Category: Coffee
Starbucks Mexican Chiapas
Occasionally I get caught up in the grasp of coffee-buying apathy. Invariably when this happens we end up running out of coffee, necessitating an urgent run to somewhere, anywhere to get coffee.
As result, two of the more recent coffees I’ve been drinking were Trader Joe’s Costa Rica Tarrazu (accessible and satisfactory, if not wholly enjoyable) and this bag of Starbucks’ Mexican Chiapas. While getting coffee at work one day, and knowing that I was buying a cup of Starbucks because we didn’t have any coffee at home for me to bring into the office, I saw this bag of one of their specialty coffees and decided to give it a roll. It was a double-bonus that it was from the same region as a Barrington coffee that I’d just finished.
This coffee is from the Chiapas region of Mexico, and was sourced from two specific farms, Santa Teresa and Guadalupe. The beans were grown at an elevation of 1000-1300 meters, and include the Catuai, Caturra, and Bourbon varietals. According to a post on their website, all of the coffee was grown under shade trees, though it doesn’t say this on the bag itself.
The most remarkable thing is the roast level of this coffee. Starbucks says that it’s their medium roast, and yet the beans are very dark and oily. To me, this looks like much more of a French roast, a level that carbonizes the bean to some extent, and releases more of the oils, creating a darker, sweeter cup of coffee. Dark roasts are, of course, typical of Starbucks approach to roasting, and is a style that really originated on the west coast with companies such as them and Peet’s. So I suppose that their’s is a subjective idea of a medium roast.
Contrast this to the approach that Barrington took with their Chiapas coffee. They used a City roast, and labeled it a “light roast” on the packaging. The beans are a light, milk-chocolate brown, with no oils coming through on any of them.
This is really a clash of two opposing coffee ideologies, the leveling approach as embodied in Starbucks’ dark roasts versus the embracing difference approach as captured in Barrington’s light roasts. But how does the difference play out in the cup?
Tasting Notes
The aromas in this coffee are very dark and roasty, with notes of molasses, toast, and vanilla bean. The palate is voluptuously smooth and soft with little acidity. There are flavors of hazelnuts, milk chocolate, vanilla wafers, toast, and a distant hint of black cherries. The finish is very dry and dark, with the flavors melding into a seamless, rather indistinct mash of molasses, nuts, and chocolate.
All in all, the flavors are okay, but lack much in the way of nuance. The overall impression was a melange of rich, dark, sweet flavors, and very smooth. It’s hard not to wonder what it would have been like at a lesser roast.
And here’s where the differences in Barrington’s approach play out relative to Starbucks. With Barrington’s lighter roast you get a much brighter cup of coffee, one that enables the nuances and layers in the coffee to shine. Starbucks’ approach leads to a more indistinctly, darkly flavored cup.
Is one better than the other? It’s really a question of preference, but if you like a coffee that is expressive of where it came from and what makes coffee from that place unique, then you should pick up the Barrington Coffee Chiapas. On the other hand, if you like heavily roasted coffees, then this one isn’t really much different than Starbucks’ other coffees, expect perhaps with less of a dark char flavor, and so I’d say give this one a roll.
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Barrington Coffee Roasters Mexican Chiapas Grower’s Cooperative
I like drinking coffee. I enjoy the ritual of grinding the beans, boiling water, and filling the french press in the morning. Sitting at work with a cup of coffee on my desk, filling the office with its aroma, makes everything feel just a bit less stressful, deadlines less imminent. All in all, I love the role that coffee plays in my day.
And so my recent excursion into drinking tea in the morning has proven to be somewhat less than satisfying. I like tea, but it doesn’t give me the same level of enjoyment and satisfaction that coffee does. I feel more prepared for my day after having a cup of coffee in the morning, more full of life. After I drink tea in the morning, I may feel more calmly aware that my day is beginning. It’s a nice feeling, but not really what I’m looking for. Plus, I miss the smell of coffee when it’s not there in the morning. I may just not be an overall calm enough person.
It’s coffees like this one from Barrington Coffee Roasters that keep me coming back to the bean. Here is a coffee that is alive and full of flavor, while being graceful and lithe in the cup. It straddles the border between teas and coffees, in that it packs all of the flavor, body, and (let’s face it) caffeine of coffee, with the delicate flavors and subtle nuances that are the hallmark of great teas.
This specific coffee is from the Sierra Madre region of Chiapas in southern Mexico. It’s produced by the UDEPOM coffee cooperative, short for Union de Ejidos Profesor Otilio Montano. The cooperative consists of roughly 850 family-owned farms that range from 1 to 10 acres in size. The farms are situated in the mountains, with all of the beans grown between elevations of 4800-5400 feet. The varieties include Typica and Bourbon, and are washed before being sun-dried.
The beans are a light-to-medium roast. The nose has notes of orange rinds, cinnamon, cardamom, and milk chocolate, overall very enticing. The palate is lightly textured and supple with enough mellow acidity to brighten the flavors without distracting from them. The flavors are sweet , citrusy, and herbal. On the finish, a layer of acidity gently gives way to lingering flavors of vanilla and creme anglaise, much richer than the nose or palate might lead you to expect.
A very nice coffee, well-balanced in flavors, body, and acidity. I think Barrington once again hit the nail on the head with the roast for these beans. While I still tend to be a bigger fan of rich, ripe African coffees, the subtlety and delicacy of Latin American coffees is really beginning to grow on me.
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Barrington Coffee Roasting Co. Holiday Reserve Sulawesi Toraja
For the past few months I haven’t drunk much coffee. I haven’t ordered any in a while, in part because we decided to delve into some tea a bit. I know next-to-nothing about tea and so it’s been fun exploring some of the Chinese teas imported by Silk Road Teas. I sometimes think the nuances and delicacy are lost on me, as most often I feel like I have a pretty rudimentary palate. Whether or not this is true, and however much I was enjoying tea, I was pretty darned happy when a friend recently gave me a half-pound of Barrington coffee. It felt like coming home.
In fact, the extent of my excitement at trying this new coffee from Barrington was really an indication to me of how much I had been missing coffee. No offense to the tea enthusiasts out there. I like tea, but at heart I’m really more of a coffee person. It suits my personality more. Drinking coffee is relaxing, but because of the caffeine involved, and the process of making the coffee, it’s a more active kind of relaxation. I’m not very good at really sitting down and relaxing, and so coffee works best for me.
But hey! Not only was I excited to return to coffee and try an offering from Barrington that I hadn’t drunk before, but I was pretty amped to check out their new packaging. I’d heard about the new packaging from a friend of mine who knows the owners of Barrington pretty well, but hadn’t seen an example of it yet. Suffice to say, upon first inspection I think it’s a huge step forward for them.
In the past, I’ve bemoaned how uninformative their packaging was. The new packaging, which applies to their single-origin and limited edition coffees, is a big improvement. Each label includes the name of the coffee, including the estate or cooperative that produced it; the process used to make it (washed, semi-washed, sun dried, etc.); the country that the coffee comes from; and some tasting notes (for this coffee the label reads, “delicate spice…buttery body, toasted nut flavors”). Depending on the coffee in question, the label may also include information about the varietal(s), elevation, and roast.
All in all, I think this is a great change to their packaging, and is an ideal complement to their coffees, which are consistently very interesting and often downright exciting. I especially liked walking into a shop recently that sold a number of their coffees, and really feeling like I could make an educated decision about which to try.
As for this coffee, it was a special edition roast that they put out around the holidays. The coffee is from the Sulawesi region of Indonesia and was produced by the Petani Kopi Organik Toraja Cooperative. The beans were grown at an elevation of 4500-5500 feet in the Sesean Mountains region. The cooperative who grow and process the coffee is made up of 780 small-holders, each of whom farm just 1-1.5 hectares of land. The beans are semi-washed and sun dried.
The nose has notes of freshly baked bread, gingerbread cookies, subtle molasses tones, and sweet, earthy notes. It took a little while for the flavors in the nose to really open up, but once it did they were dense and enticing. The palate is rich with sweet fruits, raspberries, and cranberries. Alongside this are notes of oaky cinnamon and vanilla cake, riding atop a supple texture. The palate has a medium acidity, tempered just enough to highlight the fruit flavors. The finish is dry and almost cinnamony, with lightly acidic fruit melting away.
In their description of this coffee, Barrington states that it “comfortably rests in the realm of a supple armchair.” This is hard to argue with. The flavors are rich and enjoyable, and the coffee has a wonderfully textured body and mouthfeel. A nice coffee for a winter’s day.
Barrington Coffee Roasting Co. Aged El Salvador Finca Cerro Las Ranas 2006
The first roaster I saw offering aged coffee was George Howell’s Terroir Coffee, who offered an aged Indonesian that sounded quite exciting. At the time I had never heard of such a thing…aged coffee? Since then I’ve seen aged coffees offered by a couple of roasters, but it’s a pretty rare offering overall, and I can only think of a couple of roasters I’ve seen them from.
This coffee is unique in that not only is it aged, but it was produced using the “pulped natural” process, where the cherry is stripped off, but the mucilage is left on the bean. During the sun drying process the mucilage ferments, endowing the bean with a unique set of flavors that typical production methods do not allow for. I’ve had one other coffee produced this way, the Panama Hartmann Honey from Gimme Coffee, and I remember being struck by how apt the inclusion of the word “honey” in the name was. The coffee was rich, succulent, smooth, and very enjoyable.
And so I was excited to try this aged coffee from Barrington, whose coffees I have been enjoying a great deal lately. It was produced in the Apaneca Mountains of El Salvador, at an elevation of 5100 feet. The coffees from Finca Cerro Las Ranas, owned by the Salaverria family, are certified by the Rainforest Alliance, and this batch is made up entirely of the Bourbon-Paca varietal.
Barrington initially received this shipment in 2007 and stored the coffee for two years in a controlled environment to allow it to mature. Once they felt it had reached its optimal development, they transferred it to hermetically bags to halt any further aging. The result?
The nose is rich with heavy flavors of walnuts and molasses underscored by a trace of subtle smoke. The palate has a luscious, sweet, creamy body, and very subdued acidity. Flavors of caramel, vanilla, toast, cherry skins, and a slight woodiness, rest atop this velvet foundation. The acidity really comes into play in the finish, with the flavor of tart citrus rind quickly giving way to sweet peaches, brown sugar, and milk chocolate.
All in all, an interesting coffee. Rich, but in a subdued way. The nose was not very forthcoming, but the palate and finish brought an interesting collection of flavors that really complemented one another quite well. I can see this being a great deeps-of-winter coffee, when you want a cup that just feels like wrapping yourself up in a blanket to warm up.
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Gimme Coffee Ethiopia Amaro Gayo Organic
I’ve been thinking about coffee quite a bit the past two days. It’s been a dominant theme in my thoughts, spurred in part by a conversation that I had about Intelligentsia Coffee with a co-worker. Without realizing it, I haven’t had Intelligentsia coffee for a long time. In the meantime I’ve tasted a bunch of great coffees, no doubt. But there is something about Intelligentsia that really captured my imagination back when I first began getting more serious about understanding coffee.
And so while I was sipping on this cup of coffee from Gimme, I began to think about why roasters such as Stumptown, Intelligentsia, Counter Culture, and Gimme get me so excited about coffee. It’s not necessarily that their coffees are better than any other roasters’. And it’s not the cool-factor that surrounds certain of them, Stumptown perhaps the most. No, it’s neither of those.
What is so exciting about these roasters is how passionate they are about coffee and the people who grow it. If you read their websites, and follow their blogs, what jumps out of the pages is enthusiasm for finding great coffees, establishing relationships with the farmers that grow them, and enriching the exchange between grower, roaster, and the home coffee maker. This kind of enthusiasm is always compelling to me. Whether it is a brewer, a winemaker, or coffee roaster the consistent theme in the people and companies that hold my attention is their commitment to the culture in which they operate.
Gimme is a great example. Yes, they source great coffees. And yes, they do a great job of roasting them. But they also work very hard to reach out to their customers, to educate them about where the coffees come from, the lives of the people who farmed them, and why the coffees taste the way they taste. They fill in the gaps between the many stories that come together to make up the culture of coffee. Through their words you can learn so much about the tapestry of coffee.
So while other coffee roasters also produce very good, and often great, coffees, it’s the companies who make this extra effort that make me interested in coffee at all. Without them, coffee would be another faceless, colorless product.
So what is the story behind this coffee? The beans were farmed in the Amaro Mountains in the Sidamo region of Ethiopia and processed at the Amaro Gayo mill. This mill is owned by Asnakech Thomas, the only female owner of a coffee mill in all of Ethiopia. Not only that, but she’s also the only female exporter in Ethiopia, and owns 250 hectares of coffee farmland as well. The result is that she has near complete control over the coffee that she produces, from farming to exporting.
This coffee was grown organically, and is wet-processed and sun-dried, as is typical for Ethiopia.
The nose has compelling notes of vanilla, coconut, blueberries, and huckleberries. One of the most wonderfully fragrant coffees I’ve had! The palate has a warm, mellow, slightly voluptuous body with a rind of acidity. Flavors of cocoa,raspberries, and blueberries are underscored by a hint of caramel. The finish is somewhat minty, with blueberries once again prominent.
What a remarkably enjoyable cup of coffee, the kind that just brings a smile to your face first thing in the morning. The berry flavors are very reminiscent of other Ethiopian coffees I’ve had, in particular a couple from Barrington Coffee Roasters. Naturally, my mind ends up roaming back to the questions I’ve been mulling over for so long regarding the role of terroir in coffee. A subject that I’ll have to come back to another time…
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