Barrington Coffee Roasters Ethiopian Nekisse Micro Selection One
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… (read more)
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Signatory Ben Nevis 1992 16-Year Cask-Strength Collection
Signatory is a whisky bottler that I’ve been tasting a number of very interesting malts from recently. They have two lines that I’ve been tasting whiskies from, their cask-strength and single-barrel offerings.
The single-barrel offerings have been interesting, and have included both sherry and bourbon casks. Each bottling is reduced to ~43%. Interestingly, many of these feature a very similar quality, a sort of soft luster, similar to old Hollywood films where they would use soft-focus when shooting close-ups of star actresses. These Signatory whiskies all tend to have this overtly pleasant, approachable element to them. They’re quite tasty and enjoyable, but not necessarily thought-provoking.
The cask-strength (often also single-barrel) whiskies are another beast entirely. Each is a pretty unique expression of the distillery in question, and the flavor spectrum tends to be rather dynamic and interesting. The whiskies bottled in their teens have been fairly exciting, and the older whiskies a bit more austere and difficult to approach…. (read more)
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Full Sail Brewing Co. Black Gold Imperial Stout 2009 Release
Full Sail Brewing Company, located in Hood River, Oregon, is one of the breweries that I’ve looked forward to visiting during both of our trips to Portland in recent years. Hood River itself is supposed to be a cool town to visit, and Mount Hood has always been a destination of ours. Yet, despite Mount Hood looming on the horizon from almost anywhere in Portland, beckoning us to come and check it out, we’ve never made it that far east of Portland. Thus, we’ve yet to check out either the mountain or the town, and have not yet visited Full Sail at their home base.
We were fortunate to stop by their Portland tasting room during our last visit. This is definitely not the same as visiting them in Hood River, but it was still pretty cool to see so many of their beers on tap in one place. Several of them were rarities or one-offs, and so we… (read more)
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Gordon & MacPhail Linkwood 1969 33-Year
As time has passed and I’ve had the good fortune to taste a wide range of whiskies, from new make spirit all the way up to 44-year olds, I’ve developed a real respect and affection for older whiskies. While I appreciate and enjoy the brash energy of young whiskies, it’s the greater complexity and stateliness of older whiskies that really has the power to mesmerize me. Time brings lots of benefits to whisky, among them more presence in the glass, and a ripe, richness that comes across as a much different characteristic when the whisky is younger.
Most excitingly, it’s always fun to dive into a really old whisky to see what it has to offer. Because Scotch whiskies past the 30-year mark can be an unpredictable mixed bag, you never really know what you’re going to get. At this point, the whisky has been in the barrel for quite a long time, and so the characteristics that it… (read more)
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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… (read more)
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