Daniel's World of Coffee

Coffee of the Week: Pacamara from Finca El Carmen, El Salvador

Last Wednesday I held a cupping that included some pacamaras that I was raving about. My two favorites in the session, which was half-blind (I knew which coffees were pacamaras and which bourbons, but did not know the farms until I later looked at my cheat sheet), were both from Finca El Carmen in the San Vicente region of El Salvador.

El Carmen is on a volcano called Volcán Chinchontepec (which, roughly translated from the Nahuatl tongue means "Mountain Shaped Like Breasts" and no, I am not making that up.). This is an absolutely beautiful place which I visited on my last trip to El Salvador in February.

The producers at El Carmen are taking really remarkable care of their coffee. Pacamara in micro-lots like this is a relatively new endeavor for them. From the high profile that pacamaras are starting to get, you might get the impression that they represent a big proportion of the Salvadoran coffee export each year. But in reality, it's somewhere around 1%. Just one percent! But demand is sky-high, both in the States, and around the world. There's really nothing quite like a pacamara from El Salvador; and El Carmen is producing some of the very best.

What is a pacamara? Well, it's a hybrid coffee plant. Just like a merlot grape yields different flavors than a cabarent franc grape, different coffee varietals give you different coffee flavors. Pacamara is a unique blend of two varietals. One half of pacamara is the pacas varietal, itself a mutation of the more widespread bourbon varietal. Pacas is un café muy El Salvador, named for a member of the well-known Pacas family of coffee people and sharing many of the characteristics of the sweet, luscious bourbon. The other half comes from the maragogype line, best known as the "elephant bean" coffee for it's huge leaves, fruit, and beans. Blend these two together and you get Pacas-Maragogype, or paca-mara.

Pacamaras are true artisan coffees. They have strange, exotic, yet pleasing aromatics and tastes. They can also vary noticeably in size and shape. This makes them a challenge to roast, though well worth the effort.

In the two El Carmen samples that wowed me last Wednesday, I noticed a perfect foundation of chocolatey sweetness and medium acidity. What made these two stand out for me, though, was an incredible buttery richness coupled with a strongly prevalent herbal characteristics. These coffees were like a really luscious, creamy, sinful dessert you might get at a French restaurant. If you have never tried it, there's really nothing like a great pacamara.

These coffees are not commercially available... yet! Some savvy roaster is going to snap them up and offer them soon. When I find out who buys these coffees, I'll be sure to post it here so the rest of you can try them. (As a side note, I'll actually be cupping more El Sal pacamaras in about a week or so... if you are in the Seattle area, stay tuned because I will make an announcement about that, and you can come cup them for yourself.)

So there you have it. Pacamara samples from Finca El Carmen. This week's Coffee of the Week!

Where Does Sweetness Come From? Step Two: Processing

This is the next post in a little series that is introduced here; Part One about the plant is here.

For people who can't do it (and sometimes even for those of us who can), latte art can seem like the hardest thing there is to do in coffee. Well, it's the second hardest. The hardest thing in coffee is getting that damn sticky mucilage off the parchment.

I'm talking, of course, about coffee processing. If you don't know what I'm referring to with mucilage and parchment, Wikipedia has a fairly good, succinct introduction to coffee processing.

I want to talk about the origins of sweetness in the processing stage, but it might be more accurate to talk about the preservation of sweetness. Processing has a huge influence on the flavor of a coffee, but most of the time it's a matter of not ruining the coffee. You can put in the ripest, most delicate and beautiful high-grown coffee cherries in one end of the coffee mill and get rotten, spoiled, fermented coffee out the other side.

Geoff Watts, green buyer for Intelligentsia and all-around coffee savant has an amusing and apt analogy for the creation/preservation of quality in coffee. He says the bean is like a cowboy walking down the main street of an Old West town in a shoot-out. It's trying to get from the farm to your cup, and the whole way it's being shot at. The coffee has to dodge many bullets to make it to your cup in good condition. Well, the processing stage is like the saloon where most of the bad guys are hiding out... the coffee's got more dangerous bullets to dodge in that stretch of road than anywhere else.

In the processing stage, the two main goals are to get the fruit off the coffee, and to dry the coffee out. There are too many variations in how coffee is processed to get into it in detail here, but there are some universals. If the fruit doesn't come off cleanly or efficiently, you have problems with fermentation and dirty flavors in general. If the coffee is not dried properly, you have problems with phenolic tastes, mold, and a whole host of other problems. And all during these stages, there is the possibility of contaminating the coffee with unclean equipment and/or storage facilities.

So to sum up, sweetness is not created during processing, it is only ever really destroyed or preserved. Good processing is all about preserving the wonderful sweetness that Mother Nature and the farmers cultivated in the first place.

There is one possible exception to this rule, and that is "natural" processed coffee. (I'll use that term to encompass the varied natural styles, like sun-dried natural, "pulp natural," etc.) In these cases, the fruit is being dried onto the parchment coffee. As you can imagine if you've ever eaten a raisin or a dried apricot, it tends to concentrate the sticky sweet sugars in the fruit. The bean inside this fruit then tends to "soak up" some of this sticky sweetness, resulting in the unique flavor characteristics you get from natural-process coffees.

There's a lot of controversy surrounding natural coffees in the specialty industry. Some consider their flavors to be, by definition, defective. I don't particularly feel like wading into that quicksand right now, but I will say that I happen to adore well-cared-for natural coffees, and some of the greatest coffee experiences I have ever had were with natural coffees. Any discussion of sweetness and processing would be incomplete without mentioning naturals.

In general, though, with naturals as with washed coffee, it's all about not getting shot, so to speak. That bean has a lot farther to go before it ends up in your mouth as sweet, delicious coffee....

Where Does Sweetness Come From? Step One: The Plant

Earlier this week I promised a little bit more on the topic of sweetness in coffee.

First of all, to review, good coffee should be sweet. There are many different stages and processes that coffee goes through on the way to your mouth, and each one can have a profound impact on the sweetness. The first stage is the coffee tree itself.

Coffee is a fruit. What we roast up and brew is the seed of that fruit. Just like any fruit, coffee is sweetest when it's ripe, and the same holds true for the seeds (the "beans"). When fully ripe the seeds hold all kinds of complex organic compounds which would serve as food for a growing coffee seedling, including a complex family of sugars and other sweet compounds.

Some people used to claim that the reason that the Kopi Luwak coffee (you know, the famous "poo coffee") was so sweet was that the civet cat ate only ripe fruit, in a special mysterious civet cattish way that humans were forever ignorant of. Well, that explanation might have flown back in the bad old days. Today, though of course most human coffee production unfortunately involves lots of green cherries still, there are hundreds of quality operations out there that select only ripe red cherries. Humans have proven every bit as reliable in choosing only red as a civet cat could ever hope to be. Come on, humans, cut your species some slack! We're not that stupid.

Speaking of stupid, the first time I visited a coffee farm during harvest, I was so stoked to be eating the fruit that I ate dozens of cherries and later ended up with a severe headache, stomach ache and palpitating heart. Those cherries are caffeinated, too! I just figured that out way too late.

A few more notes on sweetness as a function of the coffee plant itself:

The higher the altitude the coffee was born at, the denser the beans tend to be. This can lead to an increase in acidity, complexity, and yes, sweetness.

Rainfall and sunlight can greatly influence the sweetness of a given coffee, but it's not the case that more or less of one or the other will lead to more sweetness. It's a complex interaction. Coffee trees, for instance, do best in mixed sunlight and shade. The percentages of this shade depends on the latitude of the farm, the altitude, the soil, and the varietal.

I'm not aware of any direct relationship between soil-type and sweetness. Obviously, proper soil for a given plant will lead to healthy, sweet fruit. But I do not know of any correlation between one particular soil type and levels of sweetness in the cup. This kind of thing generally shows up more in the aromatics (the iron tastes in volcanic soil coffees, for example). If anyone has information on the question of soil and sweetness, I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

So the first step in sweet coffee is sweet coffee fruit. If you start with green, unripe cherries, even in relatively small amounts, you are sabotaging the whole thing right from the start. But that's only the first step. We still have a long way to go to a sweet beverage.

Next time I will take a look at how processing affects sweetness.

coffee cherry photo by

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bloggle/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Why Not Buy Cheapest Coffee?

A little while ago I noted (along with the rest of the coffee world) that Starbucks was rolling out instant coffee. This development prompted a thoughtful post over at Hungry Magazine, by Michael Nagrant. Nagrant makes an argument for cutting costs in tough economic times by forgoing fine coffee. It is, as I say, a thoughtful post, if a little shaky on his coffee knowledge (he confuses roasting with extraction, for example).

Even more interesting, the post prompted a lennnnnnngthy reply from Geoff Watts. Money quotes:

Meanwhile, the mainstream first-world consumer has held stubbornly to the idea that coffee is a cheap luxury, that the $1.00 bottomless mug is somehow a right or a deserved privilege. It is this very attitude that will continue to ensure that the modern smallholder coffee farmer has little hope of escaping a life of extreme poverty. Cheap coffee (and by “cheap” I mean low cost, which typically equates to low quality) is one of the many forces shackling the developing world and suppressing opportunity for advancement for a huge chunk of the planet’s population who depend on coffee to make a living.

.........

We are after the best coffee we can possibly develop, that is the purpose that drives us. To achieve that means paying higher prices to growers and giving them the resources (and the reason!) to produce better tasting coffees. While we certainly feel the impact of the depressed economy here in the States, that impact is not limited to us. The farmers that Intelligentsia works with around the world are feeling the same kinds of pressure—it’s a global phenomenon. And while of course it makes sense to be thrifty in difficult economic times, we still need to realize that the decisions we make will have an impact further down the line. For a consumer the choice to purchase cheaper coffee has ramifications that extend far beyond the personal sacrifice of taste in favor of lower cost. It impacts the way coffee is produced, the way it will be produced in the future, and the ability of those who produce it to earn a living wage from their efforts.

Watts drops some history along with his science, too. Read the whole thing here.

Incidentally, that instant coffee goes for about a dollar a pop. If you really want to save money, you could buy a pound of gorgeous beans from Rwanda or Bolivia, lovingly sourced and roasted by a specialty coffee company, and make yourself a much, much, much better cup of coffee with hot water and a french press. Average cost per large cup? Depending on how strong you like your coffee, about 75 cents.

Gelatinous Noobs

Listening to Coleman Hawkins and the sun has been out this week. Today I cleaned out the single dirtiest espresso grinder I've ever seen. It was a La San Marco SM91, a pretty good little machine, but good God it was filthy. It had apparently been run a few times and then left completely alone. The coffee powder lodged into all the little internal slots and burrs had turned into a gelatinous, night-colored coating over all that brass. I scraped it off in long, curling peels of filth with a screwdriver, one little lane of clean at a time. My compatriot in scouring remarked that it reminded him of some of the filthiest deep-fryers he's been around.

In any case, we got the sucker clean and she works like a charm. The burrs are like brand new. We still didn't manage to pull any good espresso on it (another task for another day), but I had a distinct feeling of satisfaction seeing that steel and copper gleaming. Now if I could just get the filth out from under my fingernails.

Saturday I returned from El Salvador. While there I had a chance to cup about 40 fresh crop samples across three days, mostly from Apaneca/Lamatepec (aka Santa Ana), and came away really impressed. The focus on specialty in El Salvador is more apparent every time I go there; I think it's going to be one of the origins of the year this year, despite the irregular rains earlier in the growing season.

Already, a couple of the farms I visited in the east were done picking and had begun the long and laborious work of pruning. I had fun helping to cut back a few trees and painting the stumps with bright blue copper sulfate solution to protect them from fungus. It's a part of the growing process I have had explained to me before, but this was my first chance to observe and participate first hand. In one year the shoots will grow back with fresh life, and in two years they will produce fruit again, with more vigor than the older branches had been doing. Typically a well-managed farm does this to about a fifth of their plantation a year, to keep everything continually renewed.

As always, I brought back some samples. In this case, they are particular valuable: all fresh-crop, and all from top farms. In all it's about 3 kilos of green gold. I'll be sharing it with the public along with the top of last year's crop at an event in New York City soon, so stay tuned for that.

That makes 7 trips to El Salvador in the last 15 months. I don't know when I am going to go back again; all the projects I have been working on are wrapping up, and the new projects I have in the fire are still in the incubation stage. I suppose it won't be very long, but I really can't speculate at this point. Next trips on the horizon will most likely be Nicaragua and Ethiopia.

And, oh yeah! Chicago! This weekend is Coffee Fest, along with the Great Lakes Regional Barista Championship. Great Lakes is one of the strongest regions in the nation. Should make for good watchin'. I have a bit of a life-change announcement to make on a related note. I'll post more about that tomorrow.

For now, ponder Steve McQueen.

A Woman Made of Coffee and the Blog That Never Was

1. Ecuador was interesting: You don't think of Ecuador when you think of specialty coffee? They are just getting into that game there, as an industry. I was one of 9 official judges for the second annual Taza Dorada competition there. Our panel: Three United Statesians, one Salvadoran, one Guatemalan, two Colombians, two Ecuadorians, and one Peruvian. Everything was lovely and the people were fantastic; however, the competition was very rough around the edges, as you might expect from a second-year operation.

It may seem (to those who are not George Howell), that things like the Cup of Excellence just spring fully formed from the foreheads of the coffee gods. But in fact, in order to even have a Cup of Excellence, years and years of groundwork have to be put into (a) making the coffee good enough and (b) learning how to put on a competition. The Ecuadorians are in a crash course to do both these things at once.

The potential for the coffee is definitely there. The first-place coffee was quite nice; I scored it a 87 (which was my highest score and I believe was probably one of the 3 or 4 highest scores anyone gave out). At the same time, though, on the final table were several coffees that really didn't deserve to be there, quality-wise. Most of the samples we cupped were not 100% clean. We detected drying-related problems in the majority of the samples.

As part of the general disorganization (coffee-wise), the panel of judges was enlisted in actually making the competition happen, which meant driving to neighboring provinces to pick up samples, hand-milling parchment coffee, hand-sorting and grading coffee, roasting on a jerry-rigged roaster, replacing grinder burrs, and coming up with a protocol for the cupping... And, oh yeah, actual cupping too.

There was a little bit of grumbling, I must say, since people weren't expecting to be involved with this. But I was mainly there to learn about Ecuadorian coffee in the first place, so it really didn't bother me much. I had some beautiful moments of peace sitting in that lab (in the middle of a huge roasting/export facility in the port city of Manta) sorting out green coffee with a beautiful woman from Colombia. I made her a man out of coffee beans, and she made me a woman. All the pictures of the (coffee bean) woman are staying private cause, you know, she's my new girlfriend, but here's the man...

As expected, the ceviche and plantains were outstanding. I went swimming in the Pacific at 2 a.m. while a salsa band played loudly for a beach party nearby (which would have been the perfect night, except for that I stupidly left my journal on the beach... wasted words on the waves of the world tonight, I suppose). Fantastic new friends... and I can't wait to go back and see where the coffee world is headed there... certainly up.

2. More New York Times For the nth time in the last two years, the New York Times has an article about the surging specialty coffee scene in New York City. This one appeared in the City section last weekend, so you didn't see it if you read the paper edition outside of the metro area. Lots of beautiful visuals with this one.. .and it's a long article!

The writer, Ted Botha, interviewed me for this one. I had lots to say about the whole phenomenon (as usual the blabbermouth, me); unfortunately, Ted used only one of the less-positive things I said to feature in the article. When I walked into Gimme! this week to get a macchiato, Mike White called me a "hater." Ouch.

Here's the section in its entirety:

Given the explosion of the city’s coffee scene in recent years, it is hard to find anyone in its ranks who does not sound upbeat. One of the few voices of dissent comes from Daniel Humphries, founder of the New York Coffee Society. “Every time I think we are surpassing the West, they are pushing things out there,” said Mr. Humphries, who can often be found presiding over cuppings at places like Cafe Grumpy and El-Beit in Williamsburg, where people sip the latest coffee varietals the way wine lovers sample new vintages. “There are places here with the trappings of the third wave, but they use inferior coffee.” Nevertheless, Mr. Humphries is also part of a community that would be hard, if not impossible, to find in any other food quarter.

Of course, I'm very upbeat in general about the coffee scene here! Duh! I don't consider myself a "voice of dissent." I'm a full-on kool-aid drinking cheerleader, as you all know. So I would call that phrasing some creative drama-injection by Botha and his editors.

Nevertheless, in the context of a 30 minute discussion of the whole scene, I did say the things I am quoted as saying. My comment about "out West" is based on what I have seen at Four Barrel, Blue Bottle, Intelly-LA and Stumptown in the last two years. They really are still leading the way. That's not a knock on NYC, just the way I see it.

As for "inferior coffee," unfortunately this is also true, though it's certainly not only a New York thing. You'd have to hold a gun to my head to get me to name names in a public forum like this, but in my honest, professional opinion, some very nice shops use unfortunately mid-grade coffee. There, I said it! Is anyone really that shocked?

Anyway, nice as always to see these articles. Rising tide lifts all boats, wot wot?

3. Daniel in Imbibe Magazine: On the subject of the media and Daniel the blabbermouth, check out the latest issue of Imbibe magazine. Kate Simon has a snappy and quite useful article about serving coffee at parties. I'm actually very impressed with Imbibe's ability to create and cover new angles in their magazine. And as always, the visuals are smashingly gorgeous.

The article covers what to do when serving coffee for 4, for 10, or for 50 people, with pointers from yours truly. You can click through the "TAKE A PEEK INSIDE OUR CURRENT ISSUE" button to read the article ("Holiday Coffee") at the Imbibe website, or pick one up the future-mulch issue at the market.

4. Plowshares Coffee Roasters: Long-time New York Coffee Society member and general all-around great guy Anthony Kurutz has launched his much-anticipated roasting company!!! Huzzah!!!

It's called Plowshares Coffee Roasters and it's a welcome addition to the New York coffee world... an indigenous boutique roasting company with an emphasis on quality and sustainability. And I just love that logo.

Anthony sent me a few pounds of fresh-roasted coffee this week, and it's been sustaining me every day. I especially love the pacamara from El Salvador. I'm really getting to love this coffee (pacamara in general), and Anthony does the beauty beans justice... crispy acidity, a hint of exotic spice, and almost incense-like cedar notes. Way to go Anthony. Viva Plowshares.

5. The universe stretches on ever into infinity: And I'm happy to be on board.

"The epitome of this practice is the general, the central figure of the Sun Tzu. This general is a sage commander, someone who goes beyond the conceptualizing activity that constitutes good planning, effective strategy or even wisdom. Seeing the whole, the sage commander creates endless forms from within it. This ability arises from human capacities to see, hear and know the world that are common to everyone." --Denma

“Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.” --D. H. Lawrence

Why Life is Good: Crappy Cell Phone Picture Edition

Part of the reason I was out of touch for so long is that I spent the last two weeks wrapped up in a project that is, unfortunately, unbloggable.

I was evaluating coffee in a strange style: I wasn't cupping, nor was I straight-up drinking the stuff. I was drinking odd little half-cups of coffee brewed on an electric home machine. My daily intake was easily as high as it has ever been, caffeine-wise. Even my titanium nerves, inured to caffeine as they are, were jangled and jittery at the end of the day. On top of that, I had a two-hour train commute both ways to the location. On top of that, the coffee was terrible. I mean, truly god-awful. If I had been scoring on a standard 100-point, SCAA scale, maybe one or two of over 40 coffees tried (in multiple iterations, natch) would have broken 80 points. Many, many were sub-65 affairs.

So you will understand if, at the end of the day, I didn't feel like blogging. Plus, there wasn't that much to blog about.

This made it all the more sweet this week when my good friend Taylor "and Mindy" Mork, of Crop to Cup Coffee, invited me to his new office digs for a little cupping. I had some samples of green coffee from El Salvador provided by our mutual friend, Fernando Lima of the Cuzcachapa mill. I went to Cuzcachapa back in November of last year, and Fernando was one of the nicest people I met in a country full of kindness. Cuzcachapa, a large operation overall, has a huge specialty arm (not just an afterthought), and I snapped some photos while I was down there.

(the skull is smiling!)

(That's Fernando on the right, with head cupper Mauricio on the left)

(That's ALL specialty coffee in this picture.... oh glory!)

Anyway, Taylor's company got their start in Uganda, where he and his partner Jake have deep roots. Right now, they bring in some excellent coffee from the Bugisu region of Uganda, which I hope to visit sooner rather than later. But they are ambitious about expanding their offering list beyond their traditional comfort zone. Right now they are moving aggressively in Indonesia, with some interesting non-Sumatra prospects. One other place they have looked seriously is El Salvador, and if there is one country I have gotten to know well coffee-wise, that's the one.

So on Monday morning, I roasted up three samples (from farms called Las Nubes, La Palma, and El Paste) and trekked to downtown Brooklyn to cup with Taylor. He's got an office space in what has to be the coolest collective office space I have ever seen. It's in this old, yet sturdy 6-story building right near the mega-intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic. In another universe this building might have been derelict or turned into cheap condos by this point, but instead the owners have leased it out to a collective of green-oriented companies, Crop to Cup being one of them. They have a big, open floorplan, with skyline views of Brooklyn on both sides, a big industrial kitchen, and lots of very interesting people doing very interesting things.

I took some crappy photos with my cell phone. I wish I had captured better the overall coolness of the space, but here's a little corner of our cupping table to give you an idea...

We disturbed the peace a bit with Taylor's loud-ass Bunn grinder, but the slurping didn't seem to bother too many people. For the record, the coffee from Las Nubes was the clear winner. All three coffees had great sweetness, and a thick chocolate note. But only Las Nubes had that great, lively purple-fruit and citrus acidity that defines the best Central American coffees. Las Nubes was my choice for my morning press-pot today, Tuesday. I'm also intrigued to see the coffee from El Paste as an espresso component: very sweet and lovely, and not too much noise on either end of the spectrum.

Taylor also whipped out his Handpresso, which product I can't believe I've never played with before. Essentially you hand-pump the brew chamber to well-beyond 9 bars of pressure, then pour in near-boiling water and release the valve, at which point the water passes through a paper-filter pod and comes out as espresso on the other end. It completely lacks the full, fatty mouthfeel of high-grade commercial espresso, but I'll be damned if it wasn't pretty good and sweet. Perfect for traveling! Crop to Cup is offering their coffee in Handpresso pods soon.

All in all, Monday was a day to remember why I am in the specialty coffee industry to begin with: quality, love, taste, and people. It was such a welcome reminder after two weeks of dreck and train rides. Over the weekend, I even found time to go to the park with the lovely Liz...

... where we were thoroughly entertained by a bunch of kids running around and under a gigantic American flag, parachute-style, which their teachers/camp-counselors were billowing in the wind, which inspired me to strike a Barack Obama "coin pose"...

And on Sunday I even found time to stop by the local pub and watch the mighty Seattle Seahawks get their first of many victories this season, this one a thorough pwnage of the hated (and admittedly dreadful) Rams. There was a couple in the bar wearing San Francisco jerseys, watching the Niners dispatch the lowly Detroit Lions. I talked a little smack with them, rivals of the Seahawks as they are. The girl was friendly but the guy just snorted. They'll get their due comeuppance soon. (Did I mention the Niners were my first team when I was but a wee lad living in Sacramento? It's true, though I was born in Seattle and have never been to a Niners game and have been to several Hawks games.) Also: check out the Alex Smith jersey... ha! Oh where be ye now, young Alex?

The moral of the story is: if you get dreck, stick it out. Victory and sweet coffee are always just around the corner, if only you know where to look.

More to come...

Roasting Kenya

As I type this I am roasting up a batch of Kenyan coffee for home use. I just got done drinking, over the last few days, a batch of coffee from Los Naranjos en El Salvador, the farm of my friends, the Flores family. Four days straight of that same coffee (I don't think I had a single shop espresso or other coffee this week... amazing!), makes me crave something very, very different. So I dug through my bins of coffee and found a half a pound of coffee that Willem Boot let me have last time I was in California. It's a free-trade fair-trade certified coffee, a "double A" (for what it's worth), and the designation is Gichathainike. I drank this before, in Seattle and California, and it's classic Kenya: bold, super bright, and snappy.

The problem with roasting this kind of coffee on my little Gene Cafe, however, is it really calls for high initial heat. This coffee, like most top-grade Kenyas, is grown at super high elevation. High elevation, even at the equator, leads to exceptionally cold nights, and the cold nights lead to denser, more compact beans. This is part of what gives Ethiopian and Kenyan coffees their distinct acidity... they are some of the highest-grown coffees in the world. Combine super-high altitude with the sheer screen-size bigness of these AA beans, and that's a lot of cell structure in one bean.

You kind of have to hit beans like this with a baseball bat of heat right off the bat. Just blow torch them. In a conventional drum roaster, the idea would be to increase your drop temperature 25 or 50 degrees, making sure you are at 100% airflow right off the bat to avoid scorching. You still want a nice slow roast development time leading into and after first crack. But you want to roast with high initial heat so you can get to that first crack sometime before the cows come home. But in a little electro-gizm like the Gene Café, you have to take the "drum" away from the heat source, open it up, and pour in the beans carefully. During this time the temperature is rapidly dropping.

So I just did my best on this Kenya (I pulled them and set them beneath the cooling fan about a paragraph ago)... crank the heat as high as possible, dump the beans in fast, and whisper coaxing words to them as they roast.

I just popped one in my mouth... I can taste that crisp acidity. I think this will be a good one. But I will have to wait until morning to find out.

I've noticed through the years that Kenyan coffees tend to include an abnormally high number of "shell" beans, even in premium and specialty grade coffees that are otherwise free of defects. This is a minor defect and totally forgiveable; but still I wonder why this is. I can't believe I've never asked around for an answer on why this is! I'm curious if there's something about the varietals there or (less likely?) the processing, that creates this. The simplest explanation I can come up with is that sorters there do not consider this a defect and so they simply leave in the "shell" beans they see. With luck I will be in Kenya in November and hopefully I can find out first-hand, but if anyone reading this knows the reason for this... please share! (shell bean image from coffeeterms.com)

Cool Video from BoingBoing

As part of my ongoing effort to completely abdicate my responsibility to post original content and to live vicariously through my former brother-in-portafilter-arms, Kyle Glanville, here is a cool video from BoingBoing (again with the coffee, BB!). It's a visit to the Intelly LA roastery. Also, the title of the video is "Part One," so if they post a part two, I suppose I have to follow suit.

Original post here.

Haitian Vert (et Maron)

This is some dirty green. My friend Rachel — a filmmaker and lover of coffee I have known since the Victrola days when she used to come in and study while I worked — brought this back from her last trip to Haiti. Rachel's documentary on the U.N. intervention in Cité Soleil, a slum Port-au-Prince, is in the post-production phase. Insane woman that she is, one gigantic project not being enough, she's been toying with the idea of a big coffee project, too.

I can't say exactly the form this project is taking, since we don't really know yet ourselves. But at the very least, we'd be following the coffee all the way from the trees to the cup, enlisting some help from a third party for importing and roasting in between. But before we can even get started on all that... we had to see what we had on our hands.

Rachel brought me this completely unsorted, natural-process coffee when we met for lunch last week. Needless to say, it needed a little cleaning up. I like sorting coffee... so this was the fun part. You can see here what I took out with just one cursory run-through of a 300 gram sample.

I saw a lot of "full blacks" in this sample, which worried me. Usually a defect of this kind will ruin an entire cup. If I was seeing them in abundance, there was a chance this coffee might never be clean enough to be nice. There was some severe insect damage here and there, but overall not that much considering this sample had never once been sorted. Rachel asked her friends in Haiti to get her some coffee... they went to a warehouse where dry cherries were being stored, the hulled them on the spot with a mortar and pestle and sifted out what you see here. That's it.

So after a bit of labor, I was left with this...

Keep in mind this is natural coffee. The goal isn't 100% uniformity in color. Those orangey looking beans are just beans with the silverskin still on, turned red from being dried next to the fruit. The important thing is I threw out all the leftover hulls and full blacks and full sours and the like.

Still, I wasn't sure how this would taste. I roasted up two samples, one to a "cupping roast" and the other to about a Full City Plus. I took it over to Rachel's place off Central Park West and we had a little cupping session (after she showed me the first ten minutes of her film, which she said was full of flaws but it looked great to me... guess I'll stick to evaluating coffee). To make things even harder on this coffee, I brought the only other fresh-roasted natural-process coffee I had around, which just happened to be the SMS Korate Sidamo which just won first place over all in the Ethiopia Limited competition and which I scored a 94 in Addis.

So how did it do? I won't lie and say it performed better than the Korate. But it was surprisingly good. Good overall sweetness. No problems with fermentation or vegetal tastes or phenol. It was a touch woody, but only a touch. And there were nice chocolate and fruit aromatics. It's good coffee! It's clearly mostly ripe cherries, properly dried. This was a huge relief. It's one thing to take on a huge, complicated multi-year project. It's another thing to do it when you are starting at scratch with no quality.

Incidentally, I noticed from a little poking around that the main response to the drive for quality in Haiti has been to introduce wet processing mills in a country where 90% of the coffee is sundried natural. There is a definite equation out there that says: sundried = inferior. I saw this in Ethiopia too. Another thing that I have seen is that with proper care, sundried = dynamite. The washing-station projects are awesome. My friends and benefactors at USAID did an amazing thing with the creation and marketing of "Haitian Bleu"... check out some great reports here and here. But all I am saying is that this is clearly not the only way to go. Haiti has a unique tradition. It needs improving, but no sense in throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Who knows what will come of the project? Rachel needs to finish her film first. In the meantime, we've got six more pounds of green if anyone else wants to try this.