Stumptown Coffee Roasters Guatemala Bella Carmona
Lately, my coffee thoughts have been turned to ideas of seasonality. I’ve become curious about how seasonality affects the coffees available to roasters, what the seasons for coffee are, who is harvesting where and when, and whether each region (Africa, Latin America, etc.) harvests all of their varietals at one time, or if there are multiple harvests in a given year (in a given place).
As consumers, we’re seldom given much insight into the seasonal nature of coffee. Yet, as an agricultural product, coffee is based on the progress of a plant throughout the course of a specific growing season. It is not uncommon for roasters to offer coffees from Ethiopia, Kenya, or Colombia year-round, as though the coffee harvests in these places never ends.
Contrast this with wine, a similar agricultural product, whose production and marketing are heavily vintage-driven. Bottles of wine are labeled with the year that the grapes were grown in, alongside information about where the grapes were grown. Vintages are assessed, evaluated, and prognosticated upon on a country-by-country, region-by-region basis. Year-to-year vintages are evaluated relative to one another, and prices rise and fall accordingly. In the case of wines such as vintage Port, Sauternes, or Bordeaux, the wines are tasted while still maturing in barrels, evaluated long before they are bottled.
With rare exceptions, the specialty coffee world has done little in this regard. If you look at the information accompanying a coffee from Barrington Coffee Roasters, they will tell you roughly when the beans were harvested (e.g. “2009 crop (late 2009 harvest)”. Intelligentsia at one point had a website at the url inseason.com, that would tell you which coffees they were offering from the most recent harvest. This has now been folded into their existing website, and is featured somewhat prominently on their home page. Stumptown, who produced this coffee, will sometimes include information about when a coffee harvest.
This is a small sample of the finest specialty coffee roasters in the country, and the treatment given the notion of seasonality is highly uneven. I can guess at some of the reasons for this, but I have to admit to not knowing the full story. It is one mystery of coffee production that I would love to learn more about.
But, I do think it’s reasonable to expect producers such as these to include more (and more consistent) information about the seasonal nature of their coffees. Especially in the case of their small-lot, single-origin coffees, where they often include several pieces of information about provenance, varietal(s), processing methods, etc. Including information about the harvest strikes me as a logical step from here.
Just imagine how cool it would be to go to a roaster’s site and be able to learn information about that season’s harvest in Africa, Indonesia, Latin America, etc. Hearing how the many growers they work with coped with the seasons and harvest, and how the unique elements of that year’s growing season(s) play out in the cup. To read knowledgeable comparisons of one vintage of Kenyan coffee versus another. In particular, this would help to elucidate the benefits of one growing area versus another in the same season. For example, we could learn why higher-altitude slopes produce better coffee relative to lower slopes, and whether growing coffee at this location serves as a buffer against an especially warm growing season (e.g. “the unusually warm temperatures in the Nyeri region led to early ripening for coffees on the lower slopes, whereas those at higher altitudes ripened more slowly and steadily, resulting in cherries that were at the perfect stride of maturity when the harvest began”). For an example, check out this harvest report from Ridge’s Monte Bello vineyard. Doesn’t that description of the growing season get you excited to try the wines, to see how the growing season plays out in their finished wine?
In the end, here are the things I’m most interested in regarding coffee and seasonality:
- What are the typical growing seasons for each country, and do they differ by region within a specific country?
- When are coffee cherries typically harvested in each country, and what factors influence an earlier or later harvest season?
- How are different growing areas and conditions affected by seasonal weather patterns? How do current plantings reflect responses to the weather each coffee producing region experiences?
- How do vintages relate to one another? Are vintages consistent year-to-year in terms of quality? Quantity? If not, how do they differ?
- Can coffees from all vintages/countries/varietals improve with age? Or only coffees from especially good vintages/countries/varietals? (I’m looking at you Barrington Coffee to help with this question…)
I’m sure there are other questions, but those seem like good starting points!
Tasting Notes
The Bella Carmona wet mill that produced the coffee I’m writing about here, is situated in Antigua, at a mid-level elevation of 1500-1650 meters above sea level. Antigua is located in central Guatemala, a ways south-east from Huehuetenango, one of the country’s other prominent coffee growing regions. Because of its lower elevation, relative to Huehuetenango, coffees from this region are typically harvested earlier, and arrive in roasters’ hands earlier than those from other regions in the country.
The Zelaya family purchased the Bella Carmona wet mill in 1908, and it is currently owned third generation coffee farmer Maria Zelaya. Stumptown works closely with the mill to source some of their more notable Guatemalan coffees.
In this case, they received coffees from several farms surrounding the mill, and assembled this coffee by blending the beans together in varying quantities. The farms are located in the Duenas, Ciudad Vieja, and Alotenango counties on the slopes of the Volcan de Agua. Here the coffees are grown under a canopy of Gravilea trees. Once harvested, they are transferred to the mill, mechanically washed, and then dried on raised patios.
The Actual Tasting Notes
The nose is bright with floral citrus notes, milk chocolate, and herbal notes of lavender and heather. The mouthfeel is lithe with glittering, welcoming acidity. The flavors are bright and lively, with a sweet undertone. Orange zest and candied lemon contrast nicely with nutty flavors of light caramel and melted chocolate, underscored by a hint of berryish flavors. The finish is dry and citrusy.
This is a great afternoon coffee, full of the bright flavors that I associate with Latin American coffees, brought out well by the light/medium roast that Stumptown used. When I ordered this it was the only Latin American coffee that they were offering. Since then (only a week ago), they’ve added a couple more Guatemalan coffees, so it looks like they’re receiving and processing more from the most recent harvest. Perhaps this begins to answer some of my speculation about seasonality.
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A good post, and your questions at the end do indeed provide great starting points for a discussion, a long long discussion. I can’t possibly address it, but with a general word of caution. Coffee is a dried seed from a flowering fruit-bearing shrub. It’s not a peach, or an avocado, or a grape, or a bottle of wine, or a pinto bean. It’s not indestructible, but it is a dried seed. Seasonality implies many things that are interesting to hold up to coffee but must be discussed with care and particular knowledge, not only about “harvest” in general, but the differences in harvests between on origin and another, between one region or microclimate and another. It is very difficult to speak universally about such things in coffee and end up with a good degree of accuracy. If it is a small crop for Nyeri this year, it neither means the quality is better (the notion that less production = good quality), not does it mean good coffee would be scarce. What does it tell you? Very little because unless there is a huge catastrophe, there is always good lots to be found. It makes sense to speak of harvests in terms of volume, but not really in terms of quality, since quality is found in specific cases, not general ones. Anyway, there are too many tangents here, and too many terms that need * by them, but I enjoyed your post. Keep it coming. -Tom
Thanks for the comments! No doubt that my thoughts are missing some of pieces of the puzzle, and I look forward to filling in some of the blanks as time passes.
Based on your comments, I’m wondering about the impact of production processes on the perceived quality of coffee. If we’re to say that the differences between one harvest and the next are manifested only in quantity, not quality, than does the difference in quality between one lot of coffee and another largely come down to a combination of growing location (down to a micro-level) and how the coffee is processed?
And what about the notion often expressed in wine-making that to make good wine you have to begin with good grapes? Does this apply to coffee (aside from discussions of Robusta vs. Arabica)?
In the end, is coffee a product largely produced during processing? Or growing? It’s not an either or, but I can’t help but wonder which step plays the greater role.
Sweet Maria’s is great by the way. The info you folks post on your site is stellar, and I’ve had the pleasure of home-roasting several of your green coffees.
Hiya Nathan! I’m feeling like each of the questions you have posited in that last post deserve a yes answer. That and some serious road time.
Why don’t you come by the Roastery tomorrow and we can talk about some of the complexities of growing, processing, transporting, storing, preserving, roasting, packaging and preparing these seeds we are all so enamored with? Hopefully we can delve a bit deeper by sharing some of our own explorations with you in person. We would be thrilled to have you as our guest!