January is slipping through our fingers. But we have some busy, busy like Grant Green, fingers. There are some stellar new offerings from Rwanda, Kenya, and Colombia just launched on shrub in the last week or so. I've also been gearing up to host the Roasters Guild Executive Council annual January meeting here at shrub mountain headquarters in Fort Collins, CO. It will be a blast having all these folks in town, and on the night of Thursday the 26th there's going to be a coffee rodeo at the very super Cranknstein Coffee Roaster, Bike Shop, Tap Room.
How do you identify good coffee? What is the biggest distinction between good coffee and great coffee? Would you rather have a great coffee or a unique or interesting one? Quality and qualifiers. Such a tricky thing, mainly because what makes a coffee good or interesting or whatever is fairly wide open. I wrote a short opinion piece for the online edition of the Specialty Coffee Chronicle last week about teaching consumers to identify BAD coffee.
Hope everyone is having a great end to their year! It's been an interesting one for sure. I wanted to share two recent articles that I've written for the Sweet Maria's Library. Would be really curious to hear any feedback on both articles from this crowd.
The first article is about Roast Profiling and covers a few exercises too:
The end of 2011 is hurtling towards us like a doomsday meteor, and as is what happens every year I'm reminded of some of my favorite coffees to cup/drink/roast from the last year. One of the exciting parts of the coffee trade is that the most amazing coffee experiences are fleeting and of the moment. We don't have "vintage" in the sense that we can go back and taste a coffee from a particular year, but one of the features of Coffee Shrub and Sweet Maria's that I appreciate immensely is the archive section.
I had a really great time last night at Two Rivers Coffee in Arvada, CO where they hosted this month's Colorado Thursday night latte art rodeo. This is the second one that's been held attracting a pretty large group of folks from all over the state (mostly Denver and north so far). I was happy to see a number of local shrubbers and it was especially cool of Huckleberry Roasters to provide the espresso made up of a blend of Ethiopia Jimma Wakito Madallu and Guatemala San Diego Buena Vista which came out really nicely.
I'm roasting up a bunch of samples to take with me to Portland tomorrow. It will be some random coffees, but a fun cupping for sure. If anyone in Portland is open to hosting on Thursday morning, I'd love to swing by and set these up. I'm going to be in town for some Roasters Guild meetings and also I'm super excited about the Brew Battle that's going down on Thursday night at Sustainable Harvest: http://tinyurl.com/5u2wmgs.
I'm off early tomorrow (actually my ride will be here in about 45 mins) on my way to West Virginia to start setting up the Roasters Guild Retreat. Really looking forward to this year's retreat, we've been working very hard on delivering a challenging and engaging program. I'm most looking forward to seeing everybody who's coming out though. If you are coming out for the retreat and we haven't met, please be sure to introduce yourself.
This week saw the addition of Kenya Kirimara PB as well as the return of Yemen Harasi, two very distinctive coffees with complex flavors that both require careful attention in the roaster as well as some patience and rest in order for them to show their full potential. I think that these coffees offer a very important experience for a roaster; the practice of the afore mentioned patience and making sure to look at coffees more than once and to taste them at different stages of rest, as well as working on finely tuned end of roast decisions.
The Manzano process experiments are up on shrub now. We're very happy to be able to offer the experiments all together as a full set to shrubland this year. Some ideas for presentation of these coffees for your employees and/or customers:
- Roast all 3 to the same degree, serve as a set from a single service brew method.
- Set up a cupping to present the roasted explain the different processes and have an open discussion about the differences found in the cup.
If you have been following us on twitface, you might have noticed that I've been doing fun tastings/pairings/cuppings with some folks at Northern Colorado's Odell Brewing Company, mainly Linsey Cornish one of the brewers who works on their weekly Firkin project. I was really excited to try to do a coffee beer with Odell for a multitude of reasons: 1. Odell makes some really fantastic beers, 2. Specialty coffee has a lot to learn from the Craft Beer industry and we share a common audience (or would very much like to share their audience), and 3.
