This is one of the two coffees that I came back with after my visit to Barrington Coffee last month. It’s taken me ages to get around to writing about it, but I suppose there’s three reasons for that, 1) it’s summer, and we’ve been keeping busier than usual (which is saying something), 2) it’s summer, and with the rising temps my mind turns less often to thoughts of coffee, so while I drink it each day, putting the thought into writing about it is less common, 3) the World Cup – we’ve turned into soccer/football addicts and have been watching games during nearly all of our spare moments.

Nonetheless, I was lucky to get the chance to try this coffee. It’s unusual in a couple of regards. First off, it’s a peaberry coffee, meaning that the coffee cherry produced only one, rounded coffee bean. Most coffee cherries produce two haves of a coffee bean, which is why each coffee bean ends up having one flat side. Typically, peaberries account for ~5% of the harvest. The second interesting note about this coffee is that it is wet-processed, which is out of the norm for most coffees from Papua New Guinea. When wet-processed, all of the skin, pulp, and mucilage is removed from the coffee bean before it is dried, leading to a brighter coffee. In contrast, most coffees from Papua New Guinea are wet-hulled, whereby most of the skin, pulp, and mucilage is removed from the coffee bean, but not all. The beans are then left to dry for a period of time, typically up to a day, with the remaining mucilage on them. This produces a coffee with a more unique presence in the cup, sometimes a bit earthy, or funky.

The co-op that produces this coffee, Kimel Farms, is also fairly unique. Much of the coffee coming out of Papua New Guinea is from large plantations that have their own mills. In contrast, the Kimel Farms Co-Op incorporates both a central 620 hectare plantation and a number of smaller, privately-owned farms, and it is cooperatively owned by the Opais peoples of the Wahgi Valley, in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea. The farms are located at the high altitude of 5000 feet above sea level, and the varietals grown include Typica, Arusha, Blue Mountain, Mundo Novo, Catimor, and Caturra.

Tasting Notes

The beans were harvested in late December of 2009. Barrington chose a light/City+ roast, which has been my favorite roast level of theirs lately. It produces some very bright, nearly effervescent and exciting coffees. But this could have a lot to do with the time of year as well, since I’m typically a total sucker for Kenyan coffees at other times of the year.

In the cup, the coffee has distinct aromas of tobacco, citrus peel, dark molasses, mint, and cedar. The texture is smooth with a soft mouthfeel and notable acidity. Flavors of black cherries, walnuts, pecans, and fresh strawberry abound. The incredible finish brings gentle waves of melted brown sugar and cocoa powder accented by key lime.

Overall, I thought this coffee was pretty understated. It presented a nice range of flavors, a great finish, and was a pleasure to drink. It didn’t stimulate deep contemplation or outright excitement, but was just plain tasty. We enjoyed it quite a bit as we worked our way through the pound.

A couple of weeks ago I had the good fortune to pay a visit to Barrington Coffee Roasters, over in Lee, Mass. A long-time friend of mine worked there many years ago, and today his coffee shops work with Barrington for all of their coffee needs. Because the visit was something that he and I had talked about for ages, but simply hadn’t gotten around to, he was good enough to organize the field trip during my vacation week.

The timing was perfect. My thoughts had recently turned to questions of coffee seasonality and vintages (as captured in this post), thoughts that coincidentally are of great interest to the owners of Barrington Coffee. So I was pretty excited to visit them and talk about these ideas, so that I could learn more about the nuances that play into them and see what Barrington Coffee is doing along these lines.

The specialty coffee market seems like it’s in a funny place right now. Specialty coffee roasters are offering amazing, very carefully prepared coffees from great sources. These roasters are slowly building a landscape where lots of attention is paid to the details making up the coffee in your cup. The varietals, method of processing, elevation at which the cherries were grown, what micro-region the coffee is from, the background of the farmers or mill owners who produced the coffee beans, and so on. This level of detail gradually builds a story, one that is embodied by the coffee that you’re drinking. In other words, you’re not just drinking a single-origin Ethiopian coffee, but a single-origin, yellow-bourbon varietal, dry-processed, shade-grown coffee from a coop made up of 40 farmers who each farm 1-1.5 hectares of land apiece.

That’s a lot of information to digest, but is it the full story?

Herein lies the reason that my mind drifted towards questions of seasonality and vintages. Without question, there are pieces missing in the story making up specialty coffees today, details left out or as yet uncovered. And prominent among these are questions of how seasonality affects coffee, and whether vintage quality plays a role in the final quality of the coffee in your cup. I’m not content to know bits and pieces of a given coffee’s story, I want to know the nuances. And I’m not alone. Coffee can be wonderful and engaging, but leaving out the story is leaving out the romance.

The more I thought about this, the more I came to believe that the two concepts of seasonality and vintages are closely intertwined, and pulling them apart to look at separately is a bit thorny. In the end, this had a lot to do with the outcome of my discussion with Barrington co-owner Barth Anderson. He was generous enough to spend a few hours of his day discussing the topic, sampling both green and roasted coffees, and taking us on a tour of the roasters. But, in the end I felt like I was no closer to an understanding than I had been previously. The conversation took many twists and turns, followed numerous threads, I learned a ton, and – as the best conversations usually do – I ended up with more questions than answers, and certainly more questions than I had arrived with.

The gist of what I came away with was:

1. Yes, seasonality and vintages play a large role in the quality of any given coffee. The weather patterns of a season have a huge impact both on the size of a crop and the quality, and therefore the same tree will not produce the same coffee two vintages in a row. The differences may be nuanced, but they are there.
2. How weather affects the final flavor of a coffee is not clear. How does temperature affect the finished quality of a coffee? How about rainfall? Shade vs. sun-grown? Many questions remain to be thoroughly explored here.
3. As a tree matures, the quality of its coffee will change. This will undoubtedly play into the quality of a coffee from one vintage to the next. Think of the role of old-growth vines in producing fine, vintage wines.
4. Maintaining a coffee’s state for one or more years, so that you can directly assess the relative quality of different vintages, is a problematic and very tricky endeavor. Storage mechanisms and temperature, and ideal serving methods for vintage coffees remain wholly unanswered questions.
5. As well, what coffees age better than others also remains an open question. Whether coffee from one region is more appropriate for aging than coffee from another is not entirely known, as well as what qualities a coffee needs to have in order to be age-worthy.

These are all questions that Barrington Coffee is very interested in, and has been exploring the answers to for several years. In their warehouse they’ve got bags and bags of beans representing several vintages of specially sealed coffees from several origins, representing the fruits of their awesome Landed Aging Program. And during our discussion, they brought out a wealth of information based on their experiences in aging coffees, specifically concerning which coffees age most gracefully, and what preparation methods best suit aged coffees. We also had the opportunity to talk about the profound varietal differences that can exist within single lots of coffee, and to begin exploring the question of which varietals are most suited to aging.

As I said, I came away with more questions than answers. But enough questions to fuel both further speculation and, hopefully, future conversations with the folks at Barrington Coffee. The conversation about aged coffees, vintages, and seasonal variation in quality is at a nascent stage, and while it may be taking place just in a small part of a small group of dedicated coffee enthusiasts, I believe that it’s an incredibly valuable conversation to have on a broader scale. Coffee deserves serious attention and consideration, and investigation into these questions, however hard they may be to answer, and however limited the apparent impact of their answers may be, is a relevant next step in elevating the level of that conversation.

As for this coffee, what is there to say? Lots! The Ethiopian Nekisse Micro Lot Selection One was harvested in December 2009 in the Sidamo/Shakiso region of southern Ethiopia. The trees grew at an altitude of 5904 feet, and the beans are made up of mixed heirloom varietals that were dry-processed. The beans came to Barrington by way of Ninety+Plus Coffee, a project begun by Joseph Brodsky whose mission is to deliver fine, unique small lots of coffee to specialty coffee roasters. They previously worked with Ninety+Plus to source their Ethiopian Beloya Selection Eight, which was magnificent.

Tasting Notes

The nose has notes of brown sugar, cinnamon, blackberries, and blueberries. The palate is fresh, with brightening acidity complementing a lithe, well-textured body sporting flavors of fresh berries, mint, kiwi, oak, and hazelnut. The finish has notes of bittersweet chocolate, blood oranges, and a subtle fruitiness, accompanied by a balancing acidity.

I tasted this coffee after preparing it in a french press. I also made it in a single-cup filter, and must say that the flavors came across quite different. Using the filter, the coffee was much more delicate, with brighter, strawberries. In the french press, the coffee was denser, with darker fruit flavors. At Barrington, we tasted the coffee from a vacuum coffeemaker–which is possibly the superior brewing technique. As a testament to the coffee’s quality, the coffee was delicious (albeit different) by all of these preparation techniques, so you can’t really go wrong here.

This Nekisse is carefully sourced, impeccably roasted, well-packaged (Barrington includes roast dates on their packaging now!), and presents wonderfully in the cup. The information they’ve included, both on the packaging and on their website, tells a good deal about the coffee, and gives you a fair notion of where this coffee came from, and why it is what it is.

All in all, a truly excellent cup of coffee. One that really opens up your taste buds, and your senses, and gets your thoughts perking first thing in the morning.

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.

This coffee from Gimme Coffee of Ithaca, NY, demonstrates one of the reasons that I’m so drawn to coffees from small(er) roasters such as this. Take a quick glance at Gimme’s page for the Guatemala Asobagri and you’ll see a plethora of information about all of the initiatives that the Asobagri Cooperative is undertaking to improve the lives of its farmers and to their effect on the environment. This is a common theme among many of the producers that Gimme works with, as well as roasters such as Stumptown, Barrington, and others. A big part of the reason for this, is the effort these roasters are making to work with producers who are undertaking these initiatives.

It’s a circle of sorts. The smaller roasters are drawn to the efforts of these cooperatives to produce better coffee, lessen their effect on the environment, and improve the lives of their farmers. In turn, by working with them, and in many cases being willing to pay higher rates for their coffees, the roasters are helping to ensure that the cooperatives can continue these efforts. This is even more explicit in cases where the coffee is sourced directly by the roasters.

The case of Guatemala’s Asobagri Cooperative is especially interesting. The cooperative was founded in 1989 by 20 farmers, and has since grown to encompass 686 members spread throughout four communities. The coop runs workshops in organic production methods for its farmers, and is certified Fair Trade, Organic Crop Improvement Association, and Smithsonian Bird Friendly. The coop offers literacy classes to its member communities, and at this time over 100 members participate in reading and writing workshops, while at the same time the coop invests money in a health fund for its members. And the coop seeks to lessen its members’ impacts on the environment by offering workshops in sustainable agriculture, crop diversification, and apiculture.

That’s an impressive array of initiatives that the coop is undertaking. But, in the end, how does the coffee pan out?

Tasting Notes

The Asobagri Cooperative is located in the Huehuetenango region of Guatemala. The coffee was grown in volcanic soil, under the shade of banana, guava, and plantain trees, and planted among cardamom, banana, and citrus plants. The varietals include bourbon and caturra, that were washed and sun-dried.

The nose has delicate, enticing notes of vanilla, jasmine, and bakers chocolate. The texture is soft and balanced, with a light acidity that stacks up well against the coffee’s flavors of whole wheat toast, table grapes, orange pith, and a hint of rum. The finish is vibrant with citrus rind and and fruit flavors.

Very drinkable, enjoyable coffee. I liked it best in the morning, when its soft texture and weaving of flavors played well together in waking my senses up for the day.

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.