Ember

Brazil and Colombia are the two largest arabica producers in the world, and Ember uses both: Black Strix, from the CARPEC cooperative in Cerrado, alongside a Colombian Excelso. Dark chocolate and molasses with almond underneath, taken to a medium dark roast, which is where that depth comes from.

Best if you:

• grew up on Italian style coffee
• take milk, and maybe a little sugar
• want something low in acidity first thing

Brew it: espresso at around 2:1, so 18g in for roughly 36g out. The darker roast means you don't need to push the ratio as far as you would on a lighter coffee. Cafetiere at 70g per litre with water just off the boil. Rest it three days if you're pulling shots, though it's not the end of the world if you can't wait.

We roast in 18kg batches through the week, so nothing sits around ageing before it reaches you. No two coffees are the same, so we let each one dictate how it's roasted. Every batch runs on manual controls, so we can react to how the coffee develops in the drum and fine tune the balance of convection and conduction heat. That's where the precision comes from.