The East is calling again, as Lehmus Roastery launches today a very valuable, very rare and, above all, very high-quality Oligark coffee.
Oligark coffee is gently roasted and packaged in a gold ingot decorated with oriental touches, also called a package. Oligark is also a product line, the first representative of which is this Bourbon Bourbon coffee. The beans come from El Salvador, the barrel from Central Europe.
The coffee gets its name from the coffee bean and the whiskey barrel. The rich and even spicy Bourbon Arabica coffee is aromatized in a real bourbon whiskey barrel for ten days. To ensure an even distribution of the aroma, the barrel is danced, i.e. rotated and moved at least twice a day.
"We chose the bean for this purpose at last spring's Helsinki Coffee Festival, when we were testing different coffees. The coffee itself was already strong in flavor, and we thought that this would go well with the whiskey aroma," says roaster Visa Tuovinen .
Oligark Bourbon Bourbon is deliciously full-bodied in its aromas. There is no alcohol in the coffee, but the last few percent are lost in the roasting process. The maturation gives the coffee's characteristic flavors a rum-raisin and sweet nuance.
Oligark coffee is delicious and high quality
The idea for Oligark coffee, which resembles a gold bar, came naturally, as Lappeenranta is close to the Russian border and Lehmus Roastery is the easternmost coffee roaster in Finland. The roastery often sends coffee with the additional information "Coffee from the East", so the East has been strong in Lappeenranta before.
"We often get asked if we have any aromatic coffees. We haven't wanted to make any because essential artificial aromas are not our style. So we thought about how we could create an aromatization that suits our own style. In addition, the coffee itself is really good, which means we preserve the value of the valuable raw material, or even increase it," says roaster Tuovinen.
The oligarch's promotional video features St. Petersburg businessman Andrey Fatin.
Lehmus Roastery started its whiskey coffee experiments back in the spring. A small batch of coffee was already made then, and the result of the maturation was used in Lesoilu-Stout, a joint beer project between Lehmus Roastery and Tuju Brewery. The first part of the Oligark coffee series entered larger-scale production this autumn. Whiskey barrel coffee has previously been made in Finland by Kaffa Roastery.
Roaster Visa Tuovinen makes the beans dance, or stir, twice a day.
The newly launched Oligark is a product line, just like the Limited launched in November. With them, Lehmus Roastery roasts and makes various interesting and high-quality experiments.
"In addition to good basic production, coffee has a lot of potential. In the future, there will be different flavor options under the Oligark name," Tuovinen says.
The name Oligark refers to the obscurely wealthy figures of our eastern neighbor. Lehmus Roastery's Oligark is a valuable and rich, slightly boastful, but also high-quality coffee, preceded by subtle and long-term work, including product testing.
"We haven't really gotten rich overnight, nor have we grabbed power. Except perhaps, of course, that we've already become extremely rich in terms of experiences and experiences," Tuovinen says.
Whiskey has previously been aged in barrels, now it's coffee's turn
Barrel coffee is made by allowing raw coffee to aromatize in a barrel that has previously been used to mature whiskey. The barrel has retained aromas from the whiskey, which are absorbed into the raw coffee over time. Usually, every effort is made to protect the raw coffee from external influences and flavors.
"In this case, the sensitivity of green coffee was utilized and a new flavor was intentionally infused into it," Tuovinen describes.
Tuovinen took sample batches of barrel-aged coffee throughout the aromatization sessions and made test roasts. Based on these, ten days of aromatization was the appropriate length for this Salvadoran Bourbon Arabica bean.
"A natural way to impart aroma, which even deepens the coffee's own flavor, means a very successful Oligarch."
The package includes oriental exoticism
The golden package is the result of a long development process. Samu Koskinen , artistic director of Lehmus Roastery, says that the starting point was to create the most valuable packaging possible, one that would exude Russian romanticism and Slavic design and aesthetics.
"In an oligarchic style, we made such demanding material requests to the printing houses that the orders took a long time to fulfill and one of the printing machines probably burned out along the way. However, the end result is packaging that meets our expectations, where the material choices support embossing, spot varnishing and gold foiling."
The previously introduced Limited series packaging, which plays with different shades of black, also posed its own challenges. How could it be made more impressive?
"Luckily, the weather was with us and we realized that we could always make coffees that resemble gold bars, because coffee itself is quite valuable. We threw the rest of the brakes on and eventually found a font with Cyrillic-style letters, illustrations with Russian ornaments and coloring in passionate red tones."
The coffee launch could not be left to a lesser degree, so Lappeenranta-based filmmaker Lauri Aapro was brought from all over the world to spend some time in Lappeenranta and film a promotional video for Oligark together with artistic director Samu Koskinen.
Product information:
Oligark is a raw-flavored Bourbon Arabica coffee aged in a Bourbon whiskey barrel for 10 days. The taste has a rum-raisin sweetness, and the aroma has a hint of whiskey. The medium-roasted coffee has a full body. 200 g package.
Contain:
Bourbon Arabica, Bálsamo-Quezaltepec, San Salvador, El Salvador. Natural. 1070-1800 masl
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Oligark Bourbon Bourbon now on sale at Satamatie 6 (open mostly daily 12-18) and in the online store .