Blog

Out of the whopping four seasonal beverages we introduced in our cafes this holiday season, one rose to become something of a sleeper hit among our customers. Meet our Mulled Coffee, a sweet and zingy concoction of cranberry juice infused with aromatic mulling spices, then blended with fresh filter coffee. The result is a beverage that warms you right down to your toes: disarmingly delicious, brilliantly balanced, and surprisingly satisfying. And great news for your holiday breakfast or brunch spread: you can absolutely recreate this drink at home! In the spirit of spreading more joy this holiday season, we asked...

After years of stumbling along in my pandemic-infused brain via Spanish zoom calls with the team Peru, it was great to finally pack my bag and head back to Peru. It had been many years since I'd been in Peru, in fact, a decade. I was curious to return to see what changed and what stayed the same. Olympia Coffee sourced coffees from Peru from the region of Cusco surrounding the town of Quillabamba for many years. In 2020 as the pandemic started we had already committed to return to sourcing coffee from the same community. This time with better...

In the spring of 2018, Olympia Coffee threw open the doors to our shiny new cafe in Tacoma, Washington. And, atop the espresso bar in this outpost on Proctor Street, a blend called Little Buddy made its appearance as the cafe’s flagship espresso. Lovingly named after a certain '86 Honda Civic that used to cruise around Tacoma in the 1990s, Little Buddy was tailor-made to evoke the eager, adventurous, and optimistic spirit of the City of Destiny. Four years later, we've refreshed Little Buddy to make it an even better representation of this same spirit. Now featuring a blend of...

Mark Twain once famously said: "Kona coffee has a richer flavor than any other, be it grown where it may and call it by what name you please."So maybe Twain's quote isn't that famous— but Kona coffee most certainly is. Stretched out over a 20-mile agricultural belt, the Kona growing region is nearly inextricable from any conversation about the Hawaiian coffee scene. The reputation of its coffee precedes every bag of beans: delicate in profile, yet with a profoundly rich flavor and aroma. Not unlike, say, a fine wine. And, on the slopes of Hualālai, one farm is going to...

In this post, we hear from Olympia Coffee's very own roaster and green coffee buyer Jake Donaghy, who recently traveled to Mexico to visit several of its coffee farms, meet the farmers, and eat all the mole he could find. Thanks for sharing with us, Jake! The sound of blaring trumpets and banda, the smell of hot coals, the crowing of roosters at hours so early it’s late; handmade tortillas, warm hospitality, and slang so wonderful and impossibly ridiculous it could only be from one place. I was back. I was in Mexico. In the earlier days of the pandemic,...