Splendid coffees from around your world
My friend Mark has been asking me for a Brazilian coffee that will rekindle his interest in Brazils.. This is one for that… Satisfyingly sweet up front, delicate floral nose, and generally balanced, mild and interesting. More nutty and round in the body (mild)
Roast 2 has more vibrancy and a bit more body. In comparison, the longer development (in roast 1) after 1c muted it’s fruit and floral notes, and slightly muddies the body tones. Not that it’s awful, just not as good.
Bolivia Cup of Excellence: San Ignacio Juana Mamani Huanca.
Not my best effort at the roast. Rushed the warm, and pushed 1rst crack up about 2+ minutes. Shit. And it shows in the cup. Green and tight on the tongue, florals and fruits aren’t well developed. It still has some real nice sweetness that comes out as it cools, but it should be more delicate, balanced than this.
Well, still tweaking the roaster, but damn, wish i’d done this with a coffee that I didn’t have so little of, or that cost so much ($25/lb). Oh well, at least it was only 125g. And I still some.
But, on the bright side of things, I fiddled with the air/fuel ratio on the pinhalense tonight and have a much better flame now, one that has a slight hiss and a good tightly formed flame – not the laziness that it was before. Seems it needed more air (O2). I hope that this means that I’ll be able to mve at least a full load through the times I’m expecting… till now, 300g has been somewhere about a slow 30min. ugh.
This is alertness beautifully balanced with elegant patience. Summery. Well structured. It’s clarity cuts through me like sitting in the sun porch on bright mornings. Bright warmth, eye squinty and attentive.
Beautiful, clean, light and floral sweetness. Grapefruit like undercurrent helps round out structure – especially in the mid range temperatures as the cup cools. It shows a lighter body than most other Brazils – even compared to the more citrusy, nutty sul de Minas region or certain Central American coffees – this tends toward the light side. But don’t take this for thin. It has depth and structure.
Said sample of Brazil Carmo de Minas at a light – city plus – roast in order to preserve the delicateness of the yellow bourbon varietal. You can see that the surface color is still mottled as it hasn’t progressed far enough past first crack to even the surface out… Not a bad thing at this stage of roast. The interior is very even and consistent with the surface color.. and by the way, this is the first roast that I am satisfied with since hooking up the Pinhalense…
Here’s a little slideshow of the new roaster. I’m planning to take some more details this weekend and will post those as well.
cheers
Qishr – tea from coffee husks.
A traditional tea in Yemen made from coffee husks. I mean, yeah! okay, I’m gonna try it – purely out of curiosity. So I got a 1/2 pound of qishr from sweetmarias when I saw it available – no expectations of what it was other than Tom’s description (good, not great. Rosehips. Ginger Tea). But what the hell. I’ve paid more for a cup of coffee that was awful, so at worst, I am better informed and out 5 bucks.
Well, i don’t know if I will actually make it through the entire 1/2 pound I bought. Not that it is all bad, actually, and there are some very interesting things going on in the tea, but it left a pretty acrid and biter finish that was not at all to my liking. And it lasted for a long long time.
Unsealing the bag released powerful aroma of apple, clover, the Portland Rose Gardens in full bloom – an intensity like standing under a magnolia tree in full bloom, but not quite the same syrupy depth. It’s actually very beautiful to see – looking to me a lot like a certain cinnamon and honey encrusted pistachio shells.
Them being husks, I fully expected it to be earthy, spicy, and, well, husky – but that was just not there in the aroma. Just intense fruit like I was sticking my nose in a vat of juiced apples. Maybe all the earth was in the brew?
After that… mildly tea-like, but more like mild, thin good coffee – traces from that same aroma, hints of the sweet rose flavor. Overall, nice.. And then I sat and worked for a while, and then it started showing itself. Bitter. Astringency. Acridity. And it went on for a while.
It was pleasant until that. That harsh acrid overtone – pasting itself across my tongue. Rough, harsh and started killing my buzz. I don’t want to go back to that. It was worse than poorly toasted black tea. Worse than
I think I might try putting some in the oil over a tea light and let it fill the room with its smell. Dim the lights & spin some Tosca. I Want Some Honey. Loud.
Looks like my roaster is shipping tomorrow morning out of Brazil.. I am bouncing off the walls in anticipation.
One thing I meant to write but forgot to add at the end of that last post was, was that the griping that is abounding all over the place only shows that what what the inventors, developers, marketers have all created is not just their own thing. It has taken on a life of it’s own, and the people who have participated in it’s life so far feel (deservedly) attached to that. And that does mean that the idea has a life of its own. Beyond Starbucks… beyond clover…
So even though it sucks right now, and is going to impact the course of specialty coffee – how exactly I am not certain – they had the right to do what they did. And good for them. So, but probably, in a way no one is seeing at the moment (well, 1 person is, but he or she is diligently working in secret, at an accelerated pace…) it will eventually be good for everyone. Remember that Starbucks is at least indirectly responsible for George Howell’s founding of the Cup of Excellence program. And that is a greater deal for specialty coffee than 1000+ Coffee Connections were ever going to be.
First I read this. And I thought, well, if Starbucks wants to put Clovers in their stores, then, I support that. it puts money into a company that deserves to expand. It puts a machine that can be used to help educate people to the variations of different origins, estates, lots, etc in a huge number of stores. Places where asking what an origin is (to the barista) is just a return of blank stares. I am fully aware that it isn’t going to change the mediocrity of their coffee, just as (re)training their baristas for 3 hours isn’t going to turn their shops into a place to go for an exquisite ristretto mean to be savored. But Starbucks isn’t the bottom of the barrel, either.
But then I read the link he pointed to. And my heart sank. Oh shit. Starbucks didn’t purchase a bunch of clovers – which would likely have pushed the price down, making it more reachable to the micro-level, third-wave (insert term of choice) specialty roasters and cafes that really really lust after these things for the sole purpose of being able to present amazing coffees better. They went out and fucking bought the company. I agree with Tom. This is a sad day for specialty coffee.
I guess we all have to start saving for something like blue bottle’s siphon bar.
I was trying to edit a batch of images to Flickr with their batch tool, but the commenting was duplicating anything that I wrote (several times), so I gave up for now and simplified the set I was putting together. I am intending to post all my older designs for the drum—sections, elevations as well as these perspectives—but that will have to wait…
I decided not to go with this design pretty much because I changed my mind about the importance of air control with this batch size. I had convinced myself that at this batch size—80g to 500g—that air flow was less important. but while walking over to a friends home for dinner on night a while back, I re-thought my decision. So I am shifting over to a closed system so that I can adjust air flow much like larger roasters. I am not sure if (or how) I will keep the rest of this design. The dimensions of the chamber itself still feels correct to me, and the vane size and placements as well… I had considered possibly moving to something that agitates the beans in a way to keep them moving off the hot surface of the drum. I am leaning though, toward keeping this setup since I like how it maintains a relatively consistent mass – which my theory (somewhat supported by a scientific article (which I will post a link soon, promise) that the coffee will roast more evenly when it does this. Too much agitation will cause it to roast less evenly. so without much adoo, here are the drawings.
(BTW, notice the new fancy image viewer I found! It’s Pictobrowser a flash plugin written by a couple NYC interaction designers that pulls flickr sets into your site—all contained in this neat little package. The wordpress plugin was written by Kumara Sastry. I altered it a bit to get the original size images to load and so you could zoom them and read the notes… I like it a whole lot. It’s nice)
UPDATE_ I finally got all my drawings from sketchup posted and annotated – well, okay some of the annotations are cut and pasted from other annotations, but whatever… – so they are all in the set now. And if you care, now have a flickr account just for Deft.. you can see what’s there, uhh, here.
