Journal — January 2023

Happy 2023, everyone! We’re off to a great start this year at our new cafe in Durham, NC. It’s been a fun new journey getting to share our coffee IRL in addition to via these monthly dispatches. If you’re ever in town, we’ll have some tasty coffee from our most recent roaster in shop. We had a great time sharing the Barn, but are really excited for Casino Mocca.

Szabolcs Temesvári, Zoltán Kis, and Lajos Horváth started Casino Mocca in 2013, wanting to bring Hungarian specialty coffee to the next level, in terms of quality, flavor, and consistency. We first featured them in 2020, and I was pretty blown away by their coffees. They were all fresh, bright, clean, and consistent. Szabolcs recently shared with me how when they first launched Casino Mocca, they were just hoping to help the Hungarian coffee scene catch up with other parts of Europe. These days, though, they’ve extended far beyond that initial goal, are consistently one of my favorite roasters worldwide.

I appreciate their approach to coffee, which is a bit more maximalist than a lot of other roasters I usually love. They regularly have coffees from all over the world, and from all across the processing spectrum—the only common denominator is that they’re well processed, fresh, and tasty.

I started Yonder to help make it easier to access lots of different expressions of specialty coffee, and Casino Mocca is a great example of all those values, hence the wide range on this month’s lineup—4 coffees, each from a different continent, sourced and processed in different ways.

Roberto Mata is a lovely Costa Rican coffee, processed with Roberto’s signature “Juicy” process. The 72-hour anaerobic fermentation of coffee cherries is started with the coffee juice of a previous fermentation and then finished with a slowly and evenly dried honey process. La Cristalina is super fun. Hailing from Palestina in Huila, it’s a collaborative effort by 50 families with small farms, who pick and process the cherries themselves. It tastes delightful and reminds me why I love coffees from Huila. Frinsa Collective and Refisa are also both fantastic, and I really had a hard time choosing a favorite this month. I’m excited for you to dive into these. Let me know what you think! -Caleb