April 2019 Newsletter

Apologies for my late return to work. My brother-in-law Eric passed away in late March. He was the first of our generation to die among my and my wife's families. His death meant drastic rearrangement of travel plans and unavoidable delays in returning to Australia. Normally, when I take a break I actually return two or three days beforehand so I can organise roasting and shipping as soon as we reopen. Since we arrived Monday 8th a.m. I'm scrambling to catch up and we'll hopefully be fully back in business by Thursday 11th a.m. Meanwhile, coffees will be up on the order page as fast as I can roast them.

Anyway, since I had a lot of "Hurry up and waiting" to do I managed to acquire a unique "Special" coffee.

For the last 200 or so years "Washed" coffees have been processed by lightly crushing coffee cherries then submerging them in water and allowing them to ferment. The fermentation process loosens the cherry skins and the mucilage that surrounds the actual coffee beans, so that further washing in clean water leaves only the beans.

In a similar fashion to wine grapes, the fermentation relies on the natural wild yeasts present on the cherry skins. And, in a similar fashion to wine grapes, growers have started to experiment with selected yeast strains in order to improve the flavour. The jury is still out on whether controlled fermentation can improve all coffees, but there is no doubt it does make a significant taste difference to some of them.

So, this, and probably next month's special is a Yeast Fermented (YF) coffee, the first I've ever offered.

Burundi YF Kibingo
$66.00/kg

Upfront flavour of spiced bread and orange zest with distinctive fruity acidity and a long sweet finish.

We will be travelling again in August for a couple of weeks to attend a memorial service with the rest of Eric's far-flung family, including several who couldn't organise things in time to get to the funeral.

 Until next month

Alan.