As we’ve already established in my previous blog post, Highlander Grogg is by far our most popular and sought after coffee that we craft. I decided to crunch some numbers and wow...
We do all of our roasting in small batches, and that means each week we make a lot of batches of Highlander Grogg, or H. Grogg as we like to furiously scribble on the “roast list”. Writing out H-i-g-h-l-a-n-d-e-r just takes so much time, writer’s cramp!
Every week we make, on average, 30 barrels of H. Grogg just for our 10oz. and 2lb. bag varieties. Each barrel holds about 125 pounds of the stuff. That means we process somewhere around at least 3,750 POUNDS of Highlander Grogg EVERY WEEK! About a third of the barrels are used for our whole bean 10oz, and 2lb. bags, the remaining are ground for, well, our ground 10oz. and 2lb. bags. And if we add in the Highlander Grogg for our 1.5oz. packets, our BB cups and cold brew packets, the 5lb bulk bags, not to mention the barrels the café orders for themselves, as well as decaf, well, we’re looking at around 40 barrels getting flavored with Highlander Grogg. And yet, we will still get some people from time to time who visit the Flavor Factory and remark how “it smells just like Highlander Grogg in here!” Odd, I haven’t noticed…
We even use Highlander Grogg as part of our flavor recipe for our popular fall-time seasonal, Doe Eyes! If you haven’t tried it yet and are a fan of our Highlander flavor profile, I highly recommend!
Now 40 barrels may seem like a crazy amount of Highlander, however, Brenda, our very own Grocery Fulfillment specialist, has been known to pick up to 200 bags of 10oz. ground Highlander Grogg in one day! She can really put a dent into the 1.5s too if we don’t keep an eye on her! We keep telling her she should really pace herself, but she honestly can’t help it. (We’re looking into a 12-step program for her.) In all seriousness, just about every order our delivery drivers put in for has some variation of Highlander Grogg on it. Not to mention our distributor partners can take over a thousand bags at once! It’s true, our customers really love Highlander Grogg!
Now, as I write this, we are days away from approaching our busy season a.k.a. cool weather and bulky sweater season. Once that happens, we’re planning on running close to 55, if not 60 barrels a week! We even have a top-secret contract with our flavoring provider to ensure we always have the ingredients for our Highlander Grogg flavor blend on hand. We have to keep the contract in a safe that only a retina scan can unlock… Okay, not really. It’s actually shuffled into the Mount Everest of papers on Mary’s desk. So, same concept really?!
And now you’ll probably ask, “well, since you go through so much Highlander, do you ever run out?”
The calm and collected response is: “Yes, we have.”
The behind the scenes of actually running out wasn’t as calm nor anywhere near collected. A few may have cried, and some may have yelled at the computer monitor when the email came in from the freight carrier saying shipment was going to be delayed… But props to Mary for getting every last drop of Highlander Grogg flavoring from that last drum we had. She literally scrapped the bottom of the barrel, and after that she angled the drum to drain out any flavoring still stubborn enough to stick to the sides. She got us enough flavoring for an extra 60 pounds of Highlander Grogg which we carefully rationed out that day. We all cheered when the truck finally delivered the next day, then proceeded to flavor up 14 barrels of it.
Now with all this talk of Highlander Grogg, you may, or may not, be surprised to learn that while we all enjoy a good cup of it (one of the perks of working here, no pun intended, is that we can have all the Highlander Grogg we want from the café), we also have other Berres Brothers favorites for when we want to change it up a bit. My personal favorite is Tres Rios, our Costa Rican roast. If you’re looking for a good medium roast coffee with a hint of sweetness in the finish, I highly recommend this offering from us!
But if you just want to stick with Highlander Grogg, you can’t go wrong either! I mean, we'll just be here, behind the scenes at the Flavor Factory, up to our eyeballs in copious amounts of the best-loved butterscotch, hazelnut, and caramel flavored beans around!
And P.S. If you see Pete out and about wearing a kilt, I’m sorry, I probably gave him that (bad?!) idea!
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