Upper Midwest Gourmet

Just a heads up that we are closed Monday, May 27th for Memorial Day. We will back open on regular local delivery schedule the following Tuesday. Please feel free to leave a message on voice mail on our new phone system with any orders you may have.

Speaking of our new phone system, we are still figuring it out and doing the necessary upgrades to our internet line here to offer the best call quality available. We apologize to any customers that we’ve had a hard time hearing/understanding and those we been disconnected from and had to call back. We assure you that these problems are short-term and will be fixed soon.

Thanks again for the business and have a great holiday weekend with your friends and family!

Please enjoy Flamenco Organic Coffee‘s newest origin and offerings sheet:

(For pricing or additional product information, please Contact Us. Thank you.)

Whether you are trying to think up summer drink ideas, or you are just wondering what to do with your extra Mountain Spiced Cider concentrate, fear not, we’ve got a list for that:

Summer Cider Drinks

Sparkling Cider
1 oz. Cider concentrate
7 oz. Sparkling water

Cider Float
1 oz. Cider concentrate
7 oz. Ginger ale
Scoop of vanilla ice cream

Apple Raspberry Cooler
1 oz. Cider concentrate
1 oz. Raspberry syrup
6 oz. Sparkling water

Apple Pie A la Mode Milkshake
1 oz. Cider concentrate
1 oz. Caramel syrup
4 oz. milk
1 scoop vanilla ice cream
1 piece of graham cracker
Blend until smooth

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Need a smoothie and frappe program? If you buy a new Vita mix blender and 2 cases of Smoothie and 2 cases of Frappe we will give you an additional 6 cases of smoothie and frappe mix for free! The heat is on, call us today for all the details!

UP Cafe Grand Opening Party and Flamenco Organic Coffee Release

Presented by Upper Midwest Gourmet

We will have live music (Zorongo Flamenco Music & Dance and our very own Eric and Pat’s band, Woodshop), free food, drinks, and gelato (café drinks from UP Café and hopefully, HammerHeart beer, if they have it brewed in time), and a bunch of our vendors (Crazy Boy Farm, Autumnwood Farm, Fabbri, Cherrico Pottery, Extraction Coffee Co., Umpqua Oats, and more) with booths selling and giving stuff away to celebrate the Grand Opening of UP Café. The event will also be a release party for one of Flamenco Organic Coffee Company’s newest offerings.

When – Friday, May 3rd, 2013

Time – 10am-4pm

Where – UP Cafe – 1901 Traffic St. NE, Minneapolis, MN 55413

Open to the public, we hope you can make it!

Please RSVP on our Facebook Event Page or by emailing Party@UPcafe.us.

Welcome to Coffee Fest Chicago 2013, where passionate coffee and tea professionals will learn skills, receive education and experience new products, alongside great networking.

Our ticket discount code this year is 68555

Click here to register: http://www.coffeefest.com/Event/Attendee/Default.aspx

This will allow you to register for $10 a person! Regular ticket price is $30.

We are in booths 100 & 102 at Chicago Coffee Fest this year. We will be serving our award-winning Flamenco Organic Coffee along with a ton of other great products for you to check out and sample. Also, be sure to stop by and check out our Synesso espresso machine pulling our very own Matador espresso shots!

Here are the basics:

When – June 7th-9th 2013

Where – Navy Pier, 600 East Grand Avenue, Chicago, IL 60611

Onsite Registration Hours:
Friday & Saturday: 7:00am to 4:30pm
Sunday: 7:30am to 3:30pm

Exhibition Hours:
Friday & Saturday: 12:00pm to 5:00pm
Sunday: 12:00pm to 4:00pm

Educational Training
Friday & Saturday: 8:00am to 6:00pm
Sunday: 8:00am to 4:00pm

*** MUST REGISTER by May 19th to get this discount ***

If you have any questions about the trade show, please Contact Us.

We are an ever-evolving company and are always willing to bring in new products at the request of our customers.

Here are four new product lines that we are very happy to now stock and offer:

Monin Fruit Smoothies

Jet Fruit Smoothies

DaVinci Gourmet Syrups

Torani Syrups

(For pricing or additional product information, please Contact Us. Thank you.)

Here comes warmer temperatures and hopefully a lot of snow melting!

We are really proud of our new training cafe, UP, along with many other improvements we have made to Upper Midwest Gourmet and Flamenco Organic Coffee Company in the past few months!

Please check out our newest Brewsletter – Volume 49 – Spring 2013

Also, please go to the Brewsletters Page on our website to download and read previous Brewsletters. They contain lots of useful information!

Enjoy and thanks again from all of us at UMG!

We will be highlighting a bunch of great products at the WI Restaurant Expo next week.

Please make sure to come visit us in booth 748 to check out:

Our Hario and Chemex brewing systems with our own Flamenco Organic Coffee.

*Note we stock the brand new Hario Electric Buono Kettles and can ship immediately!

We will also be sampling Fabbri Cremagelato out of the Elmeco Quickreams, Cappuccine blended mixes, and David Rio Chai!

Please Contact Us for more information.

We hope to see you there!

We have a few Blendtec Smoother 13 demo unit blenders for sale at an amazing price!

We are upgrading to this year’s models for our sales staff and have some great deals on our current demo units!

They have been slightly used, all under 1000 blends.

Please Contact Us for more information or to get the special pricing.

Ciao Ciao everyone!  2013 is off to a great start at Upper Midwest Gourmet.  Bethany and I traveled to Italy last month.  Our first stop was Riccione where we met up with everyone from Fabbri in order to attend the SIGEP show.  SIGEP is the largest gelato and pastry show in the world!  While it’s a bit chilly in this NE coastal region in the winter, it was really warm compared to what was going on in Minneapolis, so the timing couldn’t have been better.  We spent three days touring the show and eating (and drinking) our way around the town.  SIGEP is always a great time and we were impressed with all the presentations put on by some of the best pastry chefs in Italy.  Fabbri presented a number of new items that we’ll be able to start importing sometime this Spring that we’re really excited to show everyone.  The pistachio and amarena cherry gelato pops in particular are going to be a great addition to many cafes in the USA.  Fabbri hosted a large banquet with top notch entertainment and the Italians really know how to put on a party!  Fabbri took that opportunity to present awards to some of their staff and distributors from around the world.  To my surprise, Upper Midwest Gourmet was presented with the award for Best Distributor in North America in 2012!  It was a complete shock, but we were honored to receive the award.  No distributor has ever won the award more than once so now I have a new mission for the future.

There are a bunch more pictures from the show at the end of the blog post.

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It is very, very, very important to have a well-trained staff running your cafe. The staff of your cafe are the people that your customers interact with most and are also responsible for the production of everything you offer. The quality and consistency of your drinks and food rely on having a group of individuals that know exactly what they are doing and more importantly why and how they are doing it. Another huge factor is that they are all making your products the same way to ensure that every customer has the same great experience every time they come back.

We feel that employee training is a necessary for any cafe or business for that matter. For example, we take part in the Specialty Coffee Association America classes all the time to learn about new industry standards in the area’s of Barista education, coffee brewing, coffee roasting, and a whole lot more.

There is always something that can be learned and implemented to improve your business and we want to help you gain that knowledge!

Our training cafe, UP Cafe, is now open and ready to schedule training sessions with your staff. If you use our Flamenco Organic Coffee we are more than happy to offer free training and recipe support. We can train in areas of espresso extracting, milk frothing, pour-over coffee brewing, Gold Cup drip coffee brewing, blender drink creation, gelato and sorbetto production, baking and pastry, and a whole lot more. The goal is to improve your business and have you producing the best available drinks in your area. We want to help you reach that goal!

Please Contact Us about setting up a time for training and would love to have you visit!

We, Flamenco Organic Coffee Company, had the pleasure of being the Designated Driver Sponsor for this year’s Winter Carnival Beer Dabbler!

We knew the conditions would be cold and not nearly ideal for mass-brewing of coffee, but we were determined to make it work. The last thing we wanted was for our coffee’s quality and/or reputation to suffer from not brewing fresh or keeping it hot. For that reason, brewing ahead of time or using large holding containers just wasn’t going to work for us.

The first obstacle was not having power, so we rented two gas-powered generators (Honda EU3000) to run the coffee brewers.

We decided to brew using our trusty Grindmaster B-SAP single airpot brewers running on 110 volt in pour-over mode. Each brewer needs roughly 15 amps of power, so the 25 amps that each generator was pumping out was perfect!

We did some brew tests in 20 degrees outdoors the day before the event and had an amazing regeneration time of seven minutes per brewer! This was much faster than we expected which pleased and surprised all of us.

To help simplify matters we decided to only brew in two quart increments. This made measuring our water a cinch due to buying one gallon jugs and essentially pouring half into the brewer for each cycle. We also pre-ground and weighed our coffee dosing a few hours before the event to ensure quick and accurate coffee portion control on every airpot brewed. We generally don’t ever recommend pre-grinding coffee, but we used our awesome 5lb Coffeevac containers to store the coffee fresh and they worked really well. We could offer three different origins of coffee easily this way and didn’t have to worry about the power or mess of a bulk grinder.

Just put a filter with measured coffee into the brew basket, pour two quarts of water into brewer, and press brew button! It was that easy and efficient!

During the actual event the temperatures were around 10-15 degrees and our generator/brewer combo set-up worked like a champ!

We had way more visitors than expected and were able to keep up with the demand almost flawlessly!

We would be happy to help you get set-up to brew coffee for an outdoor event and have these awesome Grindmaster B-SAP brewers in stock currently.

(For pricing or additional product or event coffee brewing information, please Contact Us. Thank you.)

We are excited to soon stock the newest flavor from Deep River Snacks!

(For pricing or additional product information, please Contact Us. Thank you.)

We now have access to some pretty great new pieces of equipment like:

Sauce Funnels, Single Induction Plate Cookers, Food Mills, Crepe Machines (Tibos),  Mandolines, Strainers, 20 Quart Food Mixers, Hamburger Presses, and of course, Panini Grills!

(For pricing or additional product information, please Contact Us. Thank you.)