Coffee reviews

Plainspoken Coffee. A Coffee Review for Ordinary People by Ordinary People, #47.

In the overview of coffee growing in India, I promised some reviews. The crew here at C&C has, in fact, been busy drinking multiple offerings from India. We hope to do at least two posts, each with several short reviews.

We start off here with reviews of several non-traditional coffees. We purchased these from Muddy Dog Coffee Roasting in Morrisville, NC.

Sethuraman Estates Liberica

This is certainly one of the most unusual mainstream coffees (versus novelty coffee such as Kopi Luwak) currently available. Two species of coffee make up nearly all coffee on the market today: arabica (Coffea arabica) and robusta (C. canephora). Coffea liberica is a species native to west and central Africa, and accounts for only about 1% of world trade. It is a large tree with big, leathery leaves often grown on roadsides or as a windbreak.

Sethuraman Estates is in the Chikmagalur region of Karnataka state, near the town of Magundi and the Bhadra Wildlife Sanctuary. By all accounts, including this excellent one by Muddy Dog owner Jim Pelligrini, there is ample shade and lots of wildlife on the farm. Much of the coffee at Sethuraman is grown organically, and part of the estate is in the process of being certified. Coffee is fertilized with estate-produced worm compost, and other environmentally-friendly practices have been initiated, including the installation of new water-conserving processing equipment.

This coffee is grown at about 900 m, and prepared as a pulped natural. The aroma of the ground coffee as well as the first taste is very fruity — there is the strong suggestion of blueberries, as in a dry process Ethiopian, but there are components of other dark fruit (plum was mentioned by one taster) as well as cherry. A fruit brandy or liqueur flavor was agreed on by multiple tasters, leading a couple of people to say it would be good as an after-dinner coffee.

As the coffee cooled, several drinkers who tended to favor milder coffees were put off by the sour notes that emerged. It wasn’t harsh or sharply sour — in fact, overall the coffee was remarkably smooth. On the other hand, the finish reminded one German taster of sauerbraten — in a good way. “I did not expect to have this kind of experience from coffee!!!” was his remark. I have seen this coffee described elsewhere as “meaty.” This may represent savory or umami aspects of the profile. We (gratefully) did not come up with “animal-like flavors of jackfruit…and mint.”

The first few sips are indeed powerful, and perhaps could be considered challenging to many. We found it was more approachable in a French press than as a drip.

I was a little surprised that such an assertive coffee was liked by so many people. Nobody dismissed it, and most people agreed that while they wouldn’t want to drink it every day, they’d try it again. A few were very enthusiastic. When scores from the larger-than-usual panel were averaged, the final score was 3.25 motmots, very respectable for such an unusual coffee. Please give it a try!

By the way, liberica has a higher caffeine content than arabica (beans at about 1.4% caffeine versus around 1%), but less than robusta (1.7%)[1], although nobody thought it produced any more buzz than usual.

Monsooned Malabar

I think for Americans, Monsooned Malabar is the coffee most associated with India. The name is a legal Geographical Indication, indicating that the coffee comes from a particular region. In this case, Monsooned Malabars are processed coffee beans (usually, maybe always, dry processed) exposed to the annual monsoon winds in warehouses along the Malabar coast of India. This unusual treatment is deemed necessary to replicate the unique taste and character of Indian coffees that were once transported to Europe on sailing vessels and subjected to months of humidity on the journey. As the beans absorb moisture, they swell and turn pale. Again, Jim of Muddy Dog has a great blog post on how the process proceeds in modern times: How Stuff is Made: Monsooned Malabar Coffee.

There are a number of adjectives that invariably pop up in descriptions of Monsooned Malabars: earthy, woody, pungent, wild, funky, low-acid, and heavy or syrupy-bodied. Unadventurous coffee drinkers might balk at a coffee described this way. Usually roasters don’t recommend Monsooned Malabars to people who like sweet, bright coffees. I consider myself solidly in that group, yet I really enjoyed this coffee.

The tasting panel did find some of those flavors in this coffee, but they were nowhere near as odd, unpleasant, or unappealing as this coffee’s reputation had lead us to expect. We found this coffee well-rounded, with pleasing tones of earthiness, leather, and smoke. There was a very agreeable rustic, musty nuance that added character to the overall mellowness of the coffee. Really no hint of fruit, despite the dry processing.

Nobody gave this coffee less than 3 motmots, and the average score was between 3.25 and 3.5 — so we’ll go with 3.5 to encourage people to give it a try. Whereas many Indian coffees are hard to come by, Monsooned Malabars are not terribly hard to find. Some roasters even offer single-estate origin Monsooned Malabars. On the other hand some also have monsooned robustas, and many roasters are just not sourcing very high quality monsooned coffees, or have the skill to roast them correctly. I assume that’s why so many Monsooned Malabars are described as extreme or intense. Choose a roaster carefully. I know our positive experience with this coffee was due in large part to Muddy Dog’s honoring the bean’s interesting profile.

Kaapi Royale Cherry Robusta

This robusta selection is also from Sethuraman Estates, grown lower than the liberica, at 750 m. “Cherry” in regards to Indian coffee means a natural or dry process. Much of the world’s bad supermarket coffee is made up of cheap robusta. However, there are some carefully grown and processed robustas used in espresso blends. Typically, people don’t drink robusta straight, with the exception of the occasional single-origin espresso shot. Since we have so far not branched out into espresso prep reviews, we bravely prepared this sample as a drip and in a French press.

Robusta beans have a distinctive rubber flavor, and a bitterness that comes from the high caffeine content. When prepared in my Technivorm drip coffee maker, these characteristics were a bit more emphatic than they were when prepared as a French press. Because a sourness also developed as the coffee cooled, making this coffee in any typical consumer drip coffee maker would surely accentuate the most formidable aspects, while drowning out the intriguing properties. Thus, we proceeded with several trials in the press.

Although a dry processed coffee, fruit was not the dominant feature. There was no mistaking it was a robusta — the “rubber” was there — but it was tempered by semi-sweet chocolate, wood, and earth. It was not bitter, but very, very smooth. Nobody found this offensive. While everyone agreed this wasn’t something they’d go out and buy a bag of, they liked the idea of a cup now and then, and very much appreciated an opportunity to taste a high quality robusta, rather than the crap in supermarket coffees. It ended up with a respectable 2.75 motmots.

A future review will cover some more traditional, single-estate arabicas from India.

We’d like to thank Jim Pelligrini for putting together a great package of Indian coffees for us to buy and try out. Nor can we neglect to also thank Allen Leibowitz of Zingerman’s Coffee Company for inspiring us to embark on exploring Indian coffees.

[1] Ashihara, H. and A. Crozier. 2001. Caffeine: a well known but little mentioned compound in plant science. Trends in Plant Science 6:407-413.

Plainspoken Coffee. A Coffee Review for Ordinary People by Ordinary People, #46.

I’ve written about Doi Chaang Coffee, a unique Thai/Canadian partnership, before.  This is certified organic, certified Fair Trade (although the partnership goes well beyond), single-origin coffee grown in northern Thailand. There is plenty of background information on the company and the coffee in the review of their medium roast that we did in 2008. I won’t rehash everything here, but just provide the basics:

Doi Chaang coffee is grown on over 2400 ha in the vicinity of the village of Doi Chang (20.325, 99.839) in Chiang Rai province at around 1200 meters. It is 50% Caturra, 35% Catimor, and 15% Catuai. The coffee is grown under the shade of various fruit and nut trees, including macadamia, plum, pear, and peach. Reforestation efforts in the area strive for a 50/50 mix of native tree species and cash crop species (both marketable and consumable crops are necessary to replace the income formerly generated by poppy growing).

In 2009, we reviewed Doi Chaang’s civet-processed coffee. Unlike most other civet coffees (often known as “kopi luwak“), Doi Chaang does not farm or raise civets in captivity (see the third photo here for the tiny cages in which these animals are typically held). All beans are gathered from what is left behind by wild civets in the Doi Chaang coffee-growing areas. Two species of civets are found in the area, the Masked Palm Civet (Paguma larvata) and the Asian Palm Civet (Paradoxurus hermaphroditus). The related Binturong (Arctictis binturong) also occurs there and is known to eat coffee fruit as well.

Generally, civet coffees are made from beans that have passed through the digestive tracts of these animals: they eat the ripe coffee cherries, but do not digest the seeds, which are passed in the waste. For more on this, er, process, read our review of typical kopi luwak coffee, and the review of Doi Chaang’s wild civet coffee. As I mentioned in the latter post, Doi Chaang actually offers two types of wild civet coffee: passed and spat. It’s not unusual for animals to regurgitate large seeds from fruit they have just eaten rather than have all the bulk pass through their systems. Modest chemical changes in the coffee beans apparently do occur when they pass through the entire digestive systems of civets. I’m not sure they’d be exposed to digestive enzymes long enough to make a profound difference if they are just held in the mouth and then spit out. However, it’s conceivable that mammals may first swallow the fruit and shortly thereafter regurgitate the seeds, in which case they will have been exposed, at least for a short time, to some of the digestive processes that apparently give “passed” civet coffee its character.

Doi Chaang provided us with a tin of the “spat” wild civet coffee for us to try. Because these are wild civets, the coffee is very limited. This year it is available in 50-gram tins, so we were unable to have a lot of people taste the coffee, so we won’t provide a motmot rating as we usually do.  We prepared the civet coffee as a simple pour-over, side by side with their medium roast single estate variety. Later, we also made the medium roast peaberry variety as a drip, and compared notes with another round of the civet as a pourover. We were going to use the peaberry for the side-by-side comparison, but the standard bean version seemed closer in roast level to the civet variety. The latter was, visually, perhaps just a tad lighter.

Now we don’t consider ourselves as having an extremely sensitive palates — we are ordinary people, after all — and I was frankly skeptical that a “spat” coffee could have gone through any flavor-enhancing changes. So we didn’t expect to be able to tell the difference between the two. We were wrong. The civet coffee was markedly smoother, with an understated milk chocolate sweetness. In our previous review (the “passed” civet coffee), we didn’t detect the Sumatran-like profile of earth and leather that we did in the regular and peaberry varieties (which were muted in that crop year, but much sharper this year). This time, we did get a more Sumatran vibe from the wild civet coffee, although it was restrained and very mellow, especially as the cup cooled. Hands down, we liked this better than either the peaberry or the standard single origin.  Was it due to the extra care and sorting that might go into the preparation of the civet beans? More careful roasting of the precious beans? Can a civet discern some particular property in ripe coffee cherries, thus making these beans share some special characteristic? Or does even brief consumption by the mammal impart a distinct profile? I can’t say. But I will admit, it was markedly different, and clearly more enjoyable.

Here is a recent review of the Doi Chaang wild civet “spat” coffee by CoffeeReview.

Since we first started reviewing Doi Chaang’s coffees, they have become much more widely available in both retail outlets and online.

One of my absolute favorite things about Doi Chaang is a coffee is the nearly overwhelming amount of information the company freely provides about its history, growing, processing, and people. If people could have this kind of background on all the coffee they buy, nobody would be drinking mystery corporate coffee anymore. Here are a couple resources:

• The Doi Chaang blog.
• A 30-minute documentary produced by Global TV is available in segments on YouTube. Part 3 is a quickie, and deals with the civet coffee as well as other products being produced by Doi Chaang, including macadamia nuts, honey, and soap. I love hearing brother Wicha talk about poop!

The Doi Chaang story is really remarkable. I especially recommend the documentary. The success of Doi Chaang in North America is nothing compared to how successful its been in changing the lives of the hill tribe that produces it. If you feel an urge to drop some cash on an animal-processed coffee, go for the Doi Chaang version. Not only does it avoid exploiting animals, it generates income for a company doing truly good work.

Plainspoken Coffee. A Coffee Review for Ordinary (or in this case, wealthy) People by Ordinary People, #42.

Introduction to animal-processed coffee
Our previous experience with kopi luwak — coffee beans processed through the digestive system of  civets — was not a pleasant one. You can read the ins and outs of kopi luwak in the original post, but basically the beans are gathered from the poop of a mongoose relative known as a civet cat, usually the Asian Palm Civet (Paradoxurus hermaphroditus). Due to the relative scarcity of civet-processed beans, the labor theoretically involved in gathering the poop, and the substantial novelty factor, kopi luwak demands very high prices and is often billed as the most expensive coffee in the world. Civets are native to southeast Asia, and low quality robusta beans are often a major component of kopi luwak coffee.

In my review, I surmised that it was impossible to determine if kopi luwak coffee was sustainably grown because in order to maintain volume, beans could have been gathered from any type of coffee farm, including sun coffee, especially because so much of it is cheap robusta. I’ve also come to learn another way volume is maintained is to keep civets in captivity and feed them coffee cherries. You can view videos that show civets in cages, then people supposedly harvesting civet dung off the forest floor. Likewise, this web site indicates the civets are raised on a farm. This practice is nothing new, as civets are raised for fur, musk, and food in many areas; these animals are usually caged. I have also heard that civets may be penned in a particular area where they can forage for coffee. So not only do you not know where the beans come from, there may also be animal welfare issues, as farm conditions cannot be verified.

Thai wild civet coffee
Enter Doi Chaang Coffee Company. We have reviewed Thailand’s Doi Chaang coffee before, and in that post I outlined the story behind this innovative partnership (more detail here by Canadian partner John Darch). The driving force behind the success of the Thai coffee venture is Wicha Promyong (left), a former entrepreneur from southern Thailand who “adopted ” the Akha hill tribe families in the Chiang Rai region and helped them organize and improve and market their coffee. Do not be fooled by this humble-looking man in traditional garb — he is no country bumpkin!

Recently, Wicha read about kopi luwak: the outrageous prices, the questionable quality. He asked the Doi Chaang farmers if they had observed civets in their coffee farms and seen their bean-laden scat. Sure enough — civets were present (Asian Palm Civet and Masked Palm Civet, Paguma larvata), and leaving their potentially-precious nuggets on the ground. Wicha recognized two important aspects of this situation: the civets were wild, and they were consuming all-organic, all-arabica coffee (caturra, catimor, and catuai varieties). He approached the Canadian partners, who were initially reluctant to roast the coffee and get on the bandwagon. However, they went ahead and invited various VIPs to taste the coffee — and the comments were very positive. And so here we are, another country heard from in the animal-processed coffee arena.

Akha woman harvesting coffee, in the more conventional manner.

Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of the Doi Chaang Wild Civet coffee is that it will be sorted into two types: digested and regurgitated. It’s not unusual for animals or birds to immediately regurgitate large seeds from fruit they have just eaten rather than have all the bulk pass through their systems before they can continue to feed.

It is the digestive process of the civet that supposedly creates the unique flavor profile of kopi luwak and similar coffees. Since the regurgitated beans will not have gone through the digestive process or been exposed to digestive enzymes for any appreciable amount of time, it’s hard to imagine that the regurgitated type will have any detectable flavor difference than normally (by humans) harvested and processed beans. Of note, however, is that the “spit” coffee has traditionally been tossed in with the defecated type by kopi luwak purveyors, functionally acting as filler.

Doi Chaang will not mix the two types. This was originally described to me by Doi Chaang as “separated between the spit and swallow.” And I have decided to include those terms here as it will undoubtedly bring all sorts of new readers to Coffee & Conservation. But I digress.

The Review
Now to the $64,000 $500/pound question: how does it taste?

First, the beans were beautiful, of uniform size and shape, without pieces or defects, unlike the hodge-podge we saw in our sampling of kopi luwak. Doi Chaang’s roaster Shawn McDonald used a light hand with these beans and the fragrance was similar to the Doi Chaang peaberry, which we tried beforehand for comparison.

Our group — nearly all of whom suffered through the kopi luwak tasting — were unanimous: we really liked this coffee. It was sweet with a light chocolate or caramel flavor. Nearly every person commented on the civet coffee’s medium body, which was very rich, smooth, even creamy, a sensation that increased as the cup cooled. “Smooth chocolate” and “honey syrup” were also mentioned. The coffee was well-balanced, and just really pleasant.

Whereas the peaberry and the standard medium roast we reviewed previously did have the distinctive, though muted, Sumatran-like profile of earth and leather, the civet coffee did not. In fact, I would have been hard pressed to guess the
origin of this coffee, and I surely would not have thought it came from the same dark place as kopi luwak.

In the past, I have tried beans from a single farm that were processed in different ways (washed, semi-washed, natural). I found the degree of difference in flavor between washed and semi-washed from that experience to have been greater than the difference between the washed Doi Chaang peaberry and their civet-processed beans. Clearly, there was some difference in the civet coffee, but it was subtle, maybe more in line with the difference in flavors between microlots grown on the same farm.

Everyone who tried both Doi Chaang coffees liked the civet coffee better, hands down, and overwhelmingly agreed the civet coffee was better than the kopi luwak. Since that’s not saying much, note that the final rating of 3.75 motmots (several people gave it 4 motmots) is at the upper range of our usual coffee ratings. Is it worth $500 a pound? It was very good coffee, and I wouldn’t complain if I had paid $25 or so a pound for it. But personally, I don’t expect to ever have a coffee, beverage, or any food item that is worth that price based on flavor alone. But I will say without reservation: for those who feel compelled or interested in having an animal-processed coffee and are willing to pay for the rarity and novelty, this is it.

The Wild Civet coffee will be marketed starting in June at Urban Fare markets in Vancouver, BC, in Pusateri’s in Toronto, and on the Doi Chaang web site. I wasn’t fooling about the approximate price. The annual gathering of the Doi Chaang Wild Civet coffee is not expected to exceed 100 kilos, with only 40 being available this year. Since the only way to increase production without farming the civets is to increase natural habitat, Doi Chaang plans to step up reforestation efforts in the region of the farms. A final, nice, sustainable touch.

Update: Ken Davids at Coffee Review has just written about this coffee.