Roasted to order, every Friday
For five years it stood in the dining room at 111 Church Street. It still runs every Friday, for a short list of people.
2019 — 2023
Blend 111 opened at 111 Church Street NW in early 2019 — forty-five seats, modern Latin cooking drawn from Colombia and Puerto Rico, and a patio that eventually became the whole operation. There was a coffee roaster in the middle of it. Not in a back room: in the restaurant, where guests could watch it work.
We closed in August 2023. The dining room belongs to someone else now. The roaster came with us.
About the decaf
Most roasters treat decaf as an obligation. One bag on the shelf, ordered because somebody will eventually ask, roasted on the same profile as everything else and left there for a season. That is why it tastes the way it does.
Decaffeinated coffee is genuinely harder to roast, and the reasons are physical. The beans arrive structurally altered and already partly cooked. They enter the drum darker, so colour lies to you about where you are. They scorch early, tip easily, and give a markedly narrower window to develop sugars before the cup collapses into something woody and flat.
It takes different profiles, and a long time to find them. I have spent twenty years on it — first at home, then in a dining room where the roaster ran in plain view of the room, every day, for five years.
We roast both. The decaf is the one people write to us about.
How it works
Someone gave you one, or we sent you one. There is no open storefront and there won't be — the whole point is that this stays small enough to roast properly.
Everything is roasted to order on Friday. Nothing sits. Orders placed by Thursday evening go into that week's roast.
Local orders are delivered by hand on Saturday. Everything else goes out in Monday’s post, one to three days on the road.
Either coffee, same price, delivered. No thresholds, no shipping calculator, no upsells. Order as many bags as you like.
The coffee
The house blend from Church Street, unchanged. Cocoa and toasted hazelnut with a little orange peel at the finish — balanced enough to drink black all morning, sturdy enough to hold up to milk.
12 oz · Medium roast · Shipping included
The one that took twenty years. Everything the regular is, without the caffeine and without the flat, woody finish that makes people give up on decaf. The cup for four in the afternoon, and again after dinner.
12 oz · Medium roast · Shipping included
Both are roasted to order on Friday. Whole bean, or ground for your brewer — you choose at checkout.
Members
Ordering is open to invited members only. If you were a regular at Church Street, or someone passed you a code, this is where you use it.
12 oz, whole bean or ground. Roasted this Friday, shipping included. Adjust the quantity at checkout.
Order regular12 oz, whole bean or ground. Roasted this Friday, shipping included. Adjust the quantity at checkout.
Order decafFive-pound bags for restaurants and offices around Northern Virginia — including the decaf they have been apologising for.
Email about wholesaleUnlocked — welcome back.
No code?
The list grows by referral, which is the only way to keep it small enough to roast properly. If you knew the restaurant, or you know a member, write and say so. We open a handful of places each season.
Write to usThe book · no code needed
Five pages from inside
Back of House is what we cooked from at 111 Church Street. 281 recipes at service weights, in the order the line ran them, with nothing rewritten for a home kitchen.
Every recipe fits on one page. Everything is in grams. Twenty sections, from stocks and sauces through pastry and the espresso program.
The back of the book is the part that gets used: a component map of which preparations feed which dishes, an allergen matrix, conversions, a glossary of kitchen terms, and sourcing.
The restaurant ran five years, served forty-two thousand guests, and went through a hundred and fifty-eight cooks and servers. This is the book they worked from.