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Meet the Roaster
Meet the Roaster: Good Life Coffee
They come from from the land of a thousand lakes … and the land of a thousand Moccamasters. Known for roasting coffee that’s fresh, clean and fruit-forward, we’re thrilled to introduce the 2024 Nordic Best Roaster, and our featured roaster for September: Good Life Coffee from Finland.
Lauri Pipinen founded Good Life Coffee as a coffee bar in Helsinki in 2012, after working for a few years in a local coffee roastery and winning the Finnish Barista Championship in 2011.
The café served coffees from the best roasters in the Nordics and occasionally from further afield. At that time, Helsinki didn’t yet have a place solely dedicated to coffee, so the bar quickly drew recognition.
Two years later, Good Life Coffee Roasters was established with the goal of bringing a quality focused roastery to Finland, one that could stand alongside the top roasters in the Nordics.
Since then, the company has gone through small changes, but for the past seven years it has been run by Lauri and Aleksi Kuusijärvi. The team includes also Richard Shannon as the head roaster, and Pia and Elina in the production.
In the early years, the company roasted mainly for its own use and for anyone who asked. In more recent years, things have grown much livelier: Good Life Coffee has gained recognition beyond Finland, with the highlight so far being the company’s win at the Nordic’s Best Roaster competition in 2024.
What can you tell us about this month’s coffee?
We’re super pleased with the coffees we’ve picked for you. Rather than searching for coffees just for this subscription, we simply bought a bit more of the coffees we already love in our regular line-up. They all represent our style: fresh, clean, and fruit-forward. We’re excited to share them with the Kaffebox audience and show who we are and what we’re all about!
First up, we have a washed Karinga AB from Kenya, available as both filter and espresso. We couldn’t do our first Kaffebox without a Kenyan coffee. Kenya was the first origin we roasted back in 2014, and it will most likely be the last one too. This coffee comes from the Karinga Factory in Kiambu County, a wet mill managed by the Gitwe Farmers Cooperative Society. It’s mainly SL-28 and SL-34 varieties, with a touch of Ruiru 11, making it a classic Kenyan profile for us: bright, juicy, and vibrant.
Next, we have Danche washed and natural, offered as filter options. We thought it would be fun to showcase the same coffee processed two different ways, so you can taste and compare, or simply enjoy them as they are, since both are standout coffees. We’ve been roasting Danche for several years and visited the Danche washing station earlier this year, which deepened our connection with this coffee. It’s a truly beautiful coffee all in all. In the cup you’ll find plenty of fruit, florals, and sweetness. A delightfully pleasant coffee. It comes from the Danche washing station in the Gedeb district of the Gedeo zone.
Lastly, we have La Catarata honey from Costa Rica, roasted for both filter and espresso. This coffee comes from the Ureña Rojas family’s farm, Café Rivense. We’ve known their son Ricardo for some years, and it’s an honor to roast their coffees. Grown high in the mountains of the Chirripó area, this coffee is smooth, sweet, and fruit-forward, a coffee you can enjoy several cups.
Do you have a go-to brew recipe for this coffee?
We are pretty straightforward when it comes to brewing coffees. Of course you can play around and try out different parameters but we go with the basic 60g/l ratio for filter and set the grind size to our liking.
For espresso you can do 1:3 ratio (f.e. 18g in and 45g out), in about 30 seconds. Our coffees tend to be quite easy to brew and extract so in that sense they are easygoing coffees.
Fun fact! Finland is “the land of a thousand lakes” but also “the land of a thousand Moccamasters” and we are proud of our recipe for that. Being quite basic with 60g/l but brewing some water through the machine before doing the actual brew helps you to rinse the paper, and to get the brewer hot and ready.
Stopping the brew for 30 seconds and stirring the coffee bed after the first 15% of water has passed will work nicely as it works as prewetting and gets the coffee ready for extracting the flavours. Stirring the coffee a bit also at the mid point helps you to get all coffee wet and well extracted.
This makes a pretty damn good cup of coffee!
What’s a moment from your roasting journey that stands out, either amazing or challenging?
Around seven years ago one of our colleagues who had done most of the roasting left the company and we had to figure out things more with the team that was left. At this point we went all out on looking into things on how and why we have done things the way we had done. It was a hectic, challenging and rewarding few months, and at the end we changed pretty much everything we had done earlier and started from scratch. It was well worth it and it shaped us to what we are now.
How do you pick your coffee beans? What makes a bean stand out to you?
We follow the harvest cycle and get coffees in as soon as they arrive to Europe. We don’t keep coffees in our menu for too long, usually around 4 months, with few exceptions here and there. This way we can be sure that the coffee is fresh and tasting as it should. This goes hand in hand with clean taste of the coffees. Coffee can’t have any unpleasant flavors whether it be from harvesting, processing, coffee getting old, etc. It needs to have the ”glou glou” (drinkability) factor. Coffee needs to be easily enjoyed, and it needs to have a taste to it. We do like fruitiness, acidity and sweetness, which is present pretty much in all our coffees. We also try to have a good selection of coffees so that there would be coffee to every taste. Whether you like more balanced and smoother coffee, or then a bit more acidity driven juice bomb.
How do you figure out the best roast for a new bean? What’s that process like?
Having roasted for over 10 years, we do have a pretty good idea on how to approach different coffees. But measuring the moisture, density, water activity and bean size gives you a good starting point, and of course knowing where the coffee comes from, variety, growing elevation, processing, etc. helps a lot. After that it is pretty straight forward, we put more energy at the start of the roast and slowly tone it down. We go rather quick with the roast, but need to find the balance of getting the coffee enough development.
What trends in coffee excite you right now, and how do they show up in your roasting?
We are kind of “boring” as we enjoy mainly washed processed coffees. Some honeys and naturals here and there. Although we’ve had some anaerobics and will mostly have in the future also. We do follow the trends, but trends come and go, it is good to stick on basics as those are usually what people always come back for.
Time to share the love: What’s a roastery you admire, and why do they inspire you?
We’ve always looked up to Koppi, Tim Wendelboe, and Coffee Collective. Koppi, for doing things on their own terms. Tim Wendelboe, for their unwavering focus on quality. And Coffee Collective, for their boldness in pushing things forward and doing it big in Copenhagen. And of course, all of them roast exceptional coffees!
What’s next for your roastery? Any exciting plans on the horizon?
We will at least do more origin trips to meet our producer partners. This year maybe to Colombia or Costa Rica or El Salvador, let’s see which one. For years we haven’t had any full time employees in our company (besides the owners Lauri and Aleksi) and we have finally hired one. So most likely there will be something exciting happening as we will have more time on doing things. So let’s see what we come up with. You can and should keep an eye on us @goodlifecoffeeroasters!