The Stray Bean story started in 2017 when our first customers – a family of four from New Zealand - walked in the door just after we opened on a bright summer morning in July. It had been a long process just getting to that point : finding the right location, convincing the local residents that a “coffee shop” wasn’t about selling drugs and that, really, weren’t even going to be open late at night, getting renovation plans through the Versailles city council (perhaps the most strict in all of France) and then getting all the renovations and fit-out done to transform the place from what had been an old-fashioned hosiery store for the preceding 38 years.
Since then, we’ve served the best coffee we can to tens of thousands of customers, whether our regular locals or visitors from all around the world. We’ve survived difficult times, starting with 35 days of rolling train strikes in our first year, then yellow jacket movement, then Covid...
Through all that time, we’ve had a great bunch of staff – over 30 in total over the years, virtually all multilingual – who have kept us going, doing their stuff and making sure our customers were glad they came. Virtually without fail: we can count on one hand the number of hours when we haven’t been open during our publicised operating hours.
Still, a couple of years ago we decided we wanted to do more. We wanted to delve further into the world of specialty coffee. And that meant one thing. Roasting!
Roasting opens up a whole new dimension to the world of coffee. It’s the roaster who decides what green beans to buy. That means understanding everything that makes one coffee different from another: the continent, country and region of origin; bean variety; altitude of the farm; the processes that were used to extract the green bean from the fruit on the tree and prepare it, ready for roasting ; and so on. It’s a voyage of discovery that takes you to new countries, introduces you to new people and culminates in new taste sensations.
Anyone can roast coffee. Making "specialty coffee" (the jargon for high-quality, exceptional coffee) is something else entirely. You first need to know how to select a very good coffee and then roast it to bring out its full aromatic potential. It's both a science and an art. Today, we track all the roasting parameters in real time on our computers. We measure bean size, density, moisture content, and color. We record the temperature, energy, and airflow settings that create the roast profile. It's all very technical, but it has one goal: to optimize the taste in the cup and, once achieved, to reproduce it every time.
The taste in the cup, that’s what we’re after. Body, intensity and balance. Aromas, whether fruity, floral, chocolaty or other. Absence of faults, like a bitter aftertaste. It’s all the culmination of everything that has led up to that point, from farming to roasting to the final preparation from an attentive barista. Magic.
That’s why our coffees are unique. Roasted outside Paris, served in our coffee shop in Versailles, each one has its own story, part of which is our story too.
And at the end of the story is you; after all, the only thing that really counts is that you, our customers, enjoy your coffee. We hope you will – let us know!
To order our coffees online, click here: The Stray Bean E-shop.