Now available online and at Black Coffee Roasting Company in Missoula, Montana: The Hunt, an annual offering celebrating hunting season and the great outdoors. This year, Black Coffee Company collaborated with legendary artist Ralph Steadman to design the package. We’re huge fans of Mr. Steadman, and his work for this bag is just the tops:
How did Black Coffee team up with Ralph Steadman? The power of the internet. More info from Black Coffee:
Ralph Steadman, the British cartoonist/artist who is perhaps best known for his iconic Hunter S. Thompson art, has illustrated numerous books, including Alice in Wonderland, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and The Grapes of Ralph, amongst many others. If you are unfamiliar with his art it is well worth the time to familiarize yourself, as he is one of the most iconic imagery creators of our day.
We are SO appreciative of his working with us on this label, and took a great deal of time selecting the beans that go into this Sumatra-based blend. So it has arrivedโฆ Hunting Season, 2012, the earth is shiftingโฆGet thee to thy forestโฆ HUNT.
Black Coffee Roasting Company opened its doors in the Summer of 2010. Owners Matt McQuilkin and James Chapman felt Missoula had a craftsman spirit, but lacked a coffee company with that ethos. As Chapman puts it, “Quality beans, quality roasting, quality coffee served – we wanted to bring this quality to a blue collar town in a way that would show the quality without pretense. Missoula, and Montana in general is full of people who seek and produce quality. Craftsman abound in all forms, from people who build canoes and furniture and log homes, to people who are writers and film makers. It is a state full of people who know quality, but who approach life casually.”
We asked Chapman to tell us more about the genesis of the HUNT offering. “The HUNT came about as a seasonal coffee offering that would highlight a particular coffee in a bag that represents the vast outdoor heritage of our state,” Chapman syas, “Even hippies hunt in Montana. Montana is a hunting culture. If you want to connect with strangers here, you just have to talk about hunting and some commonalities will emerge in the conversation.”
“The first few years we put the Hunt in a simple brown bag with an elks image letter-pressed on the bag. Then in mulling it over in my mind I had the idea of contacting Ralph Steadman, hoping to take our aesthetic to a higher level. This year we are selling Finca Bourbon from Guatemala, a coffee we purchased through Mercanta. In developing the profile we took the coffee just a hair darker than we might otherwise because of the fact that so many people here associate the coffee with the idea of cold mornings in the forest and long days in brisk mountains, and they want something hefty and robust. But the coffee is great, and not so dark as to mask the nuances. We will carry this coffee through the fall until it runs out, probably sometime in late November.”
The HUNT, available online for $12.
