A new era for Sudden Coffee
In March, we shipped our 75,000th cup of Sudden Coffee! To give you a sense of how far we’ve come, this time last year we were just rounding 1,000 cups.
Up ‘til now, we’ve offered one type of coffee — Biftu Gudina from Ethiopia. We chose this fruity, light-roasted coffee to highlight how complex crystallized coffee can be. In the past year, we’ve refined our brewing process to create the perfect cup of Sudden. And now we’re applying this method to new coffees for our members.
New Coffees to Experience
Going forward, the Sudden Coffee Club Membership will include a changing rotation of coffees from around the world. When you join the Sudden Club, you will receive a different coffee every few months.
The first new coffee launches today. It’s called Helvetica and it’s our first blend. We think it tastes chocolatey with a hint of orange. You’ll get it automatically as part of your club membership.
Our goal is to expose you to the wide range of flavors available in coffee. You’ll get to try fruity complex tones in Ethiopian coffees one month, followed by chocolatey rich tones in Colombian coffees the next. Along the way, we will be your coffee concierges, explaining about each coffee, the difference between various countries & regions, and helping you pick out the unique flavors. You don’t have to be an expert — we want to cut through the jargon for people who are brand new to coffee, so you can really experience it. Head here to join!
Coffee History in the Making
What’s special about Helvetica is both our process and our approach to blends. Coffee blends at cafes are made with many different varieties of beans, blended before brewing. With Sudden, we mix 2 single-origin coffees in powder form, after we have brewed them independently. This allows us to pick up the high notes from both coffees at once. As far as we know, the first time this has ever been done is with Helvetica — it’s truly groundbreaking in coffee!
Helvetica: groundbreaking coffee!
Read more about how Helvetica was made here.
You Made this Happen
This change was only made possible by achieving enough scale. With every cup of coffee we sell — we learn, we refine, and we improve. The continued support (and feedback and cheers) from our members makes this possible. Hopefully, you’ve noticed our constant improvements & tweaks. Long term, we want to offer you a myriad of coffee options, and this is the first step to getting there. The one thing we can promise is that the Sudden Coffee experience will get better, month by month.
Finally, a big thank you to our team! Kalle & Umeko — 2 highly skilled coffee experts — have been hard at work for the last 9 months figuring out how to improve our coffee with every cup. And LaToya & Steven have been working tirelessly to package & ship you coffee wrapped with care.
A little Q&A
In preparing to make this announcement we did a little Q&A with Umeko Motoyoshi, Sudden Coffee’s Head of Coffee:
SC: What was challenging about scaling your process?
Umeko Motoyoshi: When I first started working at Sudden, we made our coffee by pulling espresso shots one at a time. It was fun, but expensive and slow. We spent months researching a better way to make tons of coffee — and in August we launched a brand new brew method. However, just like brewing coffee on an espresso machine, the new method took time to master. No one had ever done exactly what we were doing, so there was no roadmap. We’ve spent the last 9 months learning and improving, and we’re ready to apply our learning to a variety of new coffees!
SC: What was hard about using new coffees until now?
UM: Every coffee behaves differently. Everything from roast level to botanical variety changes how it should be brewed. At a cafe, your barista makes specific tweaks to the brew method for each coffee. As we shifted to a new brew method, we took a scientific approach. We stuck with the same coffee to really understand how the method worked, without changing too many variables.
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A huge thanks to our loyal coffee lovers! Stay tuned, we’ll have a few more exciting product releases in coming months, including another big step forward in coffee flavor.
To buy Sudden Coffee — just head to our website.
