September Studio on Iver Road roasts beans so meticulously that a $25 cup tastes like blueberry pie

September Studio opened June 27 on a light industrial stretch of Iver Road in Stittsville, and international coffee connoisseurs are already placing orders. Kyle Rowsell owns and operates the bright, spacious new shop with his wife, Natasha.

The studio is the public-facing side of September, which has been roasting coffee and sending products to customers and businesses in Ottawa and around the world since 2022. But the shop itself is designed for people who want to experience the difference between instant coffee and something vastly more intricate—without requiring expertise to walk in the door.

"Regardless if you drink Starbucks or if you are a coffee enthusiast, we have a menu for everybody," Rowsell says. Standard-menu coffees cost $4 to $6. More special, hand-poured, seasonal coffees run $8 and up. A $25 cup of Luna Bermudez—made with scrupulously sourced Geisha beans from Colombian coffee farmer Alex Bermudez and prepared as a pour-over for optimal flavour extraction—tastes of blueberry pie, grapes and tea. Another offering, Buttercream from the same Colombian farm, carries notes of cardamom, pistachio, cinnamon, honey and buttercream frosting.

Five different coffees rotate weekly, available as shots, pour-overs or in beverages with milk added. Many more are available as packets of roasted beans to take home. Rowsell is particular about his sourcing: flavoured syrups are not available because he says they take away from the quality of the coffee September serves. The tasting-notes card on each brew tells you what you might taste—berries, citrus fruits, green grapes, plums, caramel, molasses, chocolate—turning the experience into something almost like a wine tasting for coffee.

"The variety is one of the more delicate harder-to-grow varieties. It's very beautiful. It's very floral. It's very delicate," Rowsell says of the Geisha bean. "And then this one has that processing so it tastes like blueberry pie. It's very sweet and it distinctly tastes like you're eating like a blueberry waffle or a blueberry muffin." A barista can help demystify the experience, much like a server at a high-end wine bar.