February/March 2021 Newsletter
We're lucky to be living in Australia during these tumultuous times. It appears we've come through the pandemic relatively unscathed compared to most of the world, and if we can avoid various levels of government lapsing into stupidity this state should continue.
Living as we do on an island continent at the bottom of the world definitely has its advantages, but it does come with a few downsides. The major one is that anything we can't grow or make ourselves has to be shipped in, usually by sea. And right now, sea freight has become both more expensive and less reliable, at the same time as importers try to catch up with inventories run down during the pandemic.
This has lead to an industry wide shortage of green beans. In the effort to rebuild stocks, the local importers are tending to concentrate more on the "bread and butter" bulk beans and less on the more rarefied high end green coffees. Great for roasters who mostly sell to supermarkets and cafes, painful for specialty roasters like us.
Which leads me to yet another substitution on our list of beans. For at least the next few months there will be no more Ethiopian Harar. We will be replacing the Harar with the somewhat more refined (and more expensive) Ethiopian Yirgacheffe Dry Process Grade 3, but won't be increasing our selling price. As I said in the brief January newsletter, these replacements are just something we'll have to get used to.
As I also said in January, I've been mining the stocks of local green coffee supporters for undiscovered gems, and I've managed to find a beauty! Harking back to the September 2020 newsletter when I discussed the various methods of processing coffee cherries to enhance the ultimate flavours of the beans, this month's special coffee is the first coffee we've seen processed by carbonic maceration.
The process was originally developed for wine making. Instead of adding a yeast inoculate to the grape juice after crushing, whole grapes were placed in a sealed vessel under a blanket of carbon dioxide (the "carbonic" or "anaerobic" bit) and fermented from the inside out. A similar process is used for coffee cherries (with added water). Since the fermentation process uses enzymes rather than yeast it doesn't consume the natural sugars, resulting in increased sweetness and body and reduced tannins and bitterness.
The other distinguishing feature of this coffee is that it's the Pacas varietal, a Bourbon offshoot noted for its rich flavour. The coffee is the Honduras San Vincente Evin Moreno Anaerobic Washed Arabica V.Pacas, abbreviated to:
$68.00/kg
This is the sweetest coffee I have ever tasted. It starts with an immediate Gula Melaka (Palm Sugar) front palate note through to a caramel mid palate and finishes with a strong creamy malt and molasses body. I would score it an easy 89. The only reason it would not rate higher is the absolute absence of bitters and tannins in the aftertaste, leaving it slightly unbalanced towards the sweeter side.
Finally a quick reminder that we're now running a "real time" stock control system, accurate to 250g. When we run out of a coffee you can get a situation where you can order 1x 250g but not 500g.
Until April
Alan
