Author: John Fladd

A&E is reinvented as Rare Breed

Emeran Langmaid has been on a voyage of reinvention.

Langmaid is the owner of Rare Breed Coffee (2 Pittsburgh Ave., Nashua, 578-3338, rarebreedcoffee.com), one of New England’s most innovative coffee and tea companies. For more than 20 years it went by a different name: A&E Coffee and Tea. At the 10-year point, Langmaid felt that her company needed to go in a new direction, but she was advised against it.

“I was working with a marketing company at the time,” Langmaid remembered, “and they told me, ‘Don’t change your name because you already have a loyal customer base and it gets confusing. So just stick with your name,’ which was probably not great advice. It makes sense on the surface, but then the specialty coffee market became a big thing. Like craft beer, a lot more people were opening in on it. And so we actually wanted to rebrand to tell more of what our story was and to connect with people and to really have a much better online presence.”

By 2021 it had become clear to Langmaid that she needed to tap into a new pool of customers, and she made the decision to not only change the name of her company but also completely change the look and marketing of her products.

“We were doing something that was different in our area than really anybody else,” Langmaid said. “Green Mountain [Coffee] was the region’s first or second most popular coffee brand out there, behind Dunkin’ Donuts. Dunkin’ was predominantly a drive-thru business and Green Mountain was Keurig and a brew-at-home business. So they didn’t really compete in terms of who their end user was necessarily. So the genesis of Rare Breed is stepping outside of the lines and doing something different and following your own passage.” A company like hers needs to be unique and vibrant, she said — a Rare Breed.

Langmaid was confident about her coffee. She is one of very few certified coffee specialists to pass the prestigious Q Grader exam, making her one of the most qualified coffee producers in the world. She knew she could depend on her team.

“I totally depend and rely on everybody that’s part of the team,” she said. “We all are moving in the same direction.”

Langmaid knew that roasting and processing Rare Breed’s coffee and tea would involve continual fine-tuning, but one of the highest priorities for her and her team in reinventing themselves was the look of their products. They decided to adopt an audacious brightly-colored look for their packaging, with strong graphics and bold images on the containers.

“You have to really market and brand your company to get attention and to get noticed,” Langmaid said. “It’s a very fast-paced world and eye candy is so important.”

Rare Breed worked with a branding company that was known primarily for its work for craft beer companies with the same market that Rare Breed wanted to target.

“Our core customer is about 25 to 40, whereas it used to be like 35 to 60. As kids mature and grow up, they move away from energy drinks and some of the other caffeinated sugar products into a more sophisticated palate. We wanted to be their first choice. That’s our target audience.”

“If you go to the beer store and you see all of the cans, those labels are bright and fun and dynamic and a little irreverent at times, and that was our inspiration,” Langmaid said. “We wanted to push the envelope a little bit within the coffee space. We also want to be in grocery [stores]. And again, when you walk through the coffee aisle, it’s all in bags. So we ended up going with cans, kind of a throwback to the old coffee can, where it’s completely recyclable, it retains its shape, so regardless of how it’s stocked on the shelf it will look really sharp and clean.”

A&E Coffee and Tea officially became Rare Breed in October 2023. The visual changes have been just a small part of Rare Breed’s rebranding, but so far the results have been promising.

“At times it is an uphill battle,” Langmaid sighed. “You’re swimming upstream. Or against the tide. I’m sure there’s like a lot of phrases that kind of define what we’re doing. We’re just pulling it into coffee.”

Featured Photo: Courtesy photo.

News from the local food scene

• The days of wine and sunflowers? On Thursday, Oct. 3, Barrel and Baskit (377 Main St., Hopkinton, 746-1375, barrelandbaskit.com) will host a Sunny Sunflowers Flower Bar & Wine Tasting from 5 to 7 p.m. Each guest will be able to pick a bouquet of sunflowers and other late summer/early fall flowers, enjoy wine and an appetizer bar, and socialize with other sunflower enthusiasts. Tickets are $85.

• Block Party: 603 Brewery (42 Main St., Londonderry, 404-6123, 603brewery.com) will host a Fall Fest Block Party on Saturday, Oct. 5, from noon to 9:30 p.m. The 603 will take over Main Street with food trucks, live music, a stein holding contest, axe throwing, 603 Scratch Kitchen specials and more.

• Books and Brownies: On Saturday, Oct. 5, The Friends of the Brookline Public Library (16 Main St., Brookline, 673-3330, brooklinelibrarynh.org) will hold their semi-annual Used Book & Bake Sale from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at 4 Main St. The funds raised by the Friends are used for library programs, including the Summer Reading Program and Museum Passes

• Fun with tacos: Celebrate an evening of tacos Saturday, Oct. 5, from 4 to 8 p.m in downtown Franklin.The first Fiesta del Taco will bring together community members and support local businesses as they transform their normal menus to serve tacos. Participants will vote for their favorite. Complete a Taco Passport for a chance to win prizes.

4 Tablespoons (1/2 stick) butter, plus enough to grease a soufflé dish

¼ cup (30 g) all-purpose flour

1½ cups (340 g) warm milk

A pinch of an herb or spice that you feel like adding – Aleppo pepper is a particular favorite of mine

6 eggs, separated

salt and pepper to taste

½ cup (72 g) grated Parmesan cheese

½ cup (72 g) grated cheese — if you have nubbins of several left-over cheeses, this is an excellent way to use them up. If the Universe has stepped on your last nerve, and you can’t even, feel entirely free to pick up a bag of pre-shredded cheese at random and use that. If you want to get fancy at some point and invest in a half pound of Peruvian llama cheddar, you can do that someday when you aren’t so emotionally fragile. Believe it or not, a soufflé is comfort food, and right now let’s concentrate on getting this bad boy in the oven, so you can drink a beer in the shower while it bakes.

Preheat the oven to 375°F and grease a soufflé dish. If you don’t have a soufflé dish — and seriously, why would you? — try to find something oven-safe that is deeper than it is wide. Round is better than square. Straight sides are better than curvy. A large coffee can might work in a pinch.

Melt your half-stick of butter over medium-low heat, until it stops sputtering and foaming, then add the flour. Stir it until the flour is slightly cooked and darkens a little. This is what’s called a roux — it’s used to help thicken sauces. Whisk in the warm milk, which will do funny things to the roux’s texture, but don’t panic; that’s normal.

Keep stirring the milk sauce until it thickens, then remove it from heat and leave it to cool for a while.

With your stand mixer or hand mixer, beat the egg whites until they reach fairly stiff peaks. This means that when you pull the beater out of the creamy egg whites they will leave little stalagmites behind.

Wash your hands, then stick a finger into the milk sauce. If it feels like a very warm bath, add the rest of the ingredients in — the egg yolks, seasonings and the cheeses. Whisk them together, then transfer the orange-colored sauce into a bowl.

Use a rubber or silicone spatula to beat in about a third of the stiff egg whites into the yellow mixture to lighten it up, then fold in half of the remaining egg whites, followed by the last of them. If you’ve never “folded” anything with a spatula before, here’s what’s going on:

When you whipped up the egg whites, you were beating air into them and creating hundreds of thousands of tiny bubbles. Because egg whites are very sticky and protein-y, they will hold all those bubbles in a foam for a while — not weeks or anything, but long enough to make a soufflé. When you “fold” that foam into your other mixture, the eggs are really happy about being reunited with their other half, but you want to do this gently, so you break as few of those micro-bubbles as possible.

When everything has been (gently) mixed together, and there aren’t any dramatic white streaks of egg white, use your rubber spatula to gently turn the batter into your greased dish. Put it in the oven and bake it for about half an hour. My particular oven takes 35 minutes, but check on it at 30. This is a good opportunity to take your beer shower.

When your soufflé looks ready, test it with a skewer, like you would a cake or brownies. If the skewer comes out clean, the soufflé is ready to come out of the oven. This is when it will look the puffiest and most Instagram-worthy, so take a picture now, but give it five minutes or so to cool down before serving and eating it.

Featured Photo: Photo by John Fladd.

And butter — in a panoply of Greek pastries

According to Margaret Gegas, the secret to a good spanakopitais butter. More butter.

“We use fresh spinach,” she said, “and feta cheese, eggs and good phyllo dough. And butter; a lot of butter.”

Gegas has been cooking for the yearly Taste of Greece festival at Holy Trinity Church (68 N. State St., Concord, 225-2961, holytrinitynh.org) for more than 20 years. Church ladies are crucial to every Greek church food festival, and over the years she has probably made everything on the menu at some point.

“I love the moussakawith the eggplant and meat sauce and a bechamel sauce,” Gegas said. “That is a favorite that goes pretty quickly. Another item is our macaroni dish called pastitsio; it’s macaroni with meat sauce and a bechamel topping to that too. And then the other things that are on the hotline are chicken shish kebab and lamb shish kebab and rice to go with it. We have a lady that makes all the meatballs and sauce, Greek-style.”

Except for a break during the Covid lockdown, Holy Trinity has been hosting a food festival every fall for the past 22 years. Constantine Newman is the parish priest. He is always impressed by how his parishioners throw themselves into the Taste of Greece event.

“It’s just a very festive event,” he said, “and the parish pulls together and works for the day to serve and to clean and do all the stuff that needs to be done.”

He isn’t entirely certain how many people attend the festival each year.

“I don’t know if we got an exact number [last year],” he said, “but I know that from at least 11 o’clock to easily 3 or 4, the line stretched from the food line all the way down toward the street.” Constantine said most Greek churches hold their festivals in the summer because that’s when most people have enough time to devote to hosting or attending them. Holy Trinity’s event puts a cap on the Greek food festival season.

“The festivals start around the end of May and June,” he said. “That’s the beginning of the festival season. We’ve always done it [Holy Trinity’s festival] toward the end of September … usually a week or two after Glendi in Manchester.” He said Glendi gives a big boost to Holy Trinity’s festival. “The sort of people who go to these festivals have that in mind [at the end of September] because they’ll go to Glendi and then they’re looking for more Greek food somewhere and then they can come to us.”

Margaret Gegas agrees with that theory, pointing out that most of the people who attend Taste of Greece aren’t actually Greek.

“Because the Greek families make these things at home, you know, it’s their own menu, their own diet. See, that makes sense. There will be Greek people there because some of them don’t cook these things, so there will still be Greek people, but basically I’d say it’s pretty much mostly non-Greek,” Gegas said.

Father Constantine said the weather plays into the success of this festival, too.

“I don’t think we’ve ever had any problems with the weather, at least not as long as I’ve been here,” he said. “So it’s usually sunny and just warm enough that it’s not too cold yet. So the end of September has always been good for us. And it’s not so buggy. It always ends up being a really nice day.”

Both Constantine and Gegas emphasized how many savory and sweet Greek dishes there will be, from loukanikos — Greek lamb or pork sausages flavored with fennel and orange peel — to galaktoboureko, a sweet custard baked in phyllo.

Which brings us back to the spanakopita.

“We just finished making 37 pans of spanakopita,” Gegas said. “That’s because our festival is just a one-day event. If we were three days, we would have to have made over 100.”

Which is a lot of butter.

Featured Photo: Courtesy photo.