A collaboration with Hong Kong specialty coffee roastery Urban Coffee Roasters
Hong Kong has always been nostalgic to me. Perhaps it's due to the countless HK dramas I grew up watching; maybe it's from the memories of revisiting my parents' honeymoon spots on family trips when I was a child; or it could just be my overwhelming love for dimsum and milk tea that created this special bond. Travelling to Hong Kong always felt like going home away from home - in so many ways the city was same same but different from Singapore.
With Hong Kong being a place that’s close to my heart, you can imagine how thrilled I was when we managed to land a trip there to expand our footprint! Everything happened pretty quickly, the trip was decided in April and we were to fly by early June.
By the time our air tickets were booked, my list of places to check out was already massive. But excitement aside, there was an important task ahead. Securing a trip was just tip of the iceberg, the real challenge was ensuring that a fruitful schedule was planned out and substantial outcomes were achieved from this time-off from Singapore. After many sleepless nights spent putting the plans together and through a series of hits and misses, we finally had a good itinerary ahead of us.
Among the many admirable entrepreneurs and inspirational business partners we met on the trip, a particular one struck a chord with me because of how similar their story was to ours. Urban Coffee Roasters is a specialty coffee roastery founded by Horry and Gary. The duo started out as friends and over time, bonded over their common interests - food, of course being one of those. In 2014, they turned that hobby into a business, starting off by serving coffee at pop-up markets before going full fledged into owning their own space. Check out their quaint little cafe at Tsim Sha Tsui!
While our trip lasted less than a week, conversations with the team continued and then THIS was born.
Image by Urban Coffee Roasters
This limited release Banko Gotiti coffee chocolate bar we created in collaboration with Urban Coffee Roasters is made with a micro-lot coffee selected by Gary from Ethiopia Yirgacheffe in 2019 harvest season paired with our cacao beans from Rehoboth Estate in the Philippines. With this combination of coffee and cacao, you can expect floral notes with immense blueberry sweetness and a delicate tangerine finish. This bar will be sold exclusively at Urban Coffee Roasters (though we kept a bar for our own secret stash ha!) and since we’ve made a micro-lot, it is available in limited quantities only.
While we won’t be back in Hong Kong for a while, we’re happy to have found new friends and caught up with old ones during this trip. And to those who believe in us, thank you for your support and we really look forward to growing together in the coming years.
Till we meet again, Hong Kong!
Homeground Coffee Roasters x Fossa Chocolate
We first met the Homeground Coffee Roasters (HGCR) team at their cafe takeover at The Glasshouse when they presented two special coffee co-roasted with Hoshikawa Cafe from Japan. The packaging artwork (by Mike, check out his IG: herabot) got our attention, the coffee presentation and sharing by Ely made us understand the thought process behind the cup, and the coffee was so delicious we decided we need to work with them.
Fast forward two months later, we developed two coffee chocolate bars, just in time for Christmas. Instead of going with the typical tried and tested dark-roasted espresso coffee-chocolate blend, we decided to present them lightly-roasted for filter brews. We also wanted to showcase the drastically different flavour profile brought forth by various post-harvesting methods - natural processed and wash processed.
Natural processed coffee are coffee cherries that were left to dry in the sun with its pulp on, allowing fermentation to start spontaneously as the yeast feast on the sugary pulp. This process develops a certain sweet ripen fruit character in the coffee which paired really well with the wine-like flavour of our Rehoboth Estate cacao from the Philippines.
Wash processed coffee on the other hand, have a cleaner flavour profile as the coffee cherries were pulped and washed before drying, eliminating the fermentation process. Our nutty Oko Caribe cacao highlighted the floral notes of the coffee.
Both chocolates had distinctive flavours and we found that everyone have their favourites. If you managed to get your hands on these limited release bars, do let us know your thoughts!