Meet the Roaster: Europa Kaffe & Te

This month’s roaster wants to get better coffee to more people, a mission Team KaffeBox gladly supports. Meet Europa Kaffe & Te, based in Aarhus, Denmark, where you’ll find their roastery, a café and concept shop.

For many years, they’ve been an active part of the Nordic roasting style community, trying to show people why they should care about what they drink and where it comes from, trying to meet them where they are (physically and in their taste journey).

We care about the big picture and about the small details. We care about the people crossing our path and we believe in the importance of good relations and caring for your fellow man. But most important we care about making a positive change!

Europa Kaffe & Te

The coffee bags making their way to you this month, are their brand-new bags, fresh off the printers. It’s a more easily recyclable bag made from mono plastic material. The bags say: “Make a positive difference” and this is something Europa as a roastery lives by and encourage others to take part in. This includes everyone, from the dedicated farmers they trade with, all the way to you, the dedicated enjoyer of coffee.

Locally we are involved in a work program with Aarhus Municipality to make jobs that can fit the people that has fallen out of the regular work market, we mean that these people still have great value to our community, therefore we want as many as possible to have the chance to work and work-train with us.

Europa Kaffe & Te

We’ve asked them some questions to get to know them better:

How do you source your coffee beans, and what criteria do you use to choose them?

Our assortment’s built in 3 product lines and 4 taste families. The idea is to help our customers navigate in our assortment, because there are big differences within the speciality coffee industry, and we want more people to find a speciality coffee that they like. Every line and taste family has its own purpose:

• Classic: Here you can find coffees that are available all year-round, at a price point that does not scare you away, with flavours that are typical and easy to like. A good place to start if you are used to drinking industry/commercial coffees.
• Focus: With focus coffees we want to showcase lots that deserve a bit more focus, here we try to dive a bit deeper into the flavors of speciality coffee and show how bean types, terroir and microclimate can affect coffee in the best ways possible.
• Signature: Here you will find top of the pop coffees with special attributes, showing the outskirts of our wonderful industry. Outstanding coffee of extremely high quality.

The taste families try do describe something about what you can expect from this style of coffee. We use color and keywords on all our bags:

Green = Fresh, Orange =Sweet, Brown = Full-bodied, Blue = Balanced.

So, when we set out to source coffee, we typically try to find coffees that adds to our product lines and taste families.

As a roastery that only works with speciality grade coffee, criteria like fresh harvest, high quality, sustainable production, and traceability goes without saying.

But for us it’s important that we say something about these things. In 2022 we started the work on what now is becoming our transparency rapport. Our goal is that we can make a public transparency rapport for 2024 in the beginning of 2025. Since quality is such a huge field for us, meaning not only the flavor of the product, but also the ethical aspect of our industry, caring for people and animals, environmental aspects and avoiding overconsumption of resources. A transparency rapport has become a multipurpose tool for us, forcing us to look at, evaluate and document everything we do.

We are also trying to build a bridge between the producer and the consumers so people easier can see and understand our product. As a company, we want to be truthful, ensuring that our marketing claims are backed up with actual facts, and the transparency rapport helps us document these.

We also realized that by building and using the rapport we could more easily pinpoint the areas where we needed to increase our efforts. We as a company want to make a positive difference both for the farmers we work with, but also throughout the supply chain, all the way to your kitchen counter.

What can you tell us about the coffee you’ve selected for us this month? 

We have curated the following coffee as they showcase what EUROPA Kaffe & Te stand for: coffee grown by dedicated people, with care for nature, sourced in an ethical way: directly when possible and always above the commodity market, showcasing specific terroir sometimes from overlooked countries, manually roasted in Denmark with focus on preserving each coffee unique characters.

This isn’t about roasting the best coffee lot out there but about caring for all the people involved in the process and inviting you, the coffee drinker, onboard our coffee adventure in the world of speciality coffee.   

This month we offer:

Fresh coffees from our Fokus assortment

Kivu from Kongo – Organic

A light and berry driven coffee that in many ways reminds us of some of the best Kenyan coffee. We have Kivu in our assortment not only because it is a beautiful coffee but also because we believe we can make a difference in the export marked in DR Congo by setting the spotlight on this origin. And that also leaves a good taste in the mouth. We roast Kivu nord medium long and to a light roast degree to preserve its fresh notes and enhance the juicy lasting mouthfeel.

Forget everything about the cold and grey winter with lively fresh citrus and berry notes: spring is coming!

Mbizi from Rwanda – Organic

We are ever so proud to be working with the Woman Coffee Extension, an organization that really tries to make a positive change in the lives of more than 700 women in Rwanda. The goal is to empower female farmers, using the production and sale of their own products as a vehicle to create a social change. Many of these women are widows or orphans of the 1994 genocide and have needed to provide a living for their families alone.  A house favorite, due to the perfect balance between its great tea like florality, its berry and stone fruit notes and its long creamy body.  We roast Mbizi medium slow to increase the long creamy mouth feel and to a medium light roast degree to preserve all its fruity notes.

A Sweet coffee in our Signature assortment

El Olmo from Mexico

A fantastic coffee that we have gotten amazing feedback on.  We love to showcase coffee’s underdogs: Mexican coffee often suffer from the wrongly attributed reputation of being uninteresting, low-quality coffee, but El Olmo proves it wrong! It offers a crisp plum and pineapple freshness and an incredibly lasting sweet aftertaste of milk chocolate and nougat. Just the amount of sweetness you need! We roast El Olmo medium long and to a medium roast degree to enhance the sweet chocolate and brown sugar notes. On top of producing amazing coffee the producer Marcos Aguilar and his team manage reforestation projects for the local community, which EUROPA Kaffe & Te contribute to.

A Sweet coffee in our Focus assortment

Mutendero Espresso from Kongo – Organic

Is sourced from the same station as Kivu but is naturally processed. Just like Kivu, we purchased Mutendero as a support to the reemergence of DR Congo and for its crowd-pleasing attribute: full mouth feel, sweet and chocolaty with a little hint of exotic fruits in the aftertaste. A sweet and easy to like coffee, that works both for espresso and filter brewing.  We roast Mutendero medium long and to a medium roast degree to create a balanced espresso with long-lasting chocolate aftertaste.

A Full-bodied coffee in our Classic assortment

Peru espresso – Organic

Peru is part of the foundation of Europa’s line. From day 1, we had for mission to make specialty coffee accessible to everyone, it was therefore obvious to have a coffee from Peru with its not too challenging flavors and its many crowd pleaser attributes. This year we engaged in a new collaboration, with the aim to build a long-term relationship with Cooperativa Agraria Cafetalera Valle de Incahuasi, in Cuzo region. We roast Peru medium slow to a medium roast degree to make it full and harmonious with taste notes of chocolate and nuts. Peru is a nice and pleasant espresso that also works well as brew coffee.

Do you have a recommended brew recipe for this month’s coffee?

We recommend your favorite brew method, and some playfulness! We generally, as many others, recommend 60g coffee. per liter of water, but we encourage you to, every time you get a new coffee, play around with it to see on what brew style and parameters you enjoy it best. This because flavor is a subject to your one taste, and there are big differences in taste on how you prefer to brew.
The best coffee is the one you like!

Here is our favourite recipe for El Olmo: