nanolots and single estates / single origins that score between 87-90 on the SCA quality scale. We’ve been doing this since 2017.
How we think about...
Roasting
The coffees we roast are grown in parts of the world where the altitude, soil and climate are just right and where, in the loving hands of the farmers, the coffee trees thrive in the most magical of ways. The result is a green coffee bean that is full of potential.
Our job at the roastery is to release the magic inside these beans, roasting in such a way that we bring out the best version of that coffee that we possibly can. Michelangelo is said to have believed that the sculptures he worked on were already complete inside the marble and he just had to chisel away the superfluous material. That’s a bit how we feel about the coffee we work with - the masterpiece is already inside - our job is to chisel/roast in just the right way to reveal the hard work of the farmer and the myriad of special origin tastes inside.
Sourcing
We are a little roastery. Teeny weeny really. And much as we’d like to, we are far too small to fill container ships with green coffee from every origin we'd want to roast from. And as such we can’t really use the phrase ‘Direct Trade’ to describe how we source our coffees. Perhaps “Assisted Direct Trade” is a good compromise if we need to put a label on it.
For sourcing we partner up with a few coffee importers who we know and like and who share our values of quality, sustainability and generally being nice people paying fair prices to those we come in contact with. They are used to working with small independent roasters and they ‘get’ us. (Nordic Approach, Sucafina Specialty, Panama Varietals are these partners if you want to look them up). Once or twice a year (when not in a global pandemic) Jack will join these guys on their regular trips to origin to personally meet the farmers and to just double check what we are already very certain of - that everyone is treated well and that nature is not harmed to bring these coffees to you. Our partners then take care of the logistics to bring the coffees to Europe.
Even if we haven’t personally met every single coffee farmer whose coffee we roast we can trace everything back to individual farms and washing stations. Many we have met virtually chatting with on whatsapp and Instagram. If the global pandemic has taught us anything is that you don’t have to physically be somewhere to connect.