What Makes our Local Coffees Special (and expensive)?

Browsing through our menu, you will notice that our local coffees are priced higher than many of our local competitors. We are cognisant of this and, in fact, this is very much deliberate on our part. Wide Awake PH believes in giving you high value for money. Our interpretation of high value is serving you coffees with a high quality to cost ratio. In this blog post, we aim to explain how we do so in the context of the local coffee offerings in our menu.

Meticulous Selection: In curating our lineup of local coffees, we have sampled a number of distinct coffees from single farms coming from multiple origins at our own expense. Local farmers do not give away small samples for roasters like us to test roast and cup. We purchase 1-2 kilogram samples at our expense. While this may be more tedious and expensive to do, we believe doing the selection process this way is well worth it as we can ensure a higher and more consistent cup quality.

Direct Trade with Quality Driven Producers: While cup quality is definitely an important consideration in our selection of local coffees, we also took into account the individual farmers we are working with. We are proud and humbled to be able to work with local coffee producers who have the same passion for quality we do. The producers we are working with are always attending seminars and training sessions and experimenting on production processes to improve upon their craft. Working with them, we are confident that we will be able to slowly and surely improve upon cup quality over time. More on this in a future post.

Quality Control: Besides the meticulous sourcing strategy we have adopted, we are also very strict with our quality control procedures. It is inevitable that mistakes will happen while roasting. But we won’t allow that to reflect in your coffee’s cup quality because we simply choose not to ship out the coffees that do not meet our high standards. We will talk about how we do our QC in a future blog post. But put very briefly, if the coffee in question does not meet our target roast curve and bean color (which we track digitally), we do not sell it.

All these steps are done in an effort to serve you what we believe is the best local coffees for now and the future. We are very proud of the local coffees we have on our menu. These coffees punch way above their price point and we believe they can definitely stand toe-to-toe with even some of the international coffees we have sourced and cupped. Hopefully this will help in your purchasing decisions.

Thank you for reading.