Another Trip to Colombia

I just bought tickets for Isaiah and I to fly to Colombia on June 16.  We'll come home the 23rd.  I originally planned to see Narino on this trip, but that doesn't seem so cut and dried.  So I decided to take Cristina Garces up on her generosity and kindness and go back to Medellin and Concordia.  I'm hoping we can take a short one-day trip to Jardin, where La Minita was building the mill.  It should be completed and it would be nice to see it in operation.  

This will be Isaiah's first trip to origin, so that's pretty exciting.  I think it will change the way he thinks about coffee.  I know it did for me.  And hopefully we'll both learn a lot during the trip.

I'll keep you posted.

New Coffees

Hopefully you've been able to taste Alfredo's San Rafael by now.  I roasted it twice last week.  Two different roast profiles.  Both results were good, but I think I can do better.  The coffee is outstanding.  I took some with me to a mountain bike race in Ardmore over the weekend and drank leftovers cold Sunday before the race.  Really complex coffee- subtle fruit, big body, some vegetal tastes round it out, and I think every time I've drunk it more flavors have come to me.

I'm drinking a cup of Yemen right now.  It tastes more nutty today than I remember.  The Yemen we have right now (half a bin full) is the end of the Mocca Sanani.  A lot of you have really enjoyed this coffee for its uniqueness, wildness, and sweetness.  So if you want to taste it again, you might give it a go right away.

On a brighter note, I just bought coffees from the many, many samples we have cupped recently.  In that order, I bought another Yemen.  This Yemen is from Anesi.  I've had trouble finding out much info about Anesi and this coffee in particular, but I'm hoping my broker (Anna from Cafe Imports) tells me more about it soon.  But I think Anesi is a small region within the Sanani region.  Regardless, the coffee cupped out beautifully.  The most dominating feature of the Anesi, to me, was a sweet (and sour) strawberry flavor.  Unfortunately this is a really expensive coffee.  From what I understand, Yemen doesn't produce that much coffee and their coffees are in high demand, especially in places that drink Turkish-style coffee.  Supposedly Saudi Arabia is a big buyer of Yemen coffee and they are willing to pay big bucks for it.  A lot of people in the Specialty industry in the U.S. consider Yemens to be too wild, fermented... basically defective coffee.  So that just goes to show you that different people like different stuff.  I think I'm going to sell the new Yemen for the same price as I sold the old Yemen ($17/lb).  I'll absorb the difference.  I keep doing that, and someday it's going to hurt us too bad to continue to do that.  The problem is, we keep tasting fantastic coffees and then find out they're expensive.  Oh well.  Just know you're getting a GREAT value at $17 on this coffee.

Other coffees I ordered from Cafe Imports include a Tanzania Peaberry Songea.  I know, I know.  You love it already.  Also a Brazil, "Fazenda Ambiental Fortaleza Lot 11 Pulped Natural Hamilton and Celso Families."  Ask for it by name.  This coffee is from the Mococa region in Sao Paulo.  Pulped natural is the processing method, like the Panama Hartmann Honey, where they take the skins off the cherries and dry the seeds with the mucilage still intact.  One reason this coffee is better than most Brazilians is the picking.  The farmers triple pick the farm, being careful to harvest ripe cherries only.  This is probably the most crucial step in producing great coffee.  The varietals in this coffee are Yellow Bourbon, Red Catuai, and Mundo Novo.  I've only had a Yellow Bourbon once, in another Brazil.  Catuai is a tricky varietal, the reds are better than the yellows, but it's a plant that La Minita is trying to cull out of their coffee at Rio Negro.  Mundo Novo is a varietal I don't know much about, but it's some sort of hybrid.  

Another coffee I bought is a Kenya AA.  Not a lot of info about this coffee yet either.  It's a small lot that came out of the auction in Kenya.  Scored really high in cuppings at Cafe Imports.  Here are their cupping notes:  "Floral, red currant, clean acidity, grapefruit, coconut, caramel, creamy body, long sweet aftertaste."  Sometimes these coffees come and go so fast that I don't have the opportunity to get samples, roast, cup, and decide before they are gone.  So this time I took a chance on the professionals' advice.  

Anyway, we're looking forward to new variety in coffees around here.  It's tough, when I'm looking for something superb, to weed through a lot of sub-par coffees.  Hopefully we've done a satisfactory job.

By the way, I've started using twitter, so some info I want to share that's too short for a blog, I'm going to put up there.  If you want to follow that stream, you can find my page here:  http://twitter.com/thedoubleshot

San Rafael

This is the day we've been waiting for since early December. Yesterday we got the shipment of coffee from Colombia. It's San Rafael- the coffee that Alfredo Correa produced. Every time we've cupped this coffee, it has blown away everything on the table. I roasted it for the first time last night. And I just drank a press of it. It's really good. I think you're really going to like it.

I'm hoping to dial this in on the roaster and I think it will be one of the best coffees we get this year.

It's for sale today, so if you want a pound come get it. It's selling for (a very reasonable) $16 per pound. That's $14 on $2 Tuesday.
This is really exciting for me because it's the culmination of the first time we've been able to travel to origin, cup coffee, meet the farmer of the best, and buy that coffee. Alfredo is awesome, and I was lucky to stumble upon him. You're lucky too.

Roasting and Cupping

Dang there's a lot going on around these parts.

The new sample roaster (1925 Jabez Burns) is up and running.  Jason and I have been practicing and learning and it's not easy.  The roaster works like our big roaster (1953 Vittoria) with a perforated drum tumbling the beans as a gas flame roasts the coffee.  On the Vittoria the flame is constant.  The variables we change are the amount of coffee in the drum and a vent and damper.  With the Jabez Burns, we can change the amount of coffee in the drums and the amount of flame.  It's a different way of roasting so we're having to learn to control these different variables to achieve the desired roast.  And it's easy to mess it up.

We've been getting more samples than usual, because we're working with different brokers.  With the new sample roasting setup it's easier to get samples roasted and ready for cupping.  So we're refining our cupping protocol.  We've found it's easiest to cup 4-6 samples at a time.  And we usually try the coffees in a presspot the following day.  We have a sample of La Magnolia from Costa Rica- I know that was a favorite of some of you, so if it cups out good maybe we'll offer it again.  We're waiting on a sample of the Rio Negro coffee- from the farm I visited on my last trip to Costa Rica.  We have several samples from a broker called Cafe Imports.  Specifically we're going to try a couple different Yemens, some coffees from Burundi, more Ethiopians, and a couple other origins.  An importer called Zephyr sent us a few Ethiopians, a Brazil and a Panama.  We also have the coffee from San Rafael- Alfredo Correa's farm in Concordia, Colombia.  Lots to look forward to if things pan out.  

Ethiopia

Ethiopia has become even more of a strange and mysterious place from which to get coffee.  A lot has occurred in the past couple years.  As you probably know, I think the Ethiopian government is taking missteps if they think they're going to improve their coffee economy.  The regional trademarking of Yirgacheffe, Sidamo, and Harrar... how will this affect us?  Will it limit the coffees we can get?

Here is some more news out of Ethiopia:

Ethiopia Update - Aricha and Beloya to Take Final Flights to Roasters around the World
Posted on 04. Mar, 2009 by Joseph Brodsky
The last chance to buy Aricha and Beloya is upon us. Due to an unexpected development in Ethiopia in recent days, all coffee will be sold within a week.
On Monday, The Ethiopian government issued a mandate for all coffee exporters to liquidate all coffee stocks. Within a week…
The country is starved for foreign currency. The exchange rate for the Ethiopian Birr against the dollar was bumped up to 12 Birr/$ in recent weeks from around 9 this time last year to encourage an influx of cash. The dollar goes a long way in Ethiopia these days. In a worsening global credit environment, borrowing foreign currency becomes increasingly difficult for nations dependent on it to run their operations. An excess of coffee inventory is much more valuable as cash in the bank from a national perspective.
So all 2008 coffees must go, quickly.
It is amazing how this has jump-started shippers into action. Some are obviously longer on positions than others, and this creates quite a problem for them.
What this means for Ninety Plus Coffee is that coffees it handles from 2008 - including all remaining Aricha and Beloya Macro and Micro Selections will ship next week.
The current situation with a lack of much specially prepared coffees this year due to the new ECX regulations, remaining Aricha and Beloya coffees are in high demand.
Please contact Steven Holt: +1.303.884.2380 or steven@ninetypluscoffee.com to find out how you can receive these coffees for shipment by air and sea next week.
We have around 60 bags of Micro Selection coffee remaining at the time of this entry. The coffees have been cupped in Addis several times this week and will be cupped again by Ninety Plus guests Tim Wendelboe and Paul Geshos.
There will be no time to sample Micro Selection coffees prior to purchase. Buyers will have to go on the cupping reports.
Say goodbye to Aricha and Beloya with us in style.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Coffee exports plummet below target
SATURDAY, 14 MARCH 2009
By Hayal Alemayehu

Coffee exports are sharply falling below the target set for the year with falling world prices exacerbating the situation, it was learnt.
The government set a target of over 101,000 tonnes of coffee to be exported during the first seven months of the current fiscal year while the actual export stood at 66,000 tonnes, thereby decreasing the forecast in coffee export earnings by over 46 percent.

The world coffee price per pound has plunged by some 67 cents over the last several months following the global financial turmoil-one of the major culprit for the country’s sharply falling coffee exports-operators in the sector noted.

The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development had last week warned coffee exporters against hoarding which it believed has a major contribution to the sharp drop in coffee exports, according to observers.

Major operators in the sector, however, say that the drop in coffee exports is directly linked to the global economic crises, bringing down world coffee prices to one of their lowest level in decades.

“Major coffee buyers such as Star Bucks, which had to layoff tens of thousands of employees months ago, are finding it hard to access loans from banks to buy coffee in bulks,” a mojor coffee operator told The Reporter on condition of anonymity. “This has led [coffee] prices to tumble down which, in turn, makes us unable to export as much as we could.”

Despite government urging for more coffee exports, the situation has yet to improve, government export figures indicate.

Only 7.4 thousand tonnes of coffee were exported in January 2009 against a 22,000 tonnes export forecast for the month, according to the latest export figure. Likewise, earnings from coffee dropped by a sheer 400 percent against the target for the same month.

However, earnings from coffee exports during the first seven months are slightly higher than that of the same period of last year.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Starbucks Delays Ethiopian Coffee Research Center, Capital Says
By Jason McLure

March 9 (Bloomberg) -- Starbucks Corp. put on hold plans to build a coffee research center in Ethiopia because of the slowing global economy, Capital said, citing Vivek Varma, a spokesman for the company, and Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.

Starbucks’ then chairman and current Chief Executive Officer Howard Schultz said during a visit to Ethiopia in November 2007 that the company would open a research center to improve the quality of Ethiopian coffee, the Addis Ababa-based newspaper said. A similar facility in Rwanda has also been put on ice, Capital said.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ethiopian Government Urges Japan to Lift Ban on Coffee Imports
By Jason McLure and Ichiro Suzuki

Feb. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Ethiopia urged Japan to lift a ban on imports of its coffee, saying the Horn of Africa country has taken measures to prevent pesticide contamination that led Japan to halt purchases last year.

“It’s time to put the Japanese market back and this has already been communicated to them,” Ethiopian Trade Minister Girma Birru said in an interview in the capital, Addis Ababa, on Feb. 17. “I think this is a problem we can leave behind us.”

Japan halted deliveries of coffee from Ethiopia in May after finding “abnormally high” pesticide residues in a shipment of the beans. Japanese officials demanded that Ethiopia find the source of the chemical and prevent future contamination.

Ethiopia is Africa’s biggest coffee producer. Japan had previously purchased about 20 percent of the country’s exports, said Girma, making it the nation’s third-largest market after Germany and Saudi Arabia. Ethiopia exported $525.2 million of coffee in the fiscal year ending July 7, according to the Trade Ministry.

Girma said the coffee shipment that led Japan to halt imports probably was contaminated by growers using sacks that previously contained insecticides or other chemicals. Most Ethiopian coffee is produced by smallholders who grow the beans without chemical sprays, he said.

Mocha beans from Ethiopia are highly regarded in Japan for their distinctive flavor and last year’s ban forced coffee shop owners to seek new blends.

No Beans

“We haven’t been able to offer Mocha coffee since last November because the supplier said they have no supplies of Ethiopian coffee beans,” said Takayasu Ito, a coffee shop manager in Tokyo’s Jimbocho neighborhood.

Japan will lift the ban once it receives assurances from Ethiopia’s government that there are no “reappearance risks,” Hiroyuki Uchimi, chief of the inspection planning section at Japan’s Health Ministry, said in a phone interview on Feb. 18.

Measures taken by Ethiopia to prevent a recurrence of contamination include establishing a laboratory to check for impurities in export coffee.

“We are now going to make clean all the coffee from smallholders or from state farms,” Girma said. “We have everything ready.”

CR Learnin's

Just a few notes from my trip last week.

Hacienda Rio Negro is a farm that La Minita's parent company bought three years ago.  It's Rainforest Alliance Certified.  Normally that wouldn't mean jack to me, but it was cool to actually be in a rainforest where coffee is growing amongst big trees.  Shade-grown, for real.  

When I was in Guatemala last year an agronomist told me that the varietal Yellow Catuai has a lot more pulp in the cherry, so the farmers like it but the mills do not like it (because the farmers sell their coffee to the mill by weight).  In Costa Rica I learned that Yellow Catuai also don't taste very good.  Sergio (Master Cupper at La Minita) told me he was able to separate the different varieties of coffee at La Minita and cup each one separately.  He said the Yellow Catuai are flat and not good.  That's great info.  He also told me the variety Catimor is a high-yield coffee but tastes terrible.

The coffee from Rio Negro was good.  It had a really big body and huge dark chocolate taste.  It didn't have the sweetness that the La Minita brings.  I tasted more stuff like cinnamon and whatnot in the Rio Negro, but I guess the most interesting thing was that it lacked sweetness.  

When I was riding around with Sergio in his car, I asked him how coffee had changed over the course of his 15- or 20-year career as a cupper.  He said the cupping ritual has remained the same but coffee is changing.  He said consumer demand has caused the producers to make changes in their processing.  Apparently during the years of high production and low quality, a lot of mills took out their washing channels and put in aquapulpers.  The aquapulper spins rapidly and takes the mucilage off the beans.  The traditional way of getting the mucilage off in wet-processed coffee is to put the coffee in a fermentation tank overnight and then run it down a washing channel to get the mucilage off.  Sergio told me the result of using an aquapulper is that the coffee doesn't have the sweetness of a traditionally fermented coffee.

Then it hit me.  Rio Negro has aquapulpers.  It's partially cleaned in the aquapulper and then fermented in tanks for 8 hours to finish the cleaning process.  THAT's why it's not as sweet.

Much interesting information.

Just wanted to drop that in while it's fresh on my mind.

One other thing.  I noticed that the kids down there didn't really have much to play with or things to play on.  I was thinking maybe it would be nice if we (The DoubleShot) could ask the farm to put in swingsets if we would pay for them.  I'm not sure if that's a good idea or not- or how much it would cost.  But while I was talking to Paul and Janette McEntire today, they mentioned that they take soccer balls to give to the kids.  I think that's a great idea.  So I'm thinking about (selfishly) getting some soccer balls printed with the DoubleShot logo and taking several on my next origin trip to give to the kids.  I don't know if this is something any of you have interest in helping with or not.  But I thought I'd let you know what I'm thinking...

Pulped Natural

The new Panamanian coffee (Hartmann Honey - micro-lot #7) is unique.  In fact, in our five years of business we've never had a coffee like this.  Part of its uniqueness is due to the processing of the coffee at origin.  We've talked extensively about washed coffees (wet-processed) and naturals (dry-processed), but there are other methods that lie somewhere in between.  This coffee is processed using the "pulped natural" method.  

The processing of coffee that I'm referring to is necessary to get the coffee from cherry to seed.  Coffee beans are the seeds of coffee cherries.  These cherries grow on trees and for the most part, people pick them by hand when they are ripe.  The cherries consist of skin (which is a bit fibrous), a fairly thin layer of pulp (or mucilage), a shell around the seed (called parchment skin), silverskin (a very thin layer around the seed, like the skin on a peanut), and finally the seed (or bean) itself.  All these layers must be removed at some point in order to get to the coffee beans I buy and sell to you.

In the pulped natural method, the skins are removed from the cherries as soon as they get to the mill.  This is usually done with a machine called a pulper, which is the common method used in wet processing.  It squeezes the cherries between two metal, pebbled rollers, popping the slimy seeds out of the tough skins.  At this point, in wet processing, the seeds with mucilage on them would usually go into a fermentation tank or a desmucilaginadora (demucilager).  But in pulped natural, they are laid out to dry.  I suppose many places (e.g. Brazil) lay the slimy seeds out on patios, but at the Hartmann estate they put them on raised beds to dry.  This method requires a lot of attention and turning of the beans to avoid mold.  Drying them on raised beds allows for air-flow above and below the coffee, and produces a much higher-quality coffee.

After the mucilage is fully dry, it is run through a huller, which takes off the dried mucilage and parchment.  Then the coffee is bagged and shipped to us for roasting.

The Hartmann Honey has a darker, uneven color to the beans.  This is caused by the processing.  The pulped natural method generally exudes a sweeter, slightly fruitier taste to the coffee, and this is the case with the Hartmann.  They tend to have some characteristics of a natural coffee, but cleaner.  The coloration of the beans tells me that the coffee has been "over-fermented."  It must have more of the sugars from the fruit on the bean.  And when I roast it, the beans turn a much darker color early in the roast, even though they're not fully roasted on the inside.  I wonder if this is from sugar browning on the outside of the beans.  Another interesting characteristic of the coffee is that it has a lot of honeyed flavors; and if I light-roast it, even though it doesn't taste green, the grounds sink straight to the bottom of a cup.  From what I understand, these are characteristics of a coffee that is "under-fermented."  Hmm.  What a contradiction.  Could this coffee be over- and under-fermented at the same time?  I'm sure, according to the specialty coffee industry, it could.  

I've roasted the coffee twice now, and I think I could still tweak the roast next time.  But the coffee is great this week.  It's a pulped natural.