Posts Tagged ‘Ethiopia’

Posted on November 14, 2008 - by deCadmus

PT’s Sidamo Special Prep

At PT’s Coffee, blondes have more fun. No, really.

When’s the last time you had a blonde coffee? What’s that, you say? Never? Well it’s about time that changes…

Okay, so maybe it’s not really a blonde roast… that stuff’s most often halted before first crack (and the ginger-colored grounds brewed with sugar and cardamom; it tastes like chai.) No matter what you call this extraordinary light-roasted, natural process Sidamo — cinnamon roast, New England roast, maybe — it’s spectacular.

Fresh from the grinder this coffee will fill your kitchen with the aromas of fresh strawberries and blueberries. Its flavors are a tremendous expression of fruit — sweet strawberry, blueberry and tart cherry — with an undercurrent of Cavendish tobacco. It’s body is mild (a fair trade-off what with that roast and all) and its finish is long, graciously tart and a teensy bit dry.

All in all it’s one remarkable coffee, and, I think, a testament to the  skills on display at the roaster. A coffee this light could be a disaster! But this one’s a dream.

Highly recommended and a steal at under $17.00 a pound. So go get some while the gettin’s good.

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Posted on August 13, 2008 - by deCadmus

Coffee Notes from All Over

• The cool kids at Barismo do a deft take on a David Letterman style top-ten list with 10 Reasons Coffee Doesn’t Taste Like the Bag Descriptions.
  

  Number 10 – Juan Valdez is dead. Get over it.
  Number 9 – The marketing team ran out of ways to say, “tastes just like coffee, but better.”
  Number 8 -  Two words: cat poo.

  Okay…  none of these are actually on Barismo’s list, I’m just feelin’ punchy.

• Despite the fact that it gets a lot of the salient facts about coffee and health right on the money, I got a beef with the recent NY Times’ health article — Sorting Out Coffee’s Contradictions — for perpetuating the myth that Howie Schultz was the founder of Starbucks…
  

  When Howard D. Schultz in 1985 founded the company that would become the wildly successful Starbucks chain, no financial adviser had to tell him that coffee was America’s leading beverage and caffeine its most widely used drug. The millions of customers who flock to Starbucks to order a double espresso, latte or coffee grande attest daily to his assessment of American passions.

  To set the record straight, Schultz *left* Starbucks — the company founded in 1971 by Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegl, and Gordon Bowker  — to start his own coffee company, Il Giornale, in 1985. Two years later Howie bought out the original Starbucks’ stakeholders with the profits from his new company and the help of a few investor friends, and bundled everything under the name of the coffee company that made its bones on Pike Place… Starbucks. So there.

• The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation plans to help coffee farmers in Africa boost their agronomy skills and coffee processing capabilities in an big dollar effort directed by the good people of Technoserve. Which is a very cool thing to do, and all the more remarkable as it allows me to additionally note that Bill Gates — not that Bill, his *dad* Bill Gates, Sr. — was was of the original investor friends that allowed Howie Schultz to buy out Starbucks from its original founders in 1987.Small world, huh?

Posted on February 17, 2008 - by deCadmus

On Coffee, Trademarks, and Appellations

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: An multinational coffee company is using its corporate power — more the point, its litigating muscle — to determine who has rights to a geographic place name for the purpose of establishing a trademark. Ethiopia, you say? That whole Yirgacheffe / Harrar / Sidamo rumble with Starbucks? Oh, that’s so last year! Sure, Starbucks opposed Ethiopia’s plan to trademark its regional names, but eventually they realized the writing on the wall read, “Public Relations Nightmare,” especially after their ill-advised YouTube PR campaign backfired. In the end, in the face of pressure from an international coalition of activists, Starbucks did the right thing.

No, the story that’s beginning to get some legs today is between the farmers in the Gayo Mountain region of Sumatra and the Holland Coffee Group, an international coffee importer/exporter with offices in Amsterdam, New York and San Francisco. Where Starbucks merely blockaded Ethiopia’s attempts to acquire its own trade names, Holland Coffee Group has upped the ante to something on the order of full-blown trademark piracy, actually registering marks for Gayo Mountain Coffee in the U.S. and Europe, and then demanding that Gayo Mountain coffee farmers refrain from using that name under threat of legal action. That name — Gayo — which is not only where they live… but is also their tribal name.

I really don’t know a heck of a lot about Holland Coffee Group. They could be really super people. I’m sure they have a lot invested in the success of Gayo Mountain — both in the region itself, and the coffee-growing communities there. Surely they entered into this effort with the intent to protect the investments that they’ve made. I can’t imagine what’s led to such blatant and foolish corporate strong-arm tactics. (Actually, I can… but greed doesn’t require a lot of imagination.) Meanwhile I can only worry that it’s likely to end very badly for everyone involved… and honestly, the Aceh region of Sumatra has seen hardship enough over the years.

Maybe Holland Coffee should read their Aesop.

A man and his wife had the good fortune to possess a goose which laid a golden egg every day. Lucky though they were, they soon began to think they were not getting rich fast enough, and, imagining the bird must be made of gold inside, they decided to kill it in order to secure the whole store of precious metal at once. But when they cut it open they found it was just like any other goose. Thus, they neither got rich all at once, as they had hoped, nor enjoyed any longer the daily addition to their wealth.
– Aesop’s Fables

Meanwhile, until there’s some serious progress made on international protection for appellations, it’s very likely that the corporate thuggery will continue.

Posted on January 9, 2008 - by deCadmus

Sumatra Mandheling — Age Defying Coffee?

After a bit of a hiatus I’m back at the roaster in the garage. Why the break? It’s been chilly lately — it’s winter in Vermont, after all — and besides, my roaster doesn’t perform so well when the ambient temperature is anything less than 40 degrees. Neither do I fare all too well hanging around waiting for it to get its heat on. Oh sure, I know there’s hard-core roasters who don their parkas and mittens to roast outdoors all times of the year. That kind of insane and slavish devotion I save for barbecue alone, thanks.

I haven’t ordered any new green coffee of late (see the bit about it being cold) and so what I have left is really remnants of seasons past… in some cases, several seasons past. Some Ethiopian coffees from the last eCafe competition, Guatemalan greens from the spring before, and some Sumatra from — gosh, I really can’t be sure — maybe two years ago?

And so I roasted some of just about everything.

The Ethiopian coffee is quite decent, really. For a day or two, anyway; and then the cup just sort of… winds down. Aromatics are fleeting, flavors fading. It’s not a tragic thing, really. It’s just tired.

The Guatemalan beans have a similar tale to tell. Notably, they roast dry and hot — they’ve apparently lost a lot of moisture — and the cup quality is not only faded, but also bitter. Very much so.

The Sumatran beans — the oldest of the lot — well they’re something of a different story. They roast well within parameters I might expect of new crop beans. Fresh from the roaster the cup is quite nice (if a bit sharp.) In a day or two, they’re still quite good; caramel and cocoa aromas, turf and bittersweet chocolate flavors, long and mellow finish. And enough so that I suspect they could keep this up a week more (though I don’t know that they’ll last that long… herselfis a big fan of the coffees of Sumatra.)

Is it something about how Sumatran coffees are processed at the mill that lends them more staying power? Not necessarily… the eCafe Ethopian I sampled was a dry-process (or natural) too.

Was there perhaps more moisture in these beans to begin with, so that they’ve retained more over time? I don’t know… but if there was *that* much moisture I’d wonder that there hadn’t been something icky growing in the bag with them. And besides — they’re more than twice as old as the other beans I’d roasted of late.

Is it something about Sumatra? After all, there’s lots of beans that are marketed as Aged Sumatra… how many other origins actively market aged beans? On purpose? Um… I’m thinking. And coming up empty.

Maybe it’s really about the characteristics the coffee started with. The Ethiopian and Guatemalan beans were both bright, acidy, fruit-forward cups; the Sumatran earthy and dark-toned even when it was young. Perhaps fruit and floral esters are more delicate, more prone to age, while dusky chocolate just gets… mellow.

Posted on August 15, 2007 - by deCadmus

Natural Decaf (Really!) — One Step Closer to Market

Coffee researchers in Ethiopia have started planting seedlings of a naturally low-in-caffeine coffee varietal that was found growing in the wild three years ago. Apparently the dust-up that followed that discovery — a pissing match between the Brazilian coffee researcher who “found” the plants and the government of Ethiopia which claimed the plants were taken without permission — has been settled.

“Coffee research centres are in the process of planting seedlings of natural coffee with low caffeine varieties, to enable Ethiopia to supply the world market within the shortest possible time,” said Abera Deressa, State Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development.

Don’t step out line for the processed stuff just yet, decaf fans. It’ll still be four years before this planting is mature enough to offer any potential for commercial sale… and even then, there’s still the matter of whether it will taste good.

Speaking of which, Agriculture Minister Deressa further used the occasion to urge researchers to develop coffees with higher yields:

“Although Ethiopia is home to arabica coffee with high generic diversity, the national average yield has not exceeded five to six quintals per hectare, which is lower than in other coffee producing countries,” he said.

Crap…

Um… Minister? Dude? We’ve been there. Done that. Planting varietals that boost coffee yields has always proved a disaster. Every. Single. Time.

Plant your fancy decaf coffee. We’re totally cool with that. Hey, it might even sell! But leave the heirloom varietals alone, okay? The world wants quality coffee and Ethiopia knows how to deliver.

Don’t mess with it.

Posted on August 14, 2007 - by deCadmus

Ethiopian Shanta Golba Natural Process Sidamo

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You may recall that I was pretty chuffed with Green Mountain’s 2006 eCafe Gold Competition auction lot — Ethiopian Shanta Golba Natural Process Sidamo. If you don’t recall (or don’t wanna click) here’s the particulars:

Extremely fruited, with peach and blueberry aromas, and a little whiff of cocoa and cinnamon when wetted. Fruit plays large in the flavor, too… blueberry, strawberry, spiced peach and cardamom, with a dark chocolate understory. The finish, while not everything it was a year ago, it still sweet and resonant, and fades to a pleasant, dusky leather. Yeah, this is one of those coffees you think about dabbing behind your ears, too.

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Posted on July 20, 2007 - by deCadmus

Ethiopian Shanta Golba Natural Process Sidamo

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You make your picks, you takes your chances… that’s how it goes when you bid on coffee at auction. Will the coffee be everything that you found in the auction sample? Will it be shipped carefully and travel well? Will it arrive — and clear customs — sometime in the next… Idunno, twelve months, maybe?

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Posted on May 25, 2007 - by deCadmus

From the Bloggle Archives: The Legend of Kaldi

So little time, so many things to do… in lieu of continued empty space where new posts should be, here’s a classic from the Bloggle’s Coffee History Series: The Legend of Kaldi –

Once upon a time, in a faraway land called Ethiopia � or maybe Abyssinia, it was a very long time ago, after all � there lived a young goatherd named Kaldi. By all accounts [and there are many, as the story has been retold many, many times] Kaldi was a very responsible young man, and not one to do foolish things.

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Posted on May 16, 2007 - by deCadmus

Waxing Nostalgic: The FreshRoast Coffee Roaster

All this talk of home-roasters and roasting in one’s very own kitchen has got me waxing nostalgic. And so I dug around the roasting bench in the garage and excavated my very first coffee roaster — the FreshRoast — and after a bit of dusting and inspecting to make sure that all was in apparent working order, I started roasting coffee. The neurotic golden retriever — a creature who’s memory is clearly better than I’ve had any reason to believe — ran for cover. Fortunately (at least so far as the dog is concerned) while I did fill the house with the aroma of roasting coffee, I did not set off the smoke alarms. Honestly, when you’re roasting about 2 ounces of coffee at a time, you’d have to really throw yourself into it and put some serious dark on those beans to create a lot of smoke. (more…)

Posted on April 13, 2007 - by deCadmus

Coffee Notes, Friday the 13th Edition

I really want to continue the organic coffee thread (and I will) but I’m putting in altogether too much time on a super-duper-secret, very special, Special Reserve coffee for Green Mountain. Happily I won’t have to keep it secret much longer (I hate keeping secrets!)

Meanwhile… here’s fodder for your Friday the 13th. (more…)