Archive for November, 2003

Tasting: Santa Elena Tarrazu Miel

Rating: ★★★★☆

Coffee is a fruit, you know… Sipping the cup in front of me, this simple truth is underlined. The cup is lush, heavily fruited with black cherry, and reveals a sweet tobacco finish. Oh… and it’s from Costa Rica. The coffee is Santa Elena Tarrazu Miel. Now, Santa Elena is a big coffee farm in Tarrazu, Costa Rica. Big enough they have their own mill… and big enough that when the top 10% or so of their coffee meets specialty coffee standards, it’s a lot of coffee. Erna Knutsen, the grand damme of the specialty coffee trade [and the originator of the term Specialty Coffee] convinced the folks at Santa Elena to process this coffee, this very fine Tarrazu coffee, like folks in Sumatra do… a “semi-wash” process that left the pulp of the fruit on the bean while it dried. Unheard of!

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This space intentionally left blank……in loving memory of the post I carefully crafted, and lost on a whim of the web session gods, who in their wisdom, declared I had timed out, and thus was not worthy of their sacrifice of electrons. …

El Salvador “San Francisco.”

Coffee of the day… El Salvador “San Francisco.” Exquisitely bright coffee at City roast [another way to say, wow! what an acidy coffee]. Lovely, complex cup at Full City plus… and its got the guts to go well into second. Burnt orange aromas, black tea and berry …

Bigger, better, badder, more…

I have never been content for terribly long. This is a part of my character, such as it is. It’s shown itself, over the years, in my tastes for cars, computers, and electronic gadgets of all stripes… in other words: stuff. [It has decidedly not shown itself in terms …