Thompson’s Sweet Retreat is a family run 1200 tap award winning Maple Syrup Producer located at 1922 Clayton Road just outside of the village of Clayton Ontario. In 2024 they won Reserve Grand Champion at the Perth Festival of the Maples.

Visitors can take a tour of the production facility and go for a walk on the nature trail through the trees and around the pond. With the abundance of animals in the area (deer, turkeys, geese, ducks, squirrels, muskrats, turtles, wild birds and raccoons) a wildlife encounter is almost guaranteed. Over the last few years they have been a foster and rehabilitation home for orphaned baby raccoons through Holly’s Haven Wildlife Centre.

Watch for our Maple Weekend event in April and our Fall in Love with Maple event in October each year. We always have plenty of inventory available for purchase.

Thompson’s Sweet Retreat Maple Products

Email: [email protected]

Phone: 6134648800

Fluid Solar Roasted Coffee Inc.

Address: 202 Floating Bridge Road, Clayton, Ontario K0A 1P0

Phone: 613-315-6432

Email: [email protected]

We are a hand-roaster of small-batches of carefully selected coffee beans.

As a small-scale coffee roaster, our focus is on quality and attention to detail. We work directly with our customers to select the coffee beans and roasting profile to create your unique flavour template.

Lorraine and Bill have lived off the electrical grid for the past 30 years, generating electricity and heat directly from renewable resources. 100% of our water use is recycled back to nature, and our garbage waste stream motto is simple; “If we can’t recycle it or reuse it, we don’t use it”. We also drive a fully electric car that is charged using solar electricity. We like to think of ourselves as “post-industrial eco-hippies“. (Although we have been told we might be more akin to “pre-apocalypse, preppers“. We hope that is not the case!)

We have translated our way of life into the same philosophy at Fluid. Sustainability of our energy sources; small-batch coffee roasting and eliminating waste streams as well as using compostable coffee bags are part of our commitment to the environment and to ensure we are your trusted supplier.

WHY CHOOSE FLUID COFFEE?

It starts with the beans. We purchase coffees directly from farms or small-scale suppliers such as Coffee Shrub, to ensure the highest quality. Our coffees are “cupped” or graded by third-party labs to ensure a minimum rating of 85 points (excellent), even our blends achieve 88 points, and single-origins 92.5 (outstanding); an unheard of level in the commercial roasting industry.

Our single-origin coffees often come from farms that produce only a few bags of coffee each year. In many cases we purchase directly from the farm, and pay our producers a minimum of 50% higher than Fair Trade prices. This ensures a very fair deal for the farmer and provides them with the means of providing us with the specialty coffees we require.

Of course we support Organic, Fair Trade and Rainforest Alliance certified suppliers. Many of single-origin coffees come from farms that are too small or remote to pay for these certifications. In these cases, we use direct-to-farm, purchasing via our Farm Gate program. We ensure that our small farm partners use organic growing practices and respect the rain forest environment.

Then comes our roaster. Most commercial roasting in done using a Probat drum unit which is automated, fast, hot, smokey and large; all of the things required for large-scale coffee production.

At Fluid, we use a Sivetz fluid bed (hot air) roaster, that accepts a maximum load of 8 pounds of coffee. When you order a 5 pound wholesale bag of our single origin coffee, that is exactly what we roast. Each roast has our customer name and requirements. Each roast is unique; each roast is yours. This ensures perfect roasting quality.

Fluid bed roasting operates at a lower temperature and takes longer to complete a batch than other roasting methods, and with the injection of large amounts of oxygenated-air into the roasting beans, coffee oils are never bitter. Each roast is 100% manually-controlled. Tasting is believing! (See our companion article on Fluid Bed Roasting).

Just in case you are worried that we can’t keep up with our customer demand, note that although this roaster is small, it can still roast over 1,200 pounds of coffee each week.