JulieCraves

Africa / Coffee reviews

Coffee Review: Green Mountain Gombe Reserve

Plainspoken Coffee. A Coffee Review for Ordinary People by Ordinary People, #24.

Green Mountain Coffee Roasters Gombe Reserve.

Recently I posted an overview of coffee from Tanzania, an east African country best known for their marketing of peaberry coffees. In the western part of the country, near the shores of Lake Tanganyika and the town of Kigoma, lies Gombe Stream National Park where researcher Jane Goodall began studying chimpanzees in 1960. This area is also the source of Green Mountain’s new Gombe Reserve coffee, via the 2,700-member Kalinzi Cooperative.

Deforestation has isolated Gombe’s chimpanzees, whose population has declined to fewer than 100 individuals, within the small national park. This severely limits their range and ability to enlarge their communities. This coffee will makes a significant contribution to the preservation of the Gombe chimps.  I can’t do any better than to quote from the Jane Goodall Institute web site:

Those who purchase this high-quality coffee are supporting cultivation of a sustainable, chimpanzee-friendly crop grown by farmers in the impoverished Kigoma region of western Tanzania. The coffee is shade-grown (meaning trees aren’t cut down). What’s more, because chimpanzees don’t like coffee beans, they don’t raid the fields, thus avoiding human-wildlife conflict — an increasing, life-threatening problem in areas where human and wildlife live in proximity.

JGI hopes the partnership with Kigoma coffee growers will result in a new leafy corridor connecting vital rangelands from which the Gombe chimpanzees have been cut off due to deforestation. The corridor will allow the chimpanzees to expand their feeding range and mingle with other chimpanzee groups, which is vital for genetic diversity and disease resistance.

By connecting the 2,700 small-scale farmers in Kigoma’s Kalinzi Cooperative with new markets and introducing new quality-control and production methods, JGI and Green Mountain Coffee Roasters is helping the farmers significantly boost their income and coffee production. This gives farmers an incentive to work with JGI in the future to set aside land for the chimpanzees.

If key villages reserve 10 to 20 percent of their land, there will be an interlinked, multi-village forest reserve, providing additional habitat to chimpanzees and connecting Gombe National Park to forest reserves in Burundi.

The only thing that could make you feel better about this coffee than all that is if it were also incredibly delicious.  Folks, this coffee is!

This is a medium roast, and the beans had a sweet smell, with hints of honey, flowers, and even a little tobacco. It was a distinctively African smell, but seemed unique somehow.

With its proximity to Kenya, I think we all expected this Tanzanian coffee to have the wine-like tones so characteristic of Kenyans.  Instead, we were surprised by the little citrus kick when piping hot and the undertone of fruit that followed that was so reminiscent of an Ethiopian coffee. Finally, when cooler, came the tart wine finish.

This coffee was marvelously complex, but not jarringly so, as some Africans can be.  It harmoniously went from one flavor to the next, each nicely balanced. The bird song it evoked for us was that of the Yellow-breasted Chat: full of interesting and sometimes unusual notes, all coming from an enigmatic source. There was only one shortcoming in the Gombe Reserve — we felt it failed brewed in drip coffee maker, even using a gold filter. The loss of character was nearly complete. Please prepare this special coffee in a French press, Chemex , Eva Cafe Solo, or  vacuum pot. This is seriously good coffee — 4 motmots.

Retail and specialty roasters / Starbucks

A note from Terranova Estate (Starbucks Black Apron)

Last month, I posted about the latest Starbucks Black Apron selection, from Zambia’s Terranova Estate, owned by the Street family. Warren Street was kind enough to leave a long comment on the post, giving more detail on things I found difficult to research, such as the water management at the farm, the fact they have a 400-acre natural reserve, an update on the school, and that the $15,000 from Starbucks Black Apron program will go to fund a clinic.  Please give the comment a read — it’s a worthwhile addition to the post!

Corporate coffee

Wendy’s and Folgers

Greg at The Shot more than adequately sums up the puzzling move by Wendy’s burger chain to begin serving Folger’s coffee (owned by Procter & Gamble, the company which states in its sustainability report that “P&G does not track biodiversity land use as in
general we do not operate in these areas.”). The coffees will be from the Gourmet Selections line. Here’s what Kenneth Davids had to say about one of those varieties:

Pungently sweet, cedary, faintly sewerish-fermented aroma. In the cup neutral, sweet, very simple, with hints of walnut and continued composty ferment. Cleans up a bit in the finish. Considerable difference from cup to cup, with some cups more fermented than others.

Certainly a reason to rush to Wendy’s for coffee.  Not.

Coffee-related products / K-Cups/Keurig brewers: alternatives

Refilling Keurig K-cups

(Update: I have published a summary of all my posts on Reusable alternatives to K-Cups, which includes a detailed table of the features of the Keurig My K-Cup Reusable Coffee Filter, the Ekobrew Refillable Cup for Keurig K-cup Brewers, the Solofill Refillable Cup For Keurig K-Cup Brewers, the My-Kap Kaps for refilling K-Cups, and the EZ-Cup refillable cup for Keurig brewers).

Keurig single-cup coffee brewers are handy for certain applications.  I work in a university building where lots of staff and volunteers have access to the coffee pot.  Certain times of the year, my crew and I spend about 15 minutes of every hour in the building.  If we brew a pot of coffee, someone else inevitably drinks most of it before we get back at the kitchen, or our stints in the field result in coming back to cold or over-cooked coffee. The Keurig is a perfect solution — brew a very quick, fresh single cup when we have our little interludes.

The issue we have is with excess packaging. The used plastic K-Cups are not recyclable.  I wrote to Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, which owns a large share of Keurig Corp. and manufactures K-Cups, regarding plans to make the K-Cups recyclable. They replied:

“We are not satisfied with the current environmental impact of the K-Cup packaging used with the Keurig system.  We have signed an agreement with one of our materials suppliers for the Keurig K-Cup product to jointly fund research on the application of renewable materials for the K-Cup.  One option may be to develop a brewing system that uses a photo-biodegradable K-Cup with a non-metalized lid.”

Bravo to Green Mountain that they are actively pursuing a solution! But then, this company does so much for sustainability, their efforts don’t surprise me.

Reuse is a form of recycling, so I decided to find out if I could refill a used K-Cup with my own coffee successfully.  It’s pretty straightforward — just make sure that the product used to reseal the cup is Glad’s Press and Seal.  This stuff is not like regular plastic wrap, and works like a charm.

Here’s how you do it:

  1. Get all the foil off the rim of your used cup, and make sure the rim is dry before applying the Press and Seal.
  2. Try to rinse as much coffee out of the filter in the cup as possible.  It doesn’t really seem to matter too much whether the coffee is rinsed out when it’s still wet or if it’s dried out.
  3. Grind the coffee very fine — there is not much time for the water to soak the grounds and you need as much surface area exposed as possible.
  4. Fill the cup to about 3-5 mm from the top with ground coffee — you can tap the cup to settle the grounds, but don’t pack it down. I tried it and it created overflow due to the force of the water going through the grounds. This amount of coffee is probably similar to the extra bold K-Cups,which have more coffee in them than the regular K-Cups; I personally find most of the regular ones produce pretty insipid brew.  Likewise, although I prefer light roasts, they come through as weak in the Keurig, so darker roasts are best.  But experiment — your tastes may vary. Overall, I use the Keurig for convenience — it’s not for outstanding coffee, no matter what you use.
  5. Cut two small squares of Press and Seal per K-Cup.  I’ve tried both one and two layers, and two work better.  The squares only need to be large enough to overlap the edge and stick to about 10 mm of the sides of the cups.
  6. Holding a square taut, place it on the top of the K-Cup so it is nice and tight, and press along the rim.  Then seal it along the underside of the rim and the side of the K-Cup.  Repeat with other square.
  7. Viola! Ready to use.  Important: when you place the refilled K-Cup in the brewer, make sure to line up the hole on the bottom with the pin in the brewer.

The limiting factor in the number of times a K-Cup can be refilled is clearly the inner filter. Eventually, it will get too clogged with fine particulates; I suppose it might also rip or get a hole. Mis-aligning the bottom hole (step 7) will also retire a K-Cup.  So far, I have reused a single K-Cup 5 times without any noticeable change in the flavor of the coffee.

Refilling K-Cups in some ways defeats the convenience of the Keurig system, but since I grind coffee daily at home, refilling a couple of cups is no big deal.  Green Mountain also sells a product called My K-Cup, a plastic and mesh filter assembly for ground coffee that is used in place of a K-Cup.

Finally, my spent K-Cups are also repurposed, seeing a new life as filter cups for my pitfall traps, where insects collected in fluid-filled containers inserted flush with the soil must be strained and dried before being examined and identified. K-Cups work perfectly for this, as the bug-containing cup at left shows.  Samples can even be stored in them, as the cups are also easily labeled with a felt tip marker.

I imagine you could also start seeds in the K-Cup (the space between the bottom of the filter and the bottom of the cup could hold some water which would wick up the filter, and the hole in the bottom would provide drainage). Creative types could find other uses for old K-Cups.  Feel free to post them in the comments!