Posts Tagged ‘Rwanda’

Posted on July 9, 2008 - by deCadmus

Coffee Notes from All Over

• Super-size me? Not any more. Doug Zell and the gang at Intelligentsia Coffee are ‘just saying no’ to Big Gulp portions of brewed coffee, as they discontinue their 20-oz. serving size. Is it about the bottom line? Doug says no, it’s not that at all…
  

  “Drinking our coffee is not like drinking jug wine,” said Intelligentsia Coffee founder and Chief Executive Doug Zell on Tuesday. “We’re focused on intensity of flavors and providing coffee in the way it tastes best. And it’s not in that size.”

  As a coffee snob, I think it’s a good call… coffee does not want to be slurped in giant takeaway cups. As a commentator on the business of coffee, I worry about the timing: folks are minding their pennies these days, and “value shoppers” may migrate to someplace where they feel they get more caffeine for their buck. ‘Course, that might be offset by an increase in same-day sales… folks who used to buy a Venti to last them the morning may visit twice for two twelve ounce cups. Maybe.

  P.S. Speaking of Zell, have you seen his Amex ad? He’s the new Mr. Big, man.

• Rwanda preps for its first Cup of Excellence! Rwanda is rightly celebrating one coming out party after another… last year it hosted its first Golden Cup competition, and this year it’s joining the ranks of the prestigious Cup of Excellence program.
  

  “As the host country of the first Cup of Excellence competition in Africa, Rwanda will set the stage and create the benchmark for the rest of the quality coffee-producing countries on the continent where coffee was born,” said Susie Spindler, Cup of Excellence director. “The farmers of Rwanda have worked very hard to produce exquisite coffee. We are pleased by the support these farmers have received from even the highest levels of their government and think this competition will have thrilling results.”

  If you’ve been reading here for any length of time you know that I’m extremely happy about the rise of Rwandan coffee — and the consequent lifting-up of the Rwandan people. More, the recognition is well-deserved… through hard work and force of will, Rwandan coffee growers and processors just keep raising the bar on their own performance. Good on them. And congrats to friend-of-Bloggle Stephen Leighton [HasBean], who will be one of the jurists for the first Rwanda CoE. Lucky guy.

• Cold-brewed coffee is hot. It’s the sweaty season (not you: you don’t sweat, you glisten), and folks all over — even in the northern climes — are discovering a whole new way to drink coffee.
  

  Cream and sugar is fine — for children. Once you start messing with the temperature and natural flavor of coffee, it’s a slippery slope ending in frothy, icy, sickeningly sweet concoctions.

  You see, I’m fussy about coffee. I’m the purist sipping a steaming hot cup, even in the dog days of summer.

  Then, one particularly sweltering day in Chicago last month, I broke down and had an iced coffee at a local Caribou Coffee; a large with a vanilla soy topper and one packet of raw sugar, to be precise. I was stunned. This velvety smooth, deeply refreshing, richly satisfying beverage was nothing less than a revelation in caffeine delivery.

  Not so long ago cold-brewed (or “Toddy“) coffee was strictly a B-list brewing method, save for a select set of the javaratti, who knew a cold-brewed concentrate is the ideal foundation for iced coffee.

  Me, I’m still holding out for the Coffee Snob Cold Drip Coffee Maker. Naturally.

Posted on March 26, 2008 - by deCadmus

Intelligentsia Coffee’s Rwanda Golden Cup Melange

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While I’d talked up Rwanda’s Golden Cup competition last September, I’ve only late come to realize that I hadn’t actually tasted any of the coffees from this competition. That couldn’t stand, of course. And so this week the coffee delivery man brought me a package from Intelligentisa Coffee.

Intelligentsia’s greenie, Geoff Watts, was fortunate enough both to jury the competition, and to buy a number of lots… this coffee being an all Bourbon melange of coffees from three districts: Nyamasheke, Huye and Gakenke.

Just ground, this blend’s aromas are clean and sweet, with brown sugar the dominant note. On brewing the sweetness continues with a bit of apple pie spice. In the cup, mango and caramel flavors are accentuated by a shimmering acidity, and buttery, syrupy body. The finish is long, and sweet, and leaves a taste of candied pecans on the tongue.

Sweet. Balanced. Lyrical. This is Zen poetry in a cup.

Recommended, and available at Intelligentsia Coffee.

Posted on October 22, 2007 - by deCadmus

Bikes to Rwanda: Happy Birthday!

Portland’s Stumptown Coffee Roasters has been doing some mighty fine things on the ground in Rwanda for a while now. Stumpies have been key players in the PEARL Project, a public / private partnership with USAID and Michican State University to revitalize agriculture – and life — in post-genocide Rwanda. PEARL has, by any measure, done great things, and among them it’s been instrumental in putting Rwandan coffee on the world stage as an emerging — and now preeminent — coffee origin. (Really! have you tasted Rwandan coffee lately? All kinds of awesome.)

Above and beyond PEARL, however, Duane Sorenson – Stumptown’s founder and chief protagonist — found a need that had gone unmet. The people harvesting coffee in Rwanda’s hilly terrain had to carry heavy loads of coffee cherry from remote growing regions to washing stations. And they had to do it quickly. Cheaply. Reliably. No matter the weather.

Rwandan coffee farmers needed bikes.

Back in Portland, Duane started putting things together. He rounded-up a network of avid sport cyclists and bike messengers (naturally… most all those messengers were fueled by Stumptown coffee already) and started fundraising. He held benefit dinners. Awareness-raising rides. And in a matter of months he had spun off a non-profit organization to focus on the effort, and had 260 custom-built cargo bikes in the ground in Rwanda.

Today Bikes to Rwanda is a year old. (Happy Birthday!) And to-date they have delivered 400 cargo bikes to Rwanda, opened a bicycle repair shop, arranged innovative financing for coffee growers and more. (Maybe you should think about giving them a tax-deductible birthday present?)

Learn all about it: watch the (awesomely) GOOD video, produced by Good Magazine.

Posted on September 3, 2007 - by deCadmus

Rwanda’s Golden Cup — The Results Are In!

It’s Labor Day in these United States — a celebration of the working stiff, the last gasp of Summer — and to mark the event I’ll be… laboring on the garage. (sigh)

I can’t help but take a moment, however, to mark the outstanding results of Rwanda’s Golden Cup competition and auction. In a few short years Rwanda has emerged from its national nightmare to become an increasingly prominent player in the specialty coffee trade, and perhaps nothing to-date has marked this more significantly than the results of the events of the past few days.

The cupping jury has seen some phenomenal coffees, some scoring as high as 95 — even 98! — and the results of the auction itself are now in. The winning bidders? The usual suspects: Stumptown walks away with the top lot from the Muyongwe cooperative, at $25 per pound. Lots from Ngoma, Karaba and Kanzu fetched in the neighborhood of $15/lb. and winning bidders included Zoka, Counter Culture and Intelligentsia.

Look for some of these stunning coffees at a winning roaster — perhaps even before the turn of the year.

Posted on August 8, 2006 - by deCadmus

Tasting… when you can’t taste a thing.

Over the weekend I found myself with an awful head cold, every bit as severe as it proved — thankfully — short-lived. Now a cold most any time is an inconvenience. This time it was distressing. The coffee delivery man had just left some excellent beans on my front porch, and doggone it, I was really looking forward to giving them a taste. And the simple truth was I couldn’t taste a thing. Zero, Zilch. Nada.

So I brewed some coffee anyway. (more…)

Posted on May 8, 2006 - by deCadmus

Tasting: Counter Culture Coffee’s Rwanda Karaba

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100 miles east of Kansas City, Missouri, along the route of Highway 24, you’ll find a pecan the size of a UPS delivery truck. Here, at the confluence of the Grand and Missouri rivers, the fertile bottomlands produce not only roadside attractions worthy of Neil Gaiman’s attention (look for it in his latest work, Yet More American Gods) but also prodigious numbers of black-trunked pecan trees standing in sentinel rows as far as the eye can see. And each tree, in turn, produces prodigious pecans… Oh, they’re not the biggest in the land (that title probably goes to Georgia, despite the many-tonned concrete pecan’s hyperbole) but bite for bite, they’re the tastiest you’ll find anywhere. Nutty, sure… but also buttery, warm and sweet. By flavor alone you might mistake them for cashews… but they’re not one bit tropical, but instead Missouri’s favorite native… er, nut. (more…)

Posted on April 2, 2006 - by deCadmus

Rwanda Reborn as a Premiere Origin

Rwanda — in particular, Rwandan coffee — is enjoying a well-deserved coming out party.

At Green Mountain we celebrated the coffee of Rwanda by offering it as our very first Special Reserve origin. Its reception exceeded our loftiest expectations… Rwanda Karaba-Bourbon proved an exceptionally fragrant, extravagantly sweet and dynamic cup. It sold out within days. (more…)

Posted on January 31, 2006 - by deCadmus

Green Mountain: Special Reserve

From the shameless commerce department:

Lindsey Bolger — Green Mountain Coffee Roasters’ queen bee of green coffee sourcing and farm relationships — has secured a remarkable lot of coffee from Rwanda. It’s a 100% bourbon varietal, all picked in an eleven day period that marked the very peak of the season’s harvest. This tiny lot of coffee is the inaugural offering in Green Mountain’s new Special Reserve line of coffees… exceptional coffees, hand-roasted in small batches, roast-dated and shipped within 24 hours of roasting.

If I sound slightly stoked about this… well, I am! This has been a long time coming. More, since the announcement of the program, nearly the entire lot of coffee has already been pre-ordered… so get yours while the gettin’ is good!