Category: Coffee
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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Stumptown Coffee Roasters Colombia El Jordan
Prior to us going on our totally awesome and relaxing vacation, most of the coffee that I had been drinking I had roasted myself. This past Christmas Erin had gotten me a home-roasting machine and a few pounds of green beans. But it wasn’t until July that I really got the hang of home-roasting and felt like the coffee I was making was pretty good. And since green beans are so inexpensive relative to roasted coffee, a few pounds went a long way.
Next thing I knew, I hadn’t bought coffee from any of my favorite roasters for a while. But when we were in Portland I couldn’t resist the chance to pick up some freshly roasted coffee from Stumptown. And since we were on vacation, I decided to branch out from my recent African-coffee-obsession and picked up this Latin American coffee. I couldn’t really resist Stumptown’s tasting notes.
The beans making up this lot of coffee are all from farms that are members of two cooperatives, APCEJOR and ACEDGA. The farms are located in central-western Colombia in the municipality of Planadas, in the Tolima province, just a bit south of the Nevado del Tolima volcano, a 5200 foot tall mountain that last erupted in 1943. The lot includes beans that were harvested from each day of the harvest season, all of which were grown at an altitude of 1500-1800 meters, and includes the Caturra, Typica, and Colombia varietals.
After harvesting, the cherries are de-pulped using hand-cranked machines. They are then left to ferment for 12-16 hours before being washed and laid out to dry on parabolic drying beds. These are long, rectangular structures mildly similar to greenhouses, except that they are open on both ends. The beans are laid out on raised plastic mats that have holes in the bottom to allow the moisture to escape. The drying process typically takes 7-14 days, until the moisture level in the beans reaches 10-12%. This drying system is common on all but large-scale farms in Colombia, and has the unique benefit of freeing the growers from having to move the coffee in the event of rain.
Because I hadn’t had any Latin American coffees, with their typically brighter more citrusy flavor profile, in a while, I was looking forward to digging into this bag of coffee. And let me tell you, a cup of this first thing in the morning really woke up my senses.
The nose has flavors of figs, toast, cinnamon. The palate leads off with bright, sparkling acidity that complements the flavors of cherry stones, orange rinds, lemongrass and – curiously – toasted marshmallows. Underscoring these flavors is a slightly heavy undercurrent of caramel. The finish is the where the citrus flavors really blossom though, carrying bright notes of oranges and lemons through a long, slow crescendo.
A very nice coffee, highly enjoyable and a perfect complement to the cooler mornings that we’ve had of late. As obsessed as I’ve been with African coffees, I wasn’t too far gone to really enjoy and appreciate this lot. Definitely recommended.
P.S. This is my 100th post, which I think is pretty cool. I began writing this as a lark almost a year ago, and while it really still is a lark (I don’t think anyone reads it but me), I get a real kick from writing here. And I think it’s especially cool that a Stumptown coffee was the subject of my 100th post, since it’s companies like them that really inspire to think so much about these topics!
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