The more and more I eat, the more I am amazed at how much better some food is than others. The right ingredients crafted by skilled artisans creates a class of products that help us to remember what food is supposed to taste like. It reminds me why I am so passionate about creating Foodzie.

Case in point: meet Eileen - the founder of Ritual Coffee, an award-winning artisan coffee roaster in San Francisco. Ritual makes darn good coffee. Good enough to convince a gal (me!) who doesn’t like coffee to come back for a second cup. A second cup of straight black coffee nonetheless - no cream, no sugar and I loved it. I was stunned. (For the record it was their Misty Valley roast from Ethiopia - syrupy sweet and wild with intense ripe berry flavors, dates, figs hints of star anise, and a floral aftertaste.)

After I asked, “But it tastes fruity, kinda sweet - not bitter like every other coffee I’ve tried? How is your coffee so different?” Eileen explained.

First it’s about the beans. Eileen travels around the world searching for farmers who have the highest quality coffee beans. These coffee beans hang on the tree long enough to soak up that wonderful fruit flavor (remember coffee is a fruit!) and picked when the time is right. Eileen explains how they take the beans through the roasting process to enhance coffee’s naturally sweet, fruity flavor.

Coffee is already a delicious, sweet, juicy fruit. It has complex sugars, and exquisite acids that deliver wonderful flavors to our palates. Plucked off its tree, it has a flavor that you may compare to strawberry or watermelon. Our job as coffee roasters is to stand out of the way and let the coffee live up to its full potential. We roast the coffee just enough to caramelize the natural sugars and develop the delicate, bright flavors that the terroir and variety instill in the coffee. We favor vintage Probat coffee roasters made of cast iron with direct flame and we pay assiduous attention to our senses and our few rustic gauges while roasting. We taste our coffee every day. Every day we re-approach roasting as if nothing we know, nothing we have done, means anything.

Bottom line. Ritual rocks and so does Eileen. In fact, Eileen is the head curator for the coffee pavilion at Slow Food Nation this upcoming weekend. Eileen hand-picked the other 10 artisan roasters that will be at the event serving their coffee. We had a blast chatting with her because she is just so passionate about making the absolute best coffee around. Great work Eileen!