Journal — December 2024

Happy holidays everyone! Caleb here. Last time we featured The Barn on our subscription was 2 years ago during our first month of the cafe. We celebrated our second anniversary this past week (and we’ve been serving The Barn on espresso for a year now), so it felt right to bring them back on the subscription for the Christmas season again this year.

If this is your first experience with The Barn, you’re in for a treat. Ralf and his team are some of the best in the biz. They opened The Barn in Berlin in 2010 with the goal of exploring the horizons of the coffee industry. According to Ralf, “Our vision has been very clear from the start: We focus on making our coffees better and better. No compromise—just great coffee.” Their coffee has been good from the start, but they’ve never stopped trying to improve, and they’ve been recognized a few years in a row as the world’s best roaster. I think this month’s coffees reflect that and I can’t wait to hear what you think.

Everyone is getting The Barn’s Julkaffe (Christmas Coffee) from Huye Mountain in Rwanda. It’s a gorgeous coffee that I look forward to each year, but this year is impressing me even more than usual. I love it and could drink it all day. If you’re with family, I think it’s a crowd-pleaser even for non- coffee people, as you’ll taste a good mix of rich fruits and baking spices in the cup. The producer, David Rubanzangabo, is a true pioneer of Rwandan coffee, dedicated to showing off the superb terroir of the mountainous Huye District. The Himalaya Pineapple is a coffee reserved for their Advent Calendar, but they wanted to share some with us too.

It’s such a fun expression of what careful processing can do with a well-grown coffee. Slow drying of the coffee for more than 30 days creates a rich profile, full of pineapple and apricot sweetness. Gatomboya is such a classic representation of what I love in Kenyan coffees. It’s nice lined up with the others as the bright berry notes contrast well with the first two coffees. And the H3 from Vulcan Azul is special, as for the first time, the Barn is featuring H3, a hybrid of Ethiopian heirloom and Caturra varietals. It’s very tasty—rich and syrupy, it’s deliciously funky and a fun way to round out the lineup.