JulieCraves

Coffee reviews / Latin America

Coffee review: Counter Culture Honduras El Puente “The Purple Princess”

Plainspoken Coffee. A Coffee Review for Ordinary People by Ordinary People, #10

Counter Culture Honduras El Puente – Marysabel Caballero.  Counter Culture’s Peter Giuliano calls this coffee the Purple Princess “because its perfume and silkiness seem feminine and regal, and the aromas and flavors of the cup—lavender, plum, grape, incense—all seem purple.” I was eager to try this coffee.  Not only did the description seem intriguing (especially for a Central American coffee), I had not yet tried a Honduran.  Importantly, it was also shade grown — and farm owner Marysabel Caballero fosters a hectare of native forest for each hectare of shade coffee she grows.  She has 17.5 ha in coffee at this time.

Caballero’s farm, Finca El Puente, is in southwestern Honduras, La Paz department, near the city of Chinacla; coffees in this vicinity are often marketed under the name of another nearby municipality, Marcala (see map, click to enlarge).  Cataui is the variety grown.

El Puente has a great pedigree in the Cup of Excellence competitions.  It garnered third place in 2004 (under Dulce Nombre) and moved up to second place in 2005.  It slipped to 8th in 2006 (although still scoring 88.91), yet it went for a higher price at auction than any of the other winners.

This was the most subtly complex and distinctive Central American coffee we’ve tasted.  The beans smelled of chocolate — very specifically milk chocoloate, like a Hershey bar — and delicate floral tones. Like many of the coffees we’ve tried, the chocolate doesn’t come through in the cup.  Instead there is a honey-like sweetness and most interesting winey/plum/berry notes after it cools briefly.  This reminded us of African coffees.  I posed this question to Peter, and he told me that Marysabel believes her beans get this unique taste from the repeated washings she gives them with fresh, natural spring water.  Peter notes that “it is common in Kenya to soak coffee in manychanges of fresh water, and coffees that are treated this way frequently have asilky, fruity flavor not unlike the Purple Princess.”  Alas, he says this is speculation, and the mystery of the Purple Princess endures.The Purple Princess comes in at just a feather under 4 motmots, and is easily my most favorite Central American coffee so far.  Highly recommended!

Speaking of motmots, the Blue-throated Motmot, which has the smallest range of the motmots, is found in La Paz dept. Other interesting or restricted range birds found in the vicinity of El Puente are Bushy-crested Jay, Blue-and-white Mockingbird, and the spectacular Resplendent Quetzal.  The (U.S.) federally endangered Golden-cheeked Warbler winters in Honduras, including in La Paz.  The preservation of forest at El Puente takes on added importance in light of the rich bird life of the area.

You can read a review of Counter Culture’s 2005 El Puente crop at Coffee Review.

Map adapted from those at Wikipedia.

Birds and other biodiversity / Research on coffee growing

Research: The value of wild coffee

Hein, L. and F. Gratweiler. 2006.  The economic value of coffee (Coffea arabica) genetic resources. Ecological Economics 60:76-185.

This fascinating paper is not about the sort of ecological research I usually summarize here, but absolutely keeps with the theme of preserving biodiversity, as well as the recent Ethiopian thread that has come up here lately.

First, the authors introduce the importance of ancestral/wild genetic resources in agricultural crops, since careful breeding can impart in existing cultivars genes that can increase yields, confer disease resistance, and improve quality.  Wild coffee, and therefore its genetic resources, are only found where the species originated, in the highland forests of Ethiopia.  The paper highlights two urgent facts:

  • These forests are disappearing at an alarming rate, a rate at which, if it continues, will eliminate the forests in fewer than ten years.
  • Unlike many other plant seeds, coffee seeds are sensitive to cold and maintain their germination potential for only a couple of months.  Therefore, wild varieties are not candidates for seed banks. They must be preserved growing in the wild.

Although the benefits of preserving genetic resources is widely acknowledged, putting a monetary figure on these resources is difficult. The authors of this paper examined the potential economic benefits of preserving the genetic resources of coffee by looking at several characteristics that are known to occur in wild Ethiopian coffees: resistance to three major coffee pests/diseases, a variety with a lower caffeine content, and a higher yield variety.

They concluded that the economic value of Ethiopian coffee genetic resources is between US$420 million up to $1.45 billion (the variation reflects uncertainty in the coffee markets over the period of time it would take to incorporate wild genes into cultivars).  This does not take into account other beneficial characteristics that might be found in wild coffees, such as heat resistance that will be needed in the face of global climate change.

Current inventories of the genetic diversity in Ethiopian forests are inadequate to determine how much forest needs to be preserved in order to maintain the coffee gene pool, conclude the authors.  Certainly, we do not need to be replacing native forest and wild coffee with large plantations of nursery-grown plants. This paper provides significant economic evidence that preserving Ethiopian forests, and their wild coffee resources, are nearly priceless.

Coffee regions / Coffee reviews

Coffee review: El Salvador coffees

Plainspoken Coffee. A Coffee Review for Ordinary People by Ordinary People, #9.

El Salvador is a small Central American country with a troubled past.  It has been largely deforested, with coffee plantations providing most of the remaining “forested” areas in the country.  As El Salvador grows mainly older types of coffee — mostly bourbons and pacas — they are typically grown in shade. This has been reinforced by the many years of civil war, now over, that squelched the spread of technified sun coffee in the country.

These shade coffee farms provide critical refuge for birds and wildlife in El Salvador.  Very little primary forest remains in El Salvador, and shade coffee farms represent much of the rest of the “forested” land in the country. Coffee farms border one of the country’s most important parks, El Imposible, and they provide a a corridor to another park, Los Volcanes.  Yet coffee plots may be  abandoned or sold unless farmers can get good prices for their beans.
Examples of North American breeding birds that winter in El Salvador, and which studies have determined return to the same places each winter, include Painted Bunting (Passerina ciris, photo right), Wilson’s Warbler (Wilsonia pusilla), Tennessee Warbler (Vermivora peregrina), and Ovenbird (Seirurus auracapillus).

El Salvador has entered the specialty coffee market with a bang.  At the end of the post, you can find a number of articles about the resurgence of El Salvadoran coffee.  Here are a few reviews of some coffees for you to consider.

Counter Culture Finca Mauritania (PDF).  Counter Culture is the exclusive roaster of this Bourbon varietal from Aida Batlle’s farm on the slopes of the Ilamantepec (Santa Ana) volcano; the Santa Ana region, the red dot on the map below, is the main coffee growing region in El Salvador.  This farm has just been certified organic (it takes three years), and will be marketed as such next year.

Aida has two other farms on the volcano — Finca Kilimanjaro (PDF, which grows the popular Kenya SL28 bean) and Finca Los Alpes.

The beans had the most amazing, distinctive aroma — like opening a bag of candy.  It was variously described by our tasters as smelling like butterscotch, toffee, or brown sugar.  We kept closing up the bag and opening it up again for a whiff.  One panelist took the bag and walked away with it; we found him pacing the hall with his nose buried in it!

Try as we did — French press, drip, Aeropress — we could not coax all those great aromas into the cup.  Nonetheless, this was a fine classic coffee, with some of getting hints of honey and just general sweetness in the cup.  It was thoroughly enjoyable, and scored 3.25 motmots.  I think it might have scored higher had it not smelled so good.  The aroma just hiked up our expectations too high.  Read on, this was not the only El Salvadoran coffee that we experienced this with.

Mayorga Coffee Roasters El Salvador Santa Isabel.  Rainforest Alliance certified. The package came labeled “Altamira,” and apparently these names are interchangeable.  The Mayorga web site gives a brief profile of the Santa Isabel farm.

This was listed as a medium roast.  It was fairly dark, with all beans showing oil.  These were also very fragrant beans. The package sitting on my desk scented the air enough to make my mouth water.   There was no roast date on the package.

The coffee did not live up to the intense, appealing aroma, either.  It wasn’t bad, just unremarkable. It was full-bodied, hearty, a nice autumn or after-dinner coffee. A lighter roast may have brought out more interesting sweet, chocolate tones which we only found hinted at.  This was one coffee that was nicer brewed than in a press.  2.75 motmots.

Liquid Planet Santa Julia — This was a 2005 CoE competitor, which ended up with a score of 84.31, with the jury describing it as “floral note, round, smooth mouthfeel, sweet, syrupy, grapelike, mellow.” The entire lot was purchased by the Roasterie for Liquid Planet, which is the exclusive distributor.  The price of the lot was $4.10/lb green, a nice price well over fair trade, but does not seem to justify a retail of $25.95/lb.

Santa Julia is also in the Santa Ana region.  The farm is not certified organic or shade grown, but this farm grows Bourbon variety only (which does best in shade) and lists their shade trees as “Pepeto Peludo [Inga punctata], Avocado, Pink apple tree, among others.”

The beans were roasted just past full city, with most or all showing some oil.  A lot of us, myself included, started out this tasting process as dark roast fans, but have become lighter roast converts, so we had some trepidation.  I did not find this to taste over-roasted, or even remind me of a darker roast, but Star[bucks]ling — although he liked it — said he would have liked to have tried it in a lighter roast.  There was no roast date on the package, and we did not get a lot of fizz and “head” when we added the water to the press as we would expect with a very freshly roasted coffee.

The panel agreed on several adjectives: chocolately (including cocoa and bittersweet chocolate), slightly woodsy (especially the aroma of the beans) and full-bodied.  The richness and lingering mouthfeel of this coffee (with hints of molasses), I think, is it’s most distinctive characteristic.  I enjoyed the fullness of it (although it stayed on the tongue a bit too long, leaving a woolly rather than creamy feel).  We decided this was another perfect coffee for a crisp autumn day.  3 motmots.

Read more about El Salvador coffees:

Photo of Painted Bunting from Wikipedia Commons.