Roast Masters™ 2019 winner white label coffee look back on the competition, their victory and the trip-to-origin they won. 

The Amsterdam-based roastery white label coffee won the first ever Roast Masters™ title at last year’s festival. In doing so they did not just place themselves in the international spotlight, but also won a trip to Colombia. Winners Wouter Andeweg, Halil Turan and Sebas Geistdorfer tell us all about it. 

For the debut of Roast Masters™ you were asked to put together a blend, yet this normally does not fit with your roasting vision does it?

Correct! We truly believe in transparency in order to trade coffee in a fair way. You can do so through direct trade or in cooperation with an importer, who shares our vision. One of the reasons that we only offer single origins is to provide a stage for farms and corporations that are creating something beautiful. Next to this we as roasters find it important that you can easily extract the right flavors from our coffee. This process is different for each coffee, which makes it a logical choice for us to not mix different coffees together.





Dit is niet jullie enige opvallende trademark. Jullie branden met white label coffee tegenwoordig alleen maar omni-roast. Vanwaar deze shift?

Jaren geleden zijn we begonnen met het testen van onze espressobranding als filter en onze filterbranding als espresso. Toen ontdekten we dat de smaak van een branding – filter of espresso – op eenzelfde manier onaangenaam kan zijn. Sindsdien richten we ons meer op de ‘oplosbaarheid van koffie’ en zo ontwikkelden een stijl van branden die het karakter van de koffie het beste laat uitkomen, ongeacht de zetmethode.
  
How was the trip to Colombia that you won after winning Roast Masters™?
So beautiful! We visited different coffee producers. Together with father and son Maricio Osorio and Daniel Adolphs of Selecto Coffee we first went to their family farm La Suiza. They grow coffee-plants of the varieties tab, wush wush, Colombia and gesha. After that we travelled to Carmen Cecilia Montoya Patino in Los Pinos. Her farm is remotely located in the mountains of Urrao, west of the city of Medellin, at an extreme height of 2040 meters above sea level. This is where the caturra with which we won Roast Masters™ comes from. Isolated from the outside world, Carmen produces several prizewinning coffees here. One of her coffees was crowned with a score of 91,31 during Cup of Excellence Colombia! That might be the highest score ever given to a non-gesha coffee in Colombia.





You probably cupped quite a few coffees. Which one stayed with you the most?

Actually we only cupped at the Osorio family. There was a very large and diverse selection at our disposal; a rollercoaster of flavors! We mostly loved the hybrid variety tabi, a mix between arabica and robusta, of Finca San Jose. This is a very balanced coffee full of umami-notes, like seaweed. There was also a pink bourbon with a distinct sweet aftertaste and a natural wush wush with an enjoyable fermented taste, a little like kombucha.”