July 2016 Newsletter
My try at having Coffeereview taste Alan's Blend didn't work out. After I'd submitted my sample I heard nothing back, then when the reviews came out they were for "Australian Single Origin Roasts" instead of "Australian Brewing Coffees." At a guess they couldn't find enough dedicated non-espresso coffees to work with, not surprising in our market. I was amused by the comment that they were surprised that roasters hadn't submitted coffees from Indonesia and PNG, and thought to myself "All you had do was ask."
I was contemplating which single origin I would have submitted if asked when a little storm cloud popped up on my horizon. An article appeared in Quartz online magazine about Cuban coffee. To paraphrase, it's now permissible to import Cuban coffee into the USA and several major roasters are looking at doing so, the leader being Nestle for Nespresso capsules. Given the sheer volume that Nestle uses they could end up taking a major portion of the crop. Fortunately I've got enough spoken for to last about a year, but after that it might become even more difficult to get than it already is.
As part of an ongoing effort to have a substitute ready if Café de Cuba becomes completely unavailable I've been tasting my way through a bunch of mild, low acid, nutty coffees, many of them from Brazil. The main reason that Brazil coffees have these attributes is that they are grown at fairly low altitude on large plantations.
The vast majority of the coffee grown in Brazil is produced on these plantations, which are mechanized to the nth degree. Instead of impoverished farmers pruning, harvesting and sorting by hand it's all done by machines. As a result of the mechanization, Brazil is the world's largest coffee producer, and by far the most efficient.
You might expect that quality has been sacrificed for efficiency, and to some extent you'd be correct. Most Brazilian coffee farmers aim for "good average" coffees rather than spectacular ones. Still, it's not uncommon for even the largest estates to set aside some areas for the production of more specialised lots, and it's these lots which are entered in the annual "Cup of Excellence" auctions.
Beginning in 1999 (when we got the 3rd place coffee from Fazenda Lambari) the auctions have displayed the absolute best coffees from any year. Unfortunately for me, they've also pushed the prices of the green coffees so high that I've more or less ignored them over the last 10 years or so.
At this point I've got to say that when I receive my green coffee samples for roasting and cupping they come with really informative labels such as "Order 6793, Lot#002/1246/0141/GP" so it's always a suck it and see proposition. In this case, I thought it was the sweetest Brazil coffee I'd ever tasted, and worthy of being a monthly special.
What I didn't know at the time I bought it was that this coffee from this farm had won the COE Auctions in both 2014 and 2015, so I got a bit of a shock when the bag and the bill arrived! Here it is:
Brazil Sitio Baixadao Natural
$60.00/kg
A mild fruit aroma with hints of banana and pineapple flows through to a sweetly acid front palate. Tropical fruit flavours in the mid palate with a sweet creamy finish make this one of the most extraordinary Brazil coffees I have ever tasted. Really limited quantity, I'll never see it again, so get in quick.
Until next month
Alan
