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Haven's Seasonal Blend: What Exactly Is It?

All Things Brewing

6 mins read

What happens when we give our roasting team a little more freedom? Seasonal Blend.

Released every three months, each blend explores a new flavour experience using coffees that bring something different to the cup. Discover how we build it, why we roast it the way we do, and how you can enjoy it at home.

Where does seasonal blend fit in?

For years, our espresso program at Haven has followed a simple structure. Two choices for two different purposes.

Compass Blend

Compass is our everyday house blend. It’s an espresso roast designed to work through milk while still keeping the fruity character we like at Haven. Think smooth body, milk chocolate and fruit, with enough consistency to be the coffee you come back to every day.

Single Origin Espresso.

Our Single Origin Espresso takes a different approach. It rotates throughout the year and is roasted as an omni roast, slightly lighter than our Compass blend, so the individual character of each coffee and its origin can shine more vividly.

Without milk in the cup, the coffee itself becomes the hero.

This combination has worked for us for years across our Sydney cafés.

But we wanted a third option.

Something less safe.

Something a little more playful.

A cup where you don’t need to be a coffee nerd to notice something tastes different.

Enter seasonal blend.

A Blend Made For a Bit More Fun.

Released every three months, around March, June, September and December, each Seasonal Blend is built around a different flavour concept.

Previous blends have included

Berry Trifle, Toffee Apple and Strawberry Sundae

The names give you a hint of what we want to bring to the cup.

Rather than building around a fixed recipe or a fixed number of components, we look at the coffees available to us and ask:

What kind of flavour experience can we create from these?

There is no required origin.

No required variety.

No required processing method.

The only real requirement is that the final cup should feel bold, distinctive and fun.

More Freedom to Build Something Special

Our Seasonal Blend carries a small additional charge, giving our roasting team more freedom to work with premium lots or more unusual coffees that wouldn’t necessarily make sense in an everyday house blend.

That might mean using a distinctive variety such as Gesha.

Gesha is highly regarded in specialty coffee and is often showcased as a single origin because of its quality, complexity and nuanced flavour.

We can also work with more expressive processing styles such as anaerobic natural, carbonic maceration, co fermentation and other less conventional methods.

These coffees can bring especially vivid fruit, floral, confectionery or fermentation driven characteristics into the blend.

But none of those things are mandatory. They are simply tools we can use to help us build the flavour profile we are aiming for.

What do those processing terms mean?

Very briefly:

Anaerobic processing involves fermenting coffee in an environment with very limited oxygen.

Carbonic maceration, or CM, is a controlled fermentation technique inspired by winemaking, involving a carbon dioxide rich environment.

Co fermentation involves fermenting coffee alongside additional ingredients or fermentation inputs, which can contribute especially pronounced flavour characteristics.

There are many other processing approaches too.

The important thing is that we don’t use these coffees just because the terminology sounds exciting. We use them when they contribute something meaningful to the final cup.

We’ll go much deeper into all of this in our upcoming Coffee Processing Methods: An In Depth Guide.

Drink It Black, With Milk, or Even as Filter

Seasonal Blend is roasted as an omni roast, which gives it a lot of flexibility.

With milk, you can order it as a flat white, latte, cappuccino, piccolo, magic, iced latte or whatever your usual order might be.

Compared with Compass, expect the Seasonal Blend’s flavour concept to be much more pronounced in the cup.

Black, it works as espresso, long black or iced long black, where you’ll get a clearer view of the individual components and their processing characteristics.

Some Haven locations also occasionally serve Seasonal Blend as batch brew, so depending on which of our Sydney cafés you visit, you may get to experience the same coffee in a completely different format.

And because it is an omni roast, you can absolutely brew it as filter coffee at home too. Compared with a dedicated filter roast, it may feel fuller bodied and richer

Compared with our espresso roast, it may feel lighter and more transparent.

That middle ground is part of what makes it so interesting.

How Should You Brew It at Home?

Here’s the thing about Seasonal Blend: we don’t want to give you one recipe and call it a day.

Every release can feature different origins, varieties, processing methods and component percentages. What works beautifully for one blend might not be the best approach for the next.

Instead, start with something familiar.

Try a 1:2 ratio in around 30 seconds.

Then, try something a little different.

How about a 1:2.5 ratio in around 15 seconds?

You might find that one approach brings out more richness and sweetness, while the other highlights clarity, acidity or fruit.

Neither is right or wrong.

With Seasonal Blend, we’d rather encourage you to experiment than tell you there’s only one way to brew it.

Change the ratio. Adjust your grind. Try a faster extraction. Add milk. Drink it black. Put it through a V60.

See what changes.

Instead of asking:

“What recipe am I supposed to use?”

Try asking:

“What can this coffee do?”

That’s where the fun starts.

If you’re brewing one of our Seasonal Blends at home in Sydney, you can also drop into one of our cafés and ask the team how we’re currently approaching it on bar. It can be a useful starting point before experimenting with your own recipe.