Yay! I love Panamanian coffee—mild, delicate floral and brown sugary sweet cups that are sheer Nirvana at a light roast. It was a light-roast washed Bourbon from Boquete that first made me a coffee drinker to begin with. What a revelation—Coffee can have flavor that isn’t bitterness and burned tires!

Anyway, the lovely traditional Panamanian stuff went away about ten years ago as coffee leaf rust (roya), land speculation and low coffee prices caused many of the farmers to quit coffee altogether. Some didn’t, however, and they looked for more disease-resistant varietals that would fetch a higher price, one more in line with the cost of growing high-end coffee. They found one, and it has been very successful. Moreover, its margin allows farmers to economically produce some more familiar kinds of specialty-grade coffee as well.

Over the last decade, gesha (sometimes spelled geisha but not related to the Japanese courtesan) has been successfully grown in Western Panama, and it has gained a following among light-roast enthusiasts. Gesha is an Ethiopian cultivar with a very floral flavor and a high price (would be $40/lb or more.) I think it tastes like a cross between black tea and coffee. I don’t generally stock it because it’s way more expensive than our other offerings and appeals to a very few. Still, if you ever want Gesha, email me. I’ll price it out and get back to you. Meanwhile give thanks for Gesha; it’s why I can get some delicious Bourbon and Typica lots, like the one coming back to our offering list next week. Yay!

Enjoy your coffee!

s

We are trying out a monthly plan to designate some of our offerings as On Sale. They will sell at a discount and you will probably get an upgrade on the size because I need to reclaim some space in the inventory room. I hope you will also see this as a sign you need to try something different, as well.

So what’s on sale in May?

Rwanda “Mille Collines” Bourbon is a sweet younger sister to the best Kenyan coffees. Slightly less assertive in the acidity department, Rwanda goes for black tea-like acidity rather than the grapefruit. There is some baking spice and maybe raisin notes as well. The preparation was absolutely pristine on this lot. It’s a good time to try it.

Sulawesi “White Eagle” Pulped Natural is a cleaner, less rustic version of a classic Sumatra. Notes of cedar, black licorice and herbs with a hint of tobacco characterize the medium roasts–quite interesting and tasty. Going darker, it develops a bittersweet chocolate base with a more Sumatra-y profile. It would be a shame to only try these Indos dark roast (though they are so good in espresso).

DECAF Classic Espresso Blend. Speaking of espresso, we are offering a sale on the classic espresso blend this month. It’s got big body for a decaf plus a lot of flavor, too. No robusta coffee in the blend means that you will get less crema in your espresso shots, but there won’t be any burned rubber tire flavors, either. I’m guessing you will get used to that. 🙂

If you have any questions, please reach out to [email protected].

Enjoy your coffee!

s

As I discussed in the last post, the varietal of coffee in your cup has a major impact on the characteristics you like and don’t like. Varietals and cultivars are the DNA-level determinants of what single-origin coffee tastes like. Processing and roast levels are the other two major factors, but they can only amplify what the basic raw material is there to begin with.

As you may already be aware, coffee we drink today primarily comes from two branches of the coffee tree of life: arabica and robusta. This depiction of all the known varieties and species of coffee from Cafe Imports (thanks!) helps us visualize the relationships. Click the image for a full-size version, and prepare to be awed.

Arabica and Robusta. The two species we drink today, arabica and robusta grow naturally, as does liberica (which I understand tastes terrible) and canephora which exists commercially only as an input to certain hybrids. Robusta has very high caffeine content and is what produces the bitter burned-tire flavors to popular commercial espresso and cheap grocery store coffees. Major espresso chains who want their shots to major on bittering, dark roast flavors and volumous crema will add somewhere between 10% and 30% robusta to their blends. NanoRoast never uses robusta, even in espresso blends.

Ethiopians? Arabica coffees include all Bourbon and Typica and their hybrids as well as wild Ethiopian heirloom varietals that are so prized. We won’t discuss Ethiopians much here; they are subject to a lot of secrecy. Only one, Gesha, is being widely planted in Central America as a high-priced specialty—a delicacy in the coffee world. It’s very floral while other Ethiopian heirlooms are fruity. All this said, many of the Ethiopian naturals I prepare for you look pointed like Typica.

Bourbon. Bourbon varietals trace to coffees brought from the island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean by French missionaries in the early 18th century to East Africa, the Caribbean and eventually to Mexico and South America. These well-behaved beans are roundish and usually small to medium sized. They produce mild, nutty or floral coffees such as classic Burundi, Panama and Colombian and make high-rated pristine cups when washed-processed.

Typica.  Typica varietals and their hybrids travelled from Ethiopia primarily to Yemen, India and finally Indonesia. You can still find them in the Americas, but they predominate in Asia. Larger, pointed and tending toward fruity flavors, Typica has provided a versatile canvas for different processing methods such as natural dry processing in Yemen, washed processing in India and wet-hulling in Indonesia, each producing very different variations on the fruity theme.

Next time: A Look at My Favorite of Today’s Hybrids, Mutations and Cultivars

I’m back to talking about coffee today, specifically one important element in the coffees I choose to offer for your coffee enjoyment. Today, let’s consider varietals as an important  tip-off to what to expect in the cup.

Want to know why an heirloom Ethiopian tastes different from an estate-grown Brazil? There are three major pieces to cup profile:

1. how I select, roast, and blend it,
2. how the producer prepared the coffee cherries harvested,
3. the raw DNA of the plant producing the coffee cherry.

Role of Terroir, Whatever That Is... These all interact within a context called terroir–those environmental characteristics in which the plant grows, including altitude, soil composition, temperature and humidity at key points in cherry development, how stressed the plant was from disease and insect attacks, amount and kind of fertilizer used, and so on almost forever. These are the same things your local wine snob goes on about when raving about a cabernet sauvignon from his/her favorite vineyard. I mention terroir because it’s a wild card that keeps anyone from making a definitive pronouncement about what a particular coffee will taste like in the specifics. Nevertheless, we can still get clues as to how the coffee plant has adjusted to the place where it grows, just like grapes do.

What do I need to know about varietals? Just as you might be able to distinguish a Granny Smith apple from a Honeycrisp just by taste and might develop a preference for the sweeter Honeycrisp over the tart Granny Smith, so a Bourbon coffee bean grown anywhere will tend to produce a clean, clear taste profile that’s a bit floral and sweet while a Djember will tend herbal and rustic even if it’s not grown in Sumatra and wet-hulled. So think of varietal as the canvas upon which the artist paints–is it a canvas, side of an old block building or a slab of wood? All these can provide a decent foundation for a painting, but the differences are key to the artist’s intent and users’ enjoyment. Getting to know your varietals can give you a good idea of what the basic foundation of your cup tastes like. I’ll follow up in another post to discuss some of my favorite varietals and what they tell us.

Why does the varietal matter?  Finally today, before we dive into the specifics, let’s mention the reason varietal matters. The shorter answer is twofold: 1) varietals are what’s in the coffee’s DNA; 2) mutations happen, diseases happen, market needs change and bigger climate change makes some coffee varieties obsolete. Varietals can be developed or selected to guide the way those changes happen, so that we still like drinking coffee and farmers will still grow it.

Role of farmers. Farmers have been tinkering with coffee plants since the beginning to favor those that produce bigger crops, resist disease and/or are more conducive to local processing methods, eg, availability of water primarily. Over time, these natural and man-made hybrids are selected, sometimes in spite of degradation in quality of flavor if the market demands it. Growers can reasonably assume that if most of the world wants cheap, dark-roast instant (sorry but true) , then the extra work the older, disease-prone, smaller-yield high-end just isn’t worth the work. Fortunately, there is a growing population of people who think really good coffee is worth the premium. For those, the labor of love that these traditional varietals represent is worth it.

Next time: “So what varietals do I look for?”