Bull's blood and Sulawesi, oddly, are related in my mind. I will be in Sulawesi in July and, rather unpleasantly, bulls blood is exactly what they spill at the funeral season (July-August) in Toraja. I'll explain the relevance ... really, I will ... I have been working on two new additions over the last few days and they are finally activated today (trying to get this done before the US>UK world cup game!) The Sulawesi AA Toarco replaces the Peaberry lot, and has a different flavor profile.
If you want to make an unconventional Central America coffee, you might dry-process it on African beds and get a fruity weird cup. But if you want to do something really wild with an Indonesian coffee, known as the dirtball flavor profile of the coffee word, well... do a Central Amercia style wet-process and make it bright, clean, lively, sweet. That would describe Sulawesi Toarco Wet-Process Peaberry.
I uploaded a video to youtube about green coffee freshness and seasonality, basically a spontaneous monolgue of random thoughts, while I was roasting a bunch of super-fresh Guatemala samples. It's a "talking head" video, not very exciting, but I hope there are a couple ideas of use there... -Tom
I was looking at the actual charges for Coffee Shrub orders and it looks like I can offer further discounts. The way our UPS contract is structured, with incentive pricing, delivery area surcharges, fuel surcharges, etc etc, it is hard to figure out up front what it will cost to ship a package. It is a lot more like buying a new car than you would think - which is crazy! But I am wading through the details, will be refunding customers on orders where we overcharged folks, and building the shipping calculator so it returns better pricing. Maria
Happily, there were quite a lot of Shrub orders before the holiday and all throughout. Thanks! On the flip side, we are working on limited hours and with a bit less staff. The main man who has been fulfilling your orders, Josh, is out, and with the rest of the crew so busy with Sweet Maria's shipping, I (Tom) stepped in to do all the packaging. And it was a lot of packaging at that! (My sample roaster is being retooled anyway, so there was a cupping room hiatus).
Chris Schooley was here for a long weekend and we did massive amounts of cupping and such. We looked at all the lots for calibration purposes and to flesh out a few comments on the reviews. We ran a lot of coffees through the Giotto espresso machine to look at them as SO espresso. We have also added El Salvador Los Luchadores Pacamara today. It's an amazing cup, the best I can remember from this coffee; complex, syrupy body, sweet.
I spent the last part of the week catching up after a week off the beaten path in Peru (which should yield a nice micro for shrub). We have 2 new lots lined up, but not quite ready for full release. I'll be working on that next week. Chris Schooley is here for the weekend for extensive cupping, and we'll be running a lot of coffees through the espresso machine to test SO possibilities as well. -Tom
Thanks to those who placed orders - they are on the way, and I am sorry to say you are going to be our guinea pigs as well, polled about when the box arrives and how it is packed. We have put a lot of work into choosing the vacuum pack material and the size of the packs. It's easy to ship a couple pounds in a vac bag, but much more difficult to do 15 lb. packs. And UPS is brutal on heavy boxes. We'll be moving to a metalized nylon bag this week - we liked clear nylon so you can see the coffee, but we want the strongest seal possible.
Basically, we are set to start. The coffees are lined up and ready. Chris Schooley has been plugging in extra-colorful descriptors. Now, we don't expect a big rush through the door, but we're ready anyway. There's a few things to tweak in terms of the site layout, and we'll be adding further functions. But in general we're set and ordering is activated.
