Our Story
Social Coffee & Tea Co. is dedicated to bringing the highest quality fresh-roasted coffees grown anywhere to you, the toiling workers of the world. We do this by harnessing the existing capitalist system in service to our customers’ needs.
Our name is how to think of our coffee
We believe coffee should be a social experience, top to bottom. It should be delivered via socially conscious supply chains and brewed by impassioned devotees dedicated to providing delicious coffees for all, regardless of class, birthright or party affiliation. We roast and develop our own specialty blends using the finest coffee beans available.
Coffee, tea or the salt-mines
We strive to elevate humanity’s coffee awareness and encourage all classes to brew their own. After all, more labour equals more freedom, and thus universal happiness. To us, coffee isn’t simply a drink, but a perfect realization of the Social Contract: To ensure all human resources reach maximum productivity through correct and delicious coffee consumption.
Re-education in everything we do
At our Richmond Hill, Ontario roastery we offer tuition in coffee brewing, espresso-making and taste-testing. We also conduct tasting sessions to demonstrate how we evaluate our green coffee samples.
OUR PROCESS
Selecting top green coffee
To evaluate and select green (unroasted) coffees before purchasing, we apply a strict sample roasting and cupping protocol. Using an advanced sample roaster, we test-roast new lots to ensure they meet muster. After meticulous sampling of dozens of lots we buy in quantity to last us for the season only those that meet our standards. On receipt of orders, any beans shipped in burlap sacks is cleaned and re-bagged in freshness-preserving, gas- and moisture-proof multilayer reusable sacs.
Laboratorial excellence
Artisanal roasting to Social’s standards is a precise art and requires extreme care to achieve perfection. Our traditional drum roaster has been fully modernized and modified to provide key information on bean temperature, air temperature, air pressure, fan speed and rate of heat application. This gives our roastmasters the information necessary to control and make decisions concerning the roast profile. This combination of roastmaster expertise and timely, accurate data is the secret to roasting outstanding coffee.
Bean roast profiles
We roast and cup methodically until achieving our optimum profile. Even our cupping water is filtered and treated with a re-mineralization formula, ensuring the process isn’t influenced by variations in water quality. For espresso testing, our process adheres to a modified SCAA cupping protocol using a state-of-the-art, commercial-grade Slayer espresso machine. We also test with a simple home-style espresso machine to ensure your home brew meets our standards.
Our endless struggle for you
Meticulously tasting (called ‘cupping’), selecting and roasting each lot ourselves, we cup our own roasts yet again after production to assure the quality continues through to your final sip. This enables us to deliver delicious, distinctive coffees for all our brothers and sisters, and a guarantee of industrially correct compensation for our comrades who grow these products in faraway lands.
OUR QUALITY STANDARDS
How we blend
Social’s blends are crafted with great care to achieve our signature taste. We continue through the seasons to deliver a cup quality unobtainable from most single origin beans (more on those in a moment). Social offers two versions of each Espresso and House Blend. One is a solid, stable classic, while the other is a more exciting, adventurous exploration into coffee country
Strict coffee blending philosophy
Blending is commonly used to hide inferior quality beans or other defects, allowing unscrupulous purveyors to use poor quality or low cost beans. Social would never sanction such actions. Our blended products each stand on their own merits – so much so that we are able to offer outstanding single origin coffees.
Our packaging – a wealth of features
Social deems freshness as paramount. We use only multilayer laminated bags, with a one-way valve for degassing CO2 from coffee after the freshly roasted coffee and prevent damaging oxygen from entering the bag. This ensures Social Coffee tastes just as it did in our roasting lab. Bags are printed with a roast date, rather than an expiration date – so you always know how fresh it is. We ship within 1-3 days of roasting and encourage customers to order just 1-2 weeks’ supply. We also offer a coffee subscription service that ships (no charge) at intervals based on your volume requirements.
Variations on a theme
Coffee is a seasonal agricultural product with characteristics unique to geography and climate. Flavour changes from year to year, depending on precipitation, sun and wind. It can even vary from one section of a farm to another. As with any agricultural product, we will not purchase coffee from a previously favoured vendor if its coffee dips below our standards.
SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY
Single origin and the heroic farmer
Single origin beans let drinkers enjoy the ‘origin characteristics’ of a coffee, the way a coffee translates the unique characteristics – soil, climate, latitude, elevation, etc. – of its place of origin. Single origin also enables a deep appreciation of the hard work and dedication of the producer. Meticulous roasting showcases these fine beans, and thus the growers’ heroism. We search exhaustively to locate the best in single origin beans. Thus, we cannot offer every coffee from every region year-round.
This is how Social delivers balanced, classic, artisanally roasted coffee that always tastes fabulous.