I usually wait until the end of year for reflection, but I'm too excited. So, I'm taking a pause between holiday kitchen production and shipping orders to share a little bit. The close of 2015 and the beginning of 2016 will reveal wonderful new recipe and ingredient changes at JAVA & Co.
Brian and I launched JAVA & Co. in 2008 - with one product - our Coffee infused Syrups. New. Innovative. Delicious. They were an instant hit. It has always been our goal to bring the best tasting products to our customers and we make strides each passing year, each month and each day to do just that. Recent years and especially 2015 - has shown us that it's not only great flavors that are important, but the quality and source of those flavors and ingredients.
With that said, we will begin to switch over to Certified Fair Trade Organic Arabica coffee beans vs. our current Arabica coffee beans. These beans will still be fresh roasted from a local roaster; still be the best Arabica, and will eventually be the only coffee beans we use as ingredients in our products made from coffee. You may have already noticed the change in our Espresso Powders, soon it will be in our coffee infused syrups, JAVA Spice and eventually all coffee based items. It is a slow process, but we have a goal and we will get there.
In addition, we recently sourced a local supplier of natural milled non-gmo pure cane sugar. This pure cane sugar is unrefined and non-gmo. Win-Win!! It is made by squeezing and evaporating the juice from freshly harvested sugar cane. The result is a golden sweet crystal that tastes like biting into fresh sugar cane. This premium non-GMO sugar creates a naturally rich sweetened flavor profile. I also read that the body absorbs it slower than refined sugar, which helps with glycemic spikes. If that is true, then bonus. As you know, we use sugar in our syrups, caramels, snack bars, pancake mixes, biscotti and our new espresso infused sugar (on sale now btw). We have begun to switch out our standard pure cane sugar for the milled (with the hope that it will continue to be readily availability) and have noticed delicious results. The milled sugar seems to add a warmer, richer taste to everything. A notable visible difference is in the coffee infused syrups. Due to the natural milling process of the sugar, the clarity of the syrups has changed and isn't as clear as before, but the flavor has improved! We didn't set out to improve flavor, but by improving the ingredients, we did just that - who knew?!
There is a long road ahead of us to switch over ingredients, online updates, recipe updating and trials and performance, and eventually - at the end of it all - label updates. It may take until the end of 2016 (or longer), but we'll get there - one batch at a time.
Thank you for joining us on this journey and for bringing our locally crafted products into your kitchen. We're here for you and we're here because of you.
Happy Holidays & Merry Christmas!
Brian & Jamie Knoll
JAVA & Co.
Small Batch Recipes
www.javaandco.com
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