Lisboeta: our first collaboration with DAK

In May 2023 we turned one. A single café in Chiado had become several rooms and a very steep learning curve, and we wanted to mark the date with something you could drink rather than a party. So we made a coffee, in limited quantity, with DAK Coffee Roasters from the Netherlands, and we called it <span class="it">Lisboeta</span>. The name was not decoration. A lisboeta is someone from Lisbon, and in our first year the people who kept the door swinging were not only the visitors who found us in a guide. They were the neighbours who came in twice a day, the people who worked mornings from a corner table, the ones who told us, kindly and directly, when a coffee was not right. The coffee was for them.

Why a Colombian lot

We tasted a number of options and kept coming back to a Colombian lot. Colombia is a country of small farms at high altitude with two harvests a year in many regions, which means fresh crop is available for more of the calendar than in most origins. It also means enormous variation: the same department can give you something quiet and chocolatey and something floral and lifted, depending on the variety, the altitude and how carefully the fruit was fermented and dried. This one was firmly in the second camp, and it had the quality we care about most in a coffee we are going to put our name on: it was expressive without being unstable. There is a kind of heavily processed coffee that arrives shouting and then falls apart within weeks, leaving alcohol and not much else. This was not that. It was juicy and clear, and it stayed itself from the first bag to the last.

In the cup

Peach, first and clearly — ripe yellow peach rather than tinned, with the acidity that goes with it. Then something floral underneath, delicate hints of rose that showed most as the cup cooled and were easy to miss if you drank it too hot. Juicy through the middle, expressive on the finish, and clean: fruit-forward without the boozy edge that tells you a tank ran long. Not over-fermented, which was the whole point. We served it as filter across the cafés and sold it in bags while it lasted, which was not long. It worked best in a cone at the ratio we still recommend at home, ground a touch finer than we usually would, because the sweetness could carry the extra contact time without turning dry.

What a collaboration is for

A collaboration roast is not a marketing exercise, or it should not be. Two teams with different equipment, different water and different habits taste the same green coffee and argue about it. You discover quickly which of your own preferences are considered judgements and which are just what you happen to have always done — where you charge the drum, how long you develop, how much acidity you are willing to leave in for the sake of clarity, how much body you are willing to lose for it.

At the time we did not yet roast in Lisbon ourselves. Lisboeta is one of the reasons we decided we wanted to, and a good deal of what we learned that spring went into the roastery when it finally came: how much we care about stability, how little we care about a coffee that only impresses once, how useful it is to have someone outside your own bar tell you your espresso is sweeter than it is interesting. Some of the arguments are still going.

One year, one coffee, one city. Dedicated to the people who made us a neighbourhood café before we were anything else.

Lisboeta was a limited lot and it is long gone. What it taught us about buying for sweetness and stability is still how we choose every coffee.