Coffee mates

Neighbours brew up a partnership over Vortex

There’s a new blend of coffee in the County, and it draws upon the mystique of the South Marysburgh vortex. Filmmaker Ryan Noth and coffee roaster John Ruttan live across the road from each other in Cherry Valley. John is a co-owner of Cherry Bomb Coffee, and he and Ryan have built a friendship over their love of coffee and cycling. “Johnny has been supplying me with some great coffee and we’ve been hanging out in his garage and tasting different kinds of beans from around the world and we just stumbled upon a recipe we both liked—well, I mean he really worked hard on it—and I said ‘We should really make this as a blend that we sell,’ and that’s how it started,” says Ryan. “If you have the right combination [of beans] you’re creating many depths and layers of taste, and you’re creating a new experience from these individual flavours. Our goal was to make something sweeter with notes of cocoa, fruit and nut, and smooth to drink any time of day.” The branding came from Ryan’s obsession with the South Marysburgh vortex. “I’m working on a documentary about it, and I’ve been trying to convince locals to tell me more about it. Everybody has their pet theory, and I just find it fascinating from a historical point of view. We also made the connection to when you pull a fresh espresso, the crema and the way it gets created in the coffee itself feels like a swirling kind of vortex, and to the idea when you drink coffee you go down that path where your mind is more active and your thoughts are swirling more.”

Creators of the Vortex coffee blend (L-R): John Ruttan and Ryan Noth.

John has been roasting coffee for well over a decade, and he sources his organic coffee from cooperatives and small farms in Ethiopia, Guatemala, Brazil and Peru. He’s developed a sense for what blends well together. “At night we would just sip the coffee we roasted and talk about it and then go back and try to tweak it. All of those coffees, we put them together and it was like you know when you hit something, and we just smiled when we were drinking it,” says John. The branding of the special blend was in Ryan’s court. “I appreciate Ryan because he’s not a corporate guy, he’s not a coffee guy, he’s an artist and he’s friends with artists, and I like the Vortex brand. The look of it has been created by people that are not industry people, and I think that’s made it unique, and there’s a story to it that has an emotional appeal,” says John. At the moment, there is only one coffee blend, but John and Ryan expect to have others available by Christmas. “We’re going to have different packaging by some local artists, and I’m hoping there will be some short videos over the next few months to tie into that. The coffee is the driving engine behind it, but we can have fun and play with this idea of vortex,” says Ryan. “Even Andrew McLuhan from the McLuhan Institute, Marshall talked about this idea of the maelstrom or the vortex, so we’re going to get them involved and Andrew is going to give us some quotes, and we’re going to try to make it more of an intellectual thing, not just a coffee bag—even though we really like the coffee.”

Vortex coffee is available at only a handful of places at the moment—Beacon, Bloomfield Market, the CAPE winery, Floralora Flowers, Sunnydale, and Stowaway Vintage—but John and Ryan anticipate it becoming available in Wellington sometime soon. They also joke that if you stop them on their bike ride, they may have a pound or two of their coffee with them—and in fact when in Toronto, John delivers Vortex coffee to his friends from his bike. Their coffee is roasted in Picton weekly in small batches to ensure optimum freshness, and thanks to some of their startup costs being covered by a Prince Edward Lennox Addington rural innovation grant, their packaging is biodegradable and compostable. “The fun thing about a new startup is that it’s so personal,” says John. “We’re trying to sell to our friends, people that we know. I’m as gratified selling two pounds from my bicycle as I am selling 500 pounds from my coffee shop.” For more information, please visit vxcoffee.ca, or follow them on Instagram, @vxcoffee.