Month: June 2010

In recognition of National Pollinator Week, another review of a coffee with a great backstory.

Plainspoken Coffee. A Coffee Review for Ordinary People by Ordinary People, #44.

The Great Northern Roasting Company out of Traverse City, MI has started an initiative called Birds, Bees & Trees. They will donate 3% of all proceeds from Birds, Bees & Trees-designated coffee to the Pollinator Partnership, a non-profit organization geared toward the preservation of bees and all other pollinators.

About the Pollinator Partnership
P2, as they call themselves, is one of the best sources for information on pollinators and pollination, including many resource links and excellent planting guides for North America. They also manage a number of projects, such as the North American Pollinator Protection Campaign (NAPPC) a collaborative group of over 120 organizations and individuals that promote and implement a continent-wide Action Plan to encourage activities to protect the numbers and health of all pollinating animals.

GNRC joins a number of other companies (Burt’s Bees, HÁ¤agen-Dazs) as a supporting partner of P2. Since arabica coffee is self-pollinating and P2 appears to be exclusive to North America, at first blush this might seem like an odd partnership. However, a number of studies have shown the importance of shade coffee to pollinators in general, and the benefits of cross-pollination to coffee fruit set. The NAPPC does include Mexico and a number of Mexican organizations are partners.

About the coffee
GNRC has chosen their TerruÁ±o Nayarit Sun-Dried Organic as their primary Birds, Bees & Trees coffee. (This is currently available online from their site, and the BB&T-badged version, which will generate the donations, is coming soon; I’ll post a link as soon as it is.)

This coffee comes from cooperatives in the west-central Mexican state of Nayarit, mostly around the extinct Cerro San Juan volcano west of the capital Tepic. This is one of the northernmost locations in Latin America where coffee is grown. Most is grown at over 1100 meters, and is of the bourbon, typica, and caturra varieties.

Care to know more? Every bag of coffee has a coded label. You can go online to Track Your Coffee, enter the code, and trace your beans to their source. Our bags, for instance, were comprised mostly of beans from the community of El Malinal (86%) along with 14% from Xalisco, processed at the IPCONAY mill. There’s even a link to a map. No secrets here — and you know how much I like transparency and making it easy for consumers to know more about their coffee.

TerruÁ±o Nayarit coffee is available exclusively via San Cristobal Coffee Importers, which has done a tremendous amount of work helping small holders in this area of Mexico. I had the pleasure of seeing founder Jim Kosalos speak at the recent SCAA conference on his work, and found him and it remarkable. You can learn more: in this article: Mexico’s Nayarit Coffee Producers’ Quest To Quality Continues — Tea & Coffee Trade Journal, Aug 2003.

We tried both a light and a dark roast, supplied by GNRC’s owner Jack Davis. The aroma of both — redolent of blueberries — gave it away as a natural (dry) processed coffee. The light roast also hinted at dried summer grass; a hint of oregano was detected by one taster. The flavor was much more gentle than the dry smell would suggest. It was smooth, and prepared as a drip and in a French press the fruit flavor developed as the cup cooled, but it never was as aggressively berry-forward as natural process Ethiopians can be, for example. We like it best made in a Chemex. It really shined: clean, with a little more piquant acidity (“lemon rind at the edge of conjecture” one taster rather poetically intoned). The light roast scored consistently at 3.5 motmots. The dark roast was a tad too dark for many in the tasting panel — dark roast aficionados rated it highly at 3.75, while light roast lovers pegged it a full motmot lower. Everyone should be able to pick a favorite.

Great Northern Roasting’s Birds, Bee & Trees will be an ongoing campaign, with other or more offerings in the future. While they gear up, please honor the many pollinators — birds, bees, bats, flies, mammals, and more — by learning more about why they are important, how to garden for pollinators, and what to plant in your area. Biodiversity preservation starts at home.

Plainspoken Coffee. A Coffee Review for Ordinary People by Ordinary People, #43.

Coffee reviews have been a little sparse lately. The focus of reviews here is evolving, with an emphasis on educating about corporate coffee, and on sustainable coffees with great backstories or associated projects. This coffee is one of the latter.

Café Choco Andes is about more than just coffee. This project includes multiple international partners working not only to improve coffee quality and move toward organic production methods, but also has reforestation, biodiversity, ecotourism, and educational components. It is part of the larger Choco-Andean corridor project, which seeks to create a network of protected areas, both natural and restored and managed, from northwestern Ecuador to the Pacific coastal mangroves.

Location and background
The Café Choco Andes project takes place in northwest Ecuador. This is an area of very high biodiversity, and the Maquipucuna-Rio Guayllabamba Important Bird Area (IBA) is located here. Over 350 bird species have been recorded in this IBA, including the near-threatened Toucan Barbet (top) and the vulnerable Giant Antpitta (middle). The bulk of the IBA consists of the Maquipucuna Reserve, founded in 1989 by the non-profit Maquipucuna Foundation. The reserve is 6000 ha and located about 50 miles northwest of Quito. It is surrounded by another 14000 ha of protected forest, much of which is undisturbed cloud forest. Altitudes range from 1000 to 2800 meters, thus encompassing coffee-growing zones. It includes an ecolodge and scientific station.

In the late 1990s, the University of Georgia’s School of Ecology and the Maquipucuna Foundation began a project to preserve the area’s biodiversity while improving the livelihoods of residents. Goals included reforestation and creation of forest corridors to improve habitat, especially for migratory birds, and working with coffee farmers to re-establish shade trees and convert to organic production. Over 50,000 coffee trees have been planted since 2000, and over two dozen farms have received organic certification. Other sustainable cottage industries help diversify local income and prevent habitat destruction: beekeeping, paper making, hand-crafted jewelry, jam production, and shade-grown cacao. The project now includes over 160 coffee farmers and 400-plus cacao growers.

The importance of the shade coffee is reflected in research that takes place on these Maquipucuna Foundation-owned lands. A recently published paper [1] by University of Georgia and Foundation researchers looked at the response of resident forest birds to disturbance and canopy cover in this area. It found that 18 species of specialized forest birds sharply declined in areas with less than 21 to 40% canopy cover. The authors noted that this threshold level is the same as the 40% minimum canopy cover recommended for Bird-Friendly and Rainforest Alliance certified coffee.

Around five years ago, additional partners, including the State Botanical Garden of Georgia, the Georgia Museum of Natural History, and the Georgia Environmental Education Alliance established Our Shared Forests (Nuestros Bosques Compartidos in Ecuador). This bi-national education program for schoolkids focuses on awareness of migratory bird species that the two countries share, such as Summer Tanager, Blackburnian Warbler (right), and Red-eyed Vireo.

The coffee
The Macquipucuna Foundation’s coffee is roasted by 1000 Faces Coffee, located in Athens, GA. This particular microlot comes from one of the farms owned by the Foundation that is part of the Café Choco Andes project; Finca Orongo in Pichincha province, near the community of Palmitopamba. At one time, it was completely deforested. It consists of typica and caturra, and is grown at 1400 to 1700 meters.

This coffee is not certified organic or shade-grown, although it is grown under these conditions. Coffee & Conservation readers know that I have mixed feelings about certification, in particular because I don’t believe requiring small producers who grow coffee in perfectly environmentally-sustainable ways should have to pay for it. Many are unable to cover the costs (especially if we as consumers are unwilling to make it worthwhile) or even have the skills and time to manage the paperwork.

The last time we reviewed an Ecuadorian coffee, we weren’t especially impressed. That was a Caribou selection, and it was from Loja. Although it wasn’t a dark roast, it was a tad darker than we tend to like. 1000 Faces roasted this coffee lighter. The roast level indicates medium, but it was on the lighter side. This lighter touch served the coffee well.

This was a solid, middle-of-the-road coffee that reminded us of a good Colombian or Central American coffee. The sweetness was subtle; 1000 Faces describes it as raw honey which seemed apt to me. There was an interesting smoky accent which appealed to some panelists, while others perceived it as ashy. It had a quick and pleasant finish that I associate with a solid, reliable breakfast cup. Nothing else stood out to tasters, but I will say that it was a coffee that seemed to taste better a little further past roast day (at around ten days) than really freshly roasted. It mellowed and had a more rounded and balanced personality, losing some of the ashy notes that we detected at our first tastings. It was much better than the Caribou Ecuadorian selection; we gave it 2.75 motmots.

Read more:

• Set aside 20 minutes, and look at the short film Slow Coffee, which is all about this coffee and the partnership between the Macquipucuna Foundation and 1000 Faces.
• Eco-Exchange, Rainforest Alliance: Kids and Conservationists Unite in Ecuador and Georgi to Benefit Cultures, Farmers, Forests and Birds.
• National Geographic Geotourism Challenge 2009: Macquipucuna application with many details on Foundation partners and initiatives, includes a video.

[1] Mordecai, R. S., R. J. Cooper, and R. Justicia. 2009. A threshold response to habitat disturbance by forest birds in the Choco Andean corridor, northwest Ecuador. Biodiversity and Conservation 18:2421-2431.

Toucan Barbet photo by Michael Woodruff via Wikimedia Commons; Giant Antpitta photo by Andy Jones, Cleveland Museum of Natural History; Blackburian Warbler by Petroglyph, all under Creative Commons licenses.