Hunter Bay Coffee

Aida Batlle

Hunter Bay Logo Evolution

One of the things we’ve discussed a lot over this past summer of Hunter Bay’s 20th Anniversary as Montana’s premium coffee… is the image of our coffee roasting business.

Of course you can see the visual proof of our close physical and emotional ties to this wondrous state we live and work in… just by looking at our logo and the labels of our many signature coffees. Our logo has always been directly tied to the values of wilderness, outdoor recreation and the activities Montanans love to pursue as residents of this state.

Whether it’s our own logo with our name imprinted over a background of a mountain and a mountain stream — or one of our specialty labels like Montana Premium Blend, Kaffe Moose Drool, Smoke Jumper, Trout Slayer, Back Country Organic, Foundation Blend Coffee or Big Sky Organic — you’ll see our Montana roots in our logo.

Of course we’re also proud of the unique roast, flavor and body of each of those coffees. It’s been our main goal since we opened our doors on August 19 of 1991 to provide Montana coffee lovers with the best coffee roasted in the state and in the region.

But the evolution of our signature logo branding has been interesting, as we take a look back over the past 20 years. On this blog page you’ll see how our logo took shape and developed over the years.

Our first logo took shape in the neon sign we hung up in the front window of our retail storefront in August of 1991. We didn’t have bag labels yet, but our idea was taking shape. It was a circle with our name emblazoned at an angle over the circle. You can see a photo of that neon sign in the attached photo panel. It’s image #1. There wasn’t a mountain in the background, but you can see that it was in our imaginations, and it showed up soon with the printing of our very first labels, which you can see in image #2.

We kept that label for only a short time as we worked hard to formalize our image in our next label printing. That can be seen in image #3 with the development of what we call our “classic” logo and “classic” coffee bag label. This would be our mainstay logo and coffee label for the next 12 years and became well known to western Montana coffee lovers. As you can see at the bottom of that label, we used only one label, but indicated the name of each coffee with the printed name of that coffee.

We used another label that only the owners of the businesses who purchased our coffee saw. That’s the simple oblong circular logo (#5) in the bottom panel. It was on every package of roasted coffee we delivered to our wholesale customers. We still label our wholesale coffee, but that well-known logo has not been used for several years.

As we expanded our business into wholesale and grocery sales, we were advised to make a simple, eye-catching label, so we simplified our logo and placed it onto a bright red label with the image of roasted coffee. This is the logo on the coffee label in #4.  We used this label for several years, but were still tied to the idea of a Montana image (an image we had always used on many of our other labels, by the way).

So, in 2007, we decided return to the logo of our roots. The result is the logo you see on the front page of our Hunter Bay website, and on each and every Hunter Bay coffee label. Of course, now we have a unique label for each of our blends. But the image that ties everything together is the circular logo with the words “Hunter Bay” emblazoned across the circle and in front of the image of a Montana mountain and a Montana mountain stream.

We know the citizens of our state - and many coffee customers who live elsewhere, but who visit our website and purchase our coffee - love our direct tie to the place and values of this “Last Best Place.”

We also hope that whenever you see our logo — whether on a sign or on a Hunter Bay coffee bag — that you also are directly linked to the special place we call our homes.

~ Glenn Junkert, Coffee Director

20th Anniversary of Hunter Bay

We’ve been celebrating the 20th anniversary of Hunter Bay throughout 2011. But today— August 19th — holds extra-special significance for us because August 19th, 1991, at 8 a.m. was our official first day of business as we opened our doors for the first time at our first location: 225 West Front Street, in Missoula.

Today — August 19th of 2011 — marks our exact 20th Anniversary as Missoula’s first and best local coffee roaster.

There have been numerous highlights, but we’ll narrow them down to the most memorable:

Still roasting: We admit to having learned a lot in 20 years. I recently had a conversation with a Missoula lawyer who remembers walking into our store shortly after it opened on August 19th, 1991. His first impression? That we might not last very long, he said with a chuckle as he congratulated us on our 20th anniversary, our longevity in Missoula and our consistent hiqh quality product. We admit that our learning curve was steep. But we learned fast. And we learned well. We’re here today as proof that Hunter Bay is one of the oldest and best specialty coffee roasters in America… and the best proof of that is your first sip of today’s fresh Hunter Bay coffee.

Missoula’s introduction to coffee roasting: Shortly after we opened our downtown store, we roasted our first batch of coffee with our brand new Diedrich Roaster. It was located at the front of the store and customers could watch us roast our coffee as they waited for their beverage. We were a little nervous on that bright and sunny September morning, but our first roast was perfect! As we celebrated the freshly roasted bright chocolate-brown coffee beans in our roaster’s cooling bin just as the puff of aromatic smoke drifted over downtown Missoula, two fire engines roared up Front Street and out jumped several fire fighters who had responded to a report of a fire on Front Street. NO FIRE, just roasting coffee. But the unique aroma of roasting coffee was a new experience for Missoula residents! We gave the firemen a complimentary cup of Hunter Bay coffee as they left. Here’s an important historical note: Though coffee roaster fires are relatively common worldwide, Hunter Bay has NEVER had a coffee roaster fire and has ALWAYS used the proper effluent controls to keep our roast effluent well under the minimum city, state and national standards.

A familiar aroma: Though many Missoula natives had never smelled roasting coffee, many of our first — and most loyal — customers found us quickly because of the unique aromas of freshly roasting coffee. Numerous customers would burst through our front doors and happily exclaim, “This aroma reminds me of growing up in San Francisco (or New York, or Chicago, or Seattle)” Fresh coffee aromas are truly among the favorite aromas of city living, which we continued to do until we outgrew our downtown location and moved our roasting plant to Lolo in 1997.

Retail and Wholesale: Our first six months were a blur of roasting activity. Business in our downtown store boomed as customers sampled any of our 35 different coffees from different regions of the world. Five months after opening, we had our first wholesale customer when the then-owner of Bernice’s Bakery walked into our store and asked us if we would develop a special coffee blend for Bernice’s Bakery. We said, “Yes!” To this day, Bernice’s famous coffee continues to be blended and roasted by Hunter Bay. Since then, Hunter Bay has established mutually beneficial relationships with numerous local and Western Montana businesses. You can read all about those special blends on this web site. Whenever you see a sign in your favorite business that says “Proudly Serving Hunter Bay Coffee,” tell them “thanks” for supporting Hunter Bay. To the owners of Bernice’s — and to all our other loyal wholesale customers — we say “Thanks for the 20-years of business!” And to you, we also say “Thanks for supporting Hunter Bay!”

Our stores: Hunter Bay grew rapidly in our downtown location and it wasn’t long before we had to consider a new location. We made a then difficult decision to move our roasting plant to Lolo, where we concentrated on our rapidly expanding wholesale operations. Shortly after moving, we re-opened our retail coffee bar in downtown Missoula at 215 West Front. Then, last August, we moved two blocks east on Front Street, where we opened our brand new retail location at 101 East Front, in the First Bank building located at the corner of Higgins and Front streets. Please stop by any time to help us celebrate our 20 years in Missoula!

Our Blends — our trademark: The overriding hallmark of Hunter Bay coffee is quality. It has been our passion and practice to obtain only the highest quality green coffees from around the world to roast fresh for our Western Montana and internet customers. As we practiced our trade, we became convinced that we could provide the highest and most consistent quality through the development of our own Signature Hunter Bay Blends. Though we continue to feature a small number of quality “country of origin” coffees, Hunter Bay has strengthened and solidified its reputation through its unique and high quality blends. We offer a unique blend for all coffee tastes, whether it’s one of our award-winning espresso blends, our dark roast blends, medium roast blends, or blends for specific commercial applications. You can read about ALL of our Hunter Bay Signature blends on this web site.

Our growing reputation: Today, customers of Hunter Bay coffee have a lot of ways to get their coffee. You can now find Hunter Bay Coffee in literally EVERY independent grocery store from Darby, Montana to the south,  all the way to Bigfork, Montana to the north, Thompson Falls to the west with further expansion planned in all directions.

Join Us: We invite you to join us as we continue to celebrate our 20th year as Missoula and Western Montana’s fresh coffee roaster. Drop into our store at 101 East Front for a fresh latte or cappuccino. Or, taste our rich and flavorful brewed coffee. As you leave, make sure to grab a package of our newest blend, our “20th Anniversary Blend,” to brew at home.

Whether you’re a longtime customer of 20 years, or just introduced to our coffee, we look forward to providing you the best fresh-roast coffee you’ll ever have… for another 20 years!

~ Glenn Junkert, Coffee Director

Do You Roast Your Own Coffee?

One thing I did not think about very much in my 20 years with Hunter Bay is where, when or how we roasted our coffee.

But a common question that’s asked nowadays is “Do you roast your own coffee?”

Well… yes. Of course. Every day in our Missoula, Montana based roasting plant. We wouldn’t EVER think of doing it any other way.

The reason for the question? More and more coffee companies do NOT roast their own coffee. Which in turn leads to many more questions. Hmmm.

But you can be assured that every cup of Hunter Bay coffee you’ve ever consumed has been roasted by our roastmaster, Corey.

I’ll have several more short blog entries on the importance of quality local coffee roasting. And how important it is to know a company’s roasting methods and philosophies.

It all starts and ends with quality. That’s because quality (or the absence of quality) can be tasted. By you.

The attached photo is of Hunter Bay Roastmaster Corey, who recently developed Hunter Bay’s newest blend, our 20th Anniversary Blend. You can find this blend at our downtown Missoula Store. We guarantee that it was roasted fresh, right here in our home town.

~ Glenn Junkert, Coffee Director

Hunter Bay’s Special Iced Coffee

American coffee lovers can purchase a wide variety of coffee beverages at their favorite coffee shop and Hunter Bay is an excellent example. At our downtown Missoula shop, for instance, customers can order a tasty selection of coffee in various sizes, with a choice of milk (including rice and soy milk), and a long selection list of natural flavors, flavored syrups and toppings. To top that all off, a regular list of specials are also available.

But there’s one fresh coffee beverage you can also order at Hunter Bay that is simply not available anywhere else: Fresh Brewed Iced coffee that’s brewed especially as a cold beverage.

Hunter Bay’s own unique iced coffee blend was created to be consumed as straight, pure cold coffee. Whether or not you add milk, sweetener or flavor, it’s always our fresh iced coffee that we brew weekly in our commercial kitchen for your consumption.

With Hunter Bay’s iced coffee, you are consuming a cold beverage that’s pure coffee. We’ve spent the past 20 years fine-tuning our special iced brew. Our final recipe took eight years of tweaking and blending. It contains several unique and complementary coffees of origin known for their full flavor, thick consistency and very smooth aftertaste. If you love cold coffee, you owe it to yourself to try this unique brew.

It probably does not seem odd to you that most iced coffee beverages start out as hot brews and are then modified (thinned down, sweetened, flavored & thickened) as iced beverages.

What may surprise you is that most coffee shops sell a variety of iced beverages that were never intended as a cold beverage. Most start out as hot-brewed coffee or espresso and are then chilled. Most are so diluted or loaded with flavorings and sweeteners that they cannot really be considered coffee, just a mild coffee flavoring.
 
Because Hunter Bay’s iced coffee has been so important to us, we spent a lot of time observing how other companies brewed their iced coffee. What we learned is that most coffee sold as iced is leftover coffee. Here’s what we’ve observed: Leftover hot-brewed coffee poured into gallon jugs, put in the fridge & saved for tomorrow’s iced brew. Or, we’ve watched while baristas pulled all their morning’s adjustment shots, funneled them into an empty flavoring bottle, which they then used as a concentrate for their iced coffee. Most commonly, we’ve watched baristas pull a shot of hot espresso over a cup of ice (a terrible shock for sweet coffee that turns it instantly bitter) which they then mix with milk for iced coffee. There are countless other similar methods, but you get the idea.

The main problem with all the above methods of coffee that start out as hot brews is bitterness. Most hot coffee that’s cooled and iced has an unpleasant, lingering acidic bitter bite. That’s why so much milk, flavoring and sugar is added.

What’s most important to us is that you can always start with a cup of iced Hunter Bay straight: no milk, no sugar, no flavorings. From there, of course, you can add milk, sweeteners and extra flavoring.

One taste of Hunter Bay’s iced brew will be a revelation: it’s mild, rich and flavorful taste is always smooth and sweet. You can drink it straight. Or, you can add anything you’d like. In fact, our cold coffee concentrate works fabulously as a flavoring ingredient in many baked confections.

For proof of our claim, stop by our downtown Missoula store and order a cup of Hunter Bay Iced Coffee this week. We think it just might be the beginning of a wonderful relationship.

~ Glenn Junkert, Coffee Director

Katie leaves for Zambia!

One of Hunter Bay’s popular baristas at our downtown Missoula coffee bar will soon be embarking on a new adventure.

Katie has accepted a 27-month tour with the American Peace Corps in the Central African country of Zambia. Her last day at Hunter Bay was this past Sunday and we wish her the best.

Holder recently graduated from the University of Montana with a degree in Environmental Studies and will use her expertise in her position with the Peace Corps. Holder will work in the Rural Aquaculture Fisheries program and said she looks forward to the challenge.

“We’re starting out in Lusaka, which is the capital. We’ll be there for about nine weeks and then we’ll be separated into different villages,” said Katie.

She’s decided to chronicle her Peace Corps service with a blog she recently established, entitled: Katie in Zambia. You can follow her entries at: http://KatieinZambia.wordpress.com

Katie worked at the new Missoula store from its opening last August until this Sunday. She was previously a barista at Trout River Coffee for three years before moving to Hunter Bay.

“I have pretty fond memories about coffee,” said Katie. “Especially the customers that actually treat you as a person, and who you can actually start to get to know as a person.

“From there you can carry on conversations by starting with their name, and then they come in again and you find out what they do… and then they start telling you stories about their life and you slowly get to know people,” said Katie.

“I think my favorite thing about coffee itself is the physics of it,” said Katie. “How specific things have to be to be good. And then when you make coffee to fit those specifications, how perfect and wonderful coffee can be,” said Katie.

“That kind of made me spoiled… being at Hunter Bay, because we have such strict requirements to making a perfect cup of coffee… that going anywhere else was just… not very exciting,” she said.

Though Zambia is a coffee producing country — it shares borders with better-known East African coffee-producing countries of Tanzania to the northeast and Zimbabwe to the southeast — Zambian coffees have been scarce in America in recent years. 
It’ll be interesting to follow Katie’s blog as she works in her assigned small rural villiage. It’ll also be interesting if she’s able to discover some great Zambian coffee to write about.

After completing her two-plus years in the Peace Corps, Katie plans to return to Missoula, where she’ll pursue a post-graduate degree in Environmental Law.

~ Glenn Junkert, Coffee Director

Coffee and your Health

It is now common knowledge that coffee has been the subject of more research than any other single food.

It all started in the final decade of the 19th Century, when the U. S. Army conducted extensive research on coffee, found it to be a generally beneficial beverage, and added it as a primary beverage to the daily menus of its food service network, a policy that continues today.

Coffee research also continues to this day and on June 28th Americans will read and hear about the latest major health study that cites “a yet unidentified component of coffee (that) interacts with caffeine to … protect against Alzheimer’s disease.” (Science Daily, June 21, 2011)

You can read the entire article in Science Daily here: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110621093301.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Ftop_news%2Ftop_health+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Top+News+—+Top+Health%29

The primary conclusion of the study is that individuals who regularly consume  between two five cups of caffienated drip coffee daily are steadily building up protective benefits against Alzheimer’s as they get older.

The study’s lead researcher, Dr. Chuanhai Cao, said, “We believe moderate daily consumption of caffeinated coffee is the best current option for long-term protection against Alzheimer’s memory loss. Coffee is inexpensive, readily available, easily gets into the brain, appears to directly attack the disease process, and has few side-effects for most of us.”

There’s a lot more information in the article, the results of which continue to confirm  what the U. S. Army researchers discovered nearly 120 years ago.

There’s another informative article in the Mayo Clinic website — written by Mayo Clinic preventive medicine specialist Donald Hensrud, M.D. — that goes a step further in linking coffee consumption to many other health benefits.

“Newer studies have also shown that coffee may have benefits,” wrote Hensrud, “Such as protecting against Parkinson’s disease, type 2 diabetes and liver cancer. And it has a high content of antioxidants.”

Hensrud acknowledged that many studies in the 1960s and 1970s linked coffee and caffeine to illness.

No longer, Hensrud explained: “Coffee has a long history of being blamed for many ills — from the humorous ‘It will stunt your growth’ to the not-so-humorous claim that it causes heart disease and cancer. But recent research indicates that coffee may not be so bad after all. So which is it — good or bad? The best answer may be that for most people the health benefits outweigh the risks.”

Of course, it’s up to each individual coffee drinker to determine how much coffee is best. And to realize that the addition of sugar, artificial sweeteners, artificial flavoring, artificial creamers and milk often negate the positive health effects of coffee.

Looking for more info on coffee? Check out the Mayo Clinic article here: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/coffee-and-health/AN01354

And for those of you who want to read all you can find on coffee, check out the Vanderbilt University Institute for Coffee Studies here: http://vanderbilt.edu/ics/coffee-news/

We’ll give you a big hint: the news is almost uniformly good regarding your daily coffee constitutional and your long-term health.

~ Glenn Junkert, Coffee Director

20 Year Anniversary!

There are many reasons to commemorate anniversaries, most of them good.

Such is the case for us here at Hunter Bay, as we celebrate our first 20 years in business as Missoula and Western Montana’s “Premiere and Premium” locally owned coffee roaster.

What seemed simply the right thing to do when we first opened our doors at 225 West Front Street in 1991, still holds true for us today: that providing fresh-daily roasts of the world’s highest quality coffees and coffee blends for our local and regional clientele is a natural fit for this Last Best Place.

We admit that our original goal in 1991 was to roast fresh coffee in a style and manner similar to many of the well-known Seattle-based coffee companies that emerged in the 1980s.

To our delight (and because of a lot of hard work) we quickly expanded those goals as we developed a Hunter Bay signature style of blending and roasting coffee that made our brands equal to the best the world has to offer.

Proof? We never hesitate to place Hunter Bay’s blends on the cupping table (labeled or in blind cuppings) alongside the world’s marquee names, because we are confident it will deliver taste, complexity and finish as one of the best.

We have always known that the true proof of Hunter Bay quality is in each and every cup of coffee — for you, our customers, to taste and confirm — not in any slogan or other description.

That said, we are certainly proud that this summer we will celebrate our 20th year as Montana’s foremost craft roaster of the finest signature espresso and coffee blends available, not only for Western Montanans but for customers worldwide who purchase coffee at hunterbay.com. We never compromise quality.

Today, and throughout our summer-long anniversary celebration, you can confirm that quality by visiting us at our retail store at 101 E. Front St. (just off the northeast walkway of the Higgins Ave. Bridge) and taste for yourself. Or, by ordering a freshly roasted package of our many fine blends profiled on this site.

Check our blog regularly as we celebrate our 20 years with regular entries that describe the Hunter Bay signature: our world-class Hunter Bay blends which feature the world’s best origin coffees in unique and delicious combinations.

~ Glenn Junkert, Coffee Director