About
*FORMERLY KNOWN AS DARK ARCHES

Our most popular blend, this has been a best seller over the years having formerly been named after local Leeds landmark the Dark Arches. Following the move of our roasting facility to Leeds Dock, we have now refreshed the name to reflect the home of North Star along with the medium roast level we use for this blend.

We have put a lot of work into creating our house blend over the last few years, tinkering with components and percentages until we think it is just right. Our aim has been to create a blend that embraces many of the characteristics of a traditional espresso blend but that embodies principles of specialty coffee working with amazing producers from across the tropics, profiling and roasting their beans to a medium level before carefully blending them to create a characterful cup.

Details
The result is a coffee that is versatile, working well for the home user in a French Press or Stove Top but also for the Barista proving consistent and easy to work with on an espresso machine. The Docks is proudly our house blend and is named after our headquarters at Leeds Dock.

40% Brazil Fazenda Rainha Da Paz
A classic Brazilian coffee with low to medium acidity and intense notes of milk chocolate and roasted nuts. Full bodied and creamy in mouthfeel, this is a staple coffee from an amazing and relatively young farm in Patrocinio, Minas Gerais. The Montanari brothers (Roger and Marcello) are paving their way in the area fast gaining a reputation for innovation and social and environmental responsibility.

40% El Salvador Chelazos
We are so proud of this coffee having sourced it during a trip to El Salvador in February 2017. Determined to work with small scale producers where possible, we chose the region of Chalatenango to source our coffee from and came across two incredibly determined and focused farmers defying the challenges of the area and remaining committed to the principles of quality coffee production. Leonecio Guillen and Alfonso Rodriguez produce coffee with care and attention and the result is juicy, clean, balanced and bursting with plum and marzipan.

20% Sumatra Bener Meriah
Sumatra is possibly one of the most challenging origins to work with when looking for quality, it’s unique processing method and infrastructure can result in coffees that display a real woody, earthy character. Bener Meriah is a washing station in Aceh (North Sumatra) that belongs to the Bener Meriah Farmers Group, compromising of 400 farmers. We have worked with these smallholders for nearly four years now thanks to the clean coffee they produce –  intense and full bodied this coffee has deep notes of dark chocolate, tamarind and plum.

 The Docks House Blend

The first speciality coffee micro roasters in the great city of Leeds - roasting knockout speciality coffee with sound ethics.

North Star Coffee Roasters

Burundi Izuba Natural

Burundi Izuba Washed

Czar Street Seasonal Blend V.19

Guatemala Finca La Bolsa Washed

Brazil Fazenda Rainha Da Paz

El Salvador Chelazos

Colombia Los Rosales

Rwanda Cyato Anaerobic Natural

Rwanda Twumba Washed

Peru Antonio Mejia Paica

Honduras Blanca Rosa – 90hr macerated

Ethiopia Bookisa Natural

Peru has traditionally been known as a supplier for larger, commercial grade and certified lots of coffee – this has resulted in many producers becoming marginalised from the speciality market.

This was until our import partners, Falcon, set up the Blueprint program in the region of Jaen in Cajamarca focused on bringing about greater financial transparency for farmers in the region. To make this happen, a warehouse was set up to collect parchment coffee directly from the producers. This coffee was then sampled by a stringent QC team who would assign the sample a cupping score and it was on this basis alone that a price was determined for the producer who would receive the money on the same day. This is a pretty revolutionary initiative in this area and has seen producers receiving fair prices that have often doubled those on the local market. Not only has this brought about a more sustainable way of trading coffee in the area, it has also meant farmers are more willing to forge longer term relationships knowing their coffee will be assessed on its own merits. The initiative now incorporates over 400 local producers and Eli is one of them.

He came to the area as a teenager looking for work and started to pick coffee in the village – in time he was able to buy 4 hectares of his own land which he has planted out with coffee. By being involved in the Blueprint program and choosing to process coffee with specialty grade in mind, he is able to achieve so much more from his 4 hectares than he would do selling locally on the commercial market. Eli processes all of his coffee at his house in the village and has achieved amazing results with this natural lot – he washed and floated his ripe cherries before drying them for one day under shade. After this point they were moved to his parabolic dryer (a sort of tent with raised beds) to continue drying for another 45 days! This attention to detail and drawn out drying process has created a super refined cup displaying a touch of natural funk coupled with beautifully integrated acidity.

Peru Eli Espinoza Natural

This process was first discovered by a scientist called Kurt Zosel at the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research in 1967 as he was looking at new ways of separating mixtures of substances. In 1988, a German decaffeination company called CR3 developed this process for decaffeination whereby natural carbon dioxide (which comes from prehistoric underground lakes) is combined with water to create ‘sub-critical’ conditions which creates a highly solvent substance for caffeine in coffee. It is a gentle, natural and organically certified process and the good caffeine selectivity of the carbon dioxide guarantees a high retention level of other coffee components which contribute to taste and aroma.

Single Origin CO2 Decaf

Tanzania Mlama Washed

Generally, when showcasing Ethiopian coffees, we try to seek out the most classic of flavour profiles to best display what makes these coffees world famous.

This is yet another outstanding example of the best Ethiopia can offer up on the washed coffee front. Being the birthplace of coffee, this sort of complexity is to be expected and is certainly what we search for every year when we make our selections.

This coffee is outstandingly clean and complex with juicy notes of orange and syrupy apricot – there are rose like florals and an integrated raspberry-like acidity. Reminiscent of tea, this is a coffee to take your time over and savour. Ideally filtered and served black.

Ethiopia Kennisa

We are so excited to introduce the first Tanzanian coffee to be featured on our shop since…2015! Yes, it has certainly been a while but we have been waiting for the one 🙂

We have a washed lot available from the Mlama Estate in Moshi, read on for more information…

Tasting notes for the washed lot: Clean and complex with sharp notes of redcurrant and lemon backed with softer notes of pear and a syrupy pineapple like mouthfeel. Well balanced with a really pleasant, lingering aftertaste and a flavour profile that changes and develops from hot through to cool. Recommended for filter methods such as Chemex, AeroPress (with paper filter) or Pour Over/Batch Brew.

At the crack of dawn one sunny morning last February, North Star founders Hols and Krag hurtled towards the Kenya/Tanzania border driven by Vava Angwenyi who had hosted them during their visits to the region of Meru to source our Kenyan coffee for the year. Vava was insistent that they had to visit this incredible farm she knew of in Tanzania – it was a six day origin trip but what was one more 10 hour car journey eh?! After a fairly smooth transit across the border, they arrived in the region of Moshi around lunchtime. Moshi is in the North-East of Tanzania bordering Kenya. It is known to be the gateway to Mount Kilimanjaro and the farm is literally sat on the foothills of the mountain. Needless to say the views were just spectacular!

The Mlama Estate is situated at around 1300 metres above sea level. It is a 72-hectare estate that not only employs the majority of the local population but also processes the cherry of those with smallholdings of coffee too. It can sometimes be a bit strange visiting large coffee estates in Africa as the norm is so often a tiny shamba no more than 1-2 hectares in size. Without the ever-present misty tip of Mt Kilimanjaro peering down over the coffee you could easily think you were in Brazil walking the rows of neatly planted coffee trees! The major difference of course being the people handpicking the cherries and of course the abundance of incredible shade trees creating amazing diversity on the farm along with the perfect environment for the slower ripening of the cherries.

After an interesting night spent sleeping at the local nunnery (!) Hols and Krag reconvened with the team from Mlama the next morning to cup some type samples from the early pickings – to their delight the coffee performed beautifully displaying good brightness and complexity in the cup. This washed coffee displays juicy hints of redcurrant, lemon and pineapple. After a pretty arduous journey from Dar es Salaam, we are so so delighted to have finally landed these beautiful coffees – the harvest took place in December and we cupped numerous samples before settling on these two lots which we hope will perform well on a variety of brew methods.

Traditionally, coffee from Costa Rica was bulked and sold – however the higher production costs made it impossible for the country to compete with neighbouring Nicaragua. Specialty coffee production has therefore become the focus. Finca San Francisco is a 12 hectare farm that has been owned by the Solis family since 1965 – Edgar, his wife Ligia and son Willian are the second generation to take over production here. Edgar is very passionate about issues of environmental responsibility and he is working towards organic production, much of what he does right now is in line with biodynamic farming principles – he champions intercropping and agroforestry by planting coffee trees with avocado, banana and citrus trees. Coffee grown in this manner tends to benefit from a slower maturation of cherries.

Edgar and his team of 15 pickers religiously take the Brix reading of the cherries throughout the season to understand when is best to harvest them based on the sugar content. This year’s harvest was made somewhat easier thanks to the consistent flowering across the farm last year which enabled picking to be completed within two weeks. However, unexpected rains when picking provided some challenges when getting the coffee to the ASOPROAAA processing centre. An extra 50 raised beds had to be installed this year to assist with the influx of cherries from growers across the region. Upon delivery at the centre, the Brix reading is taken again to ascertain how to process the cherries: washed, natural or honey. We managed to secure the honey processed lot this year – this coffee has had the skin of the cherry removed before drying.

North Star Coffee Roasters

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North Star Coffee Roasters

🇬🇧 United Kingdom

Served in Coffee Shops

Coffee Roasts

The Docks House Blend

Brazil Fazenda Rainha Da Paz

Burundi Izuba Washed

Colombia Los Rosales

Costa Rica San Francisco Honey

Czar Street Seasonal Blend V.19

El Salvador Chelazos

Ethiopia Bookisa Natural

Ethiopia Kennisa

Guatemala Finca La Bolsa Natural

Guatemala Finca La Bolsa Washed

No10 Espresso Blend

Peru Antonio Mejia Paica

Rwanda Cyato Anaerobic Natural

Single Origin CO2 Decaf

Coffee archive

Burundi Izuba Natural

Honduras Blanca Rosa – 90hr macerated

Peru Eli Espinoza Natural

Rwanda Twumba Washed

Tanzania Mlama Washed

Tanzania Mlama Washed

New Coffee Review