FRESH ROASTED IN SMALL BATCHES, ON PREMISES,
EVERY SINGLE DAY
Whether you are a novice of coffee, an expert with pretentious tendencies, or just someone who knows what tastes good, we have something for you.
Recall the smell of a roasted coffee bean. Close your eyes and think of how delightful it is. Now imagine you have access to a roaster, worth the price of a Ferrari no less, at your disposal, a roaster that is operated by trained team members to offer you nearly 100 varieties of coffee (!), including 50 different flavors every day. Open your eyes – you don’t have to imagine it anymore. We have it, and it’s all for you.
IT ALL STARTED AT A VERY EARLY AGE
Benny Lanfranco has been with the Fairway family since 2005, and he has been part of a coffee family for practically his whole life. As the head of the Fairway Coffee Department, he is the expert behind our premises-roasted fresh coffee and our practice of using only superior beans. When Benny was 13 years old, he started working on his neighbor’s coffee farm in the Dominican Republic. He quickly became fascinated with the process, and it became his passion to provide top-quality, carefully-grown coffee beans to coffee drinkers around the world. It is this passion that brought Benny and Fairway together to develop our coffee department into what it is today.
WHERE DO THOSE BEANS COME FROM, ANYWAY?
The journey of the coffee bean is arduous, but to achieve the high standards we have for our end result, it is a necessary journey. Benny and his team put our coffee beans to the test – the goal is always a great tasting coffee in your cup. The number one rule: our beans are treated with respect and care. What does this mean? This means we stay away from mainstream commercial coffee – corner-cutters and companies that clearly put quantity over quality; this means we buy directly from small farms and estates that we have personal connections with, because we know they feel the same passion about coffee as we do; this means we test, and test, and then test again before any bean makes it to our stores.
When you come into Fairway Market and see those wonderful barrels filled to the brim with all shades of shiny, smooth, brown beans, here’s how they got there: the farmer, who is part of an estate, scrutinized the weather, the soil, the air, and the water, and then timed his harvest using generations of experience and skill to guide him. He knows that the elements make the beans taste different every season and he plans accordingly. Benny and his team are sent a small batch of the newly harvested beans, about ¼ lb, straightaway. The sample is visually inspected and smelled; it is tested for moisture content – passing at 11.5%, with anything more than 12% or less than 10.5% rejected. The sample is then roasted in-house, ground, and taste-tested. For those coffee experts with pretentious tendencies, this is where we keep you in mind. Our standards will exceed your expectations.
If you get your coffee from Fairway, the contents of your morning cup are the result of passion, care, and toil. How did the farmer remove the seed from the fruit? How long did the bean dry out in the sun (which, by the way, is the best method as opposed to chemically or artificially drying the beans), and what was the weather pattern at the estate during the growing season? What new methods are the farmers using? These are questions we investigate because we know they are important. The answers propel our art of combining the correct percentages so that your favorite blend will always be what it was when you first fell in love with it. It is important to us that not only do we offer your old-time favorite blend, but that we also offer varieties to keep you adventurous.
All of our coffees are 100% Arabica beans, grown in the high-mountains by people whose livelihood is coffee. We buy directly from farmers and from select specialty brokers. We offer several varieties of Fair Trade and organic coffee. Our decaffeinated coffee is water-processed, not chemically processed, which protects the flavor of our very special beans that have gone through so much simply to make you happy.
YOU HAVE TO SEE IT TO BELIEVE IT
So instead of asking what sets our coffee department apart from the rest, ask “what doesn’t?” Come smell for yourself. Take some home with you. We can ground your coffee fit for any machine. The taste will be an experience from which you will never be able to go back.
