Blends/Multiple

Blends/Multiple / Coffee reviews

Coffee review: Higher Ground Roasters

Plainspoken Coffee. A Coffee Review for Ordinary People by Ordinary People, #23.

Higher Ground is an Alabama roaster that carries only certified Fair Trade, certified organic, and shade grown coffee. Shade coffees are not labeled certified, although some do come from Smithsonian (SMBC) certified sources; unfortunately the fee to use the seal can sometimes be cost-prohibitive to a small roaster in the same way that the certification fee can be unaffordable for farms and co-ops. Because so few Rainforest Alliance certified coffees are also certified organic and Fair Trade, as well as the company being uncomfortable with some of RA’s certifying practices, these have not been on the offering list.  Instead, Higher Ground partner Alex Varner visits source farms (and knows his birds, by the way!), or relies on his importers to evaluate shade. He is actively working to find ways to improve this system, and is surely one of the most committed-to-sustainability and candid roasters I’ve ever corresponded with.

Higher Ground is a member of a number of environmental/sustainability organizations, including 1% For The Planet. Among other initiatives, they also offset their energy usage by purchasing renewable energy, use 100% recycled materials and biodegradable corn plastics as often as possible, and donate their waste as compost to local organic farms (I presume that means coffee waste!). They partner with a number of non-profit organizations, donating a good chunk of the proceeds from special-label blends for fundraising. I am extremely impressed with this company! (More on Higher Ground: Cup of coffee with a conscience — Birmingham Business Journal.)

We tried three of their coffees.

Bolivia. This medium roast is from the familiar CENAPROC co-op in the Yungas region. This co-op has twice won the Cup of Excellence, and grows on land once used for coca production on the eastern slopes of the Cordillera Occidental. The co-op has fewer than 90 members, and farms are typically about nine hectares.

Remember that our most highly-rated coffee was Bolivian, the beautiful Cup of Excellence winner Calama Marka, from Paradise Roasters. We’ve yet to find a coffee that really holds a candle to that, but it seems most Bolivians we try are real winners, as was this one.  It had awesome chocolate tones not only in the French press, but even when brewed in our crappy office pot. The first sips were quite bright, then it settles into a mellow medium-bodied cup, with a lingering sweet candy-like aftertaste.  Can coffee be yummy? This is. 3.5 motmots (one person scored it 4.5!).

Mexico. A light roast, hailing from the ISMAM (Indigenas de la Sierra Madre de Motozintla) co-op in Chiapas, made up of over 1200 Mayan farmers. Average coffee plot size is less than four hectares.  Fair Trade and organic certification has made a huge difference in the lives of farmers in Chiapas, an acutely impoverished region.  The higher prices paid for their beans has paid for schools and other community projects, not to mention boosted personal income. Benefits to the environment include improved soil conditions, as well as protecting the forest, because traditionally coffee in Chiapas is grown under native trees.

Mexican coffees are usually pleasant and enjoyable, and this was typically simple and smooth, with mild caramel and vanilla undertones. While not complex, a couple of us found it evocative, bringing to mind a bright, fresh spring morning filled with soft bird song.  In fact, this is our new gig — to match a bird song to the coffees we review. My immediate response to this was House Wren — but not the energetic full song, but the gentle murmurings of a contended wren rummaging through the fresh spring shrubbery. A perfect breakfast coffee, 3 motmots.

Peru. This was a dark roast from the CACVRA co-op (Cooperativa Agraria Cafetalera Valle Rio Apurimac), grown in the Apurimac River valley. The Apurimac is one of the headwaters of the Amazon, and this is considered the southern zone of coffee growing in Peru. This coffee comes from the co-op’s higher elevation farms, at 1300 to 1800 meters, from mostly small holders (less than five hectares), grown under mixed shade which includes various fruit trees.  I’ve cautioned that even organic Peruvian coffee may lean toward shade monoculture, but farmers in the Apurimac Valley are said to use an average of nine shade tree species on their farms. When Varner visited, he found some farms growing coffee under fruit and cacao trees in typical mixed family plots and others growing under various native tree species.

This coffee illustrated to me my complete transformation from a dark roast lover to a light roast fanatic. A year ago, I would have been crazy about this.  Today, I enjoyed it but my tastes have changed so much that I know I didn’t appreciate it fully. However, the folks who are into darker roasts were enthusiastic. The final tally: 2.75 motmots, higher from dark roast fans.

Higher Ground exemplifies the situation with sustainable coffee today. They are trying to minimize their own impact on the environment; striving to work with a hodgepodge of seals and lack of seals and searching for ways to improve transparency in this system; fostering relationships and understanding at the source; and providing great coffee.

Blends/Multiple / Coffee reviews / Latin America

Coffee review: Coffee Labs Doghouse Blend

Plainspoken Coffee. A Coffee Review for Ordinary People by Ordinary People, #22.

Coffee Labs Roasters Doghouse Blend, Peru and El Salvador.

Coffee Labs Roasters is a cafe/roaster located in Tarrytown, NY (northwest of White Plains). Owners Mike Love and  Alicia Kelligrew are devoted to sustainable coffee. Dogs, too — they are welcome in the cafe, featured in their logo and name, and honored in their Doghouse Blend, which we review here.

This coffee is certified by both Rainforest Alliance and Smithsonian (SMBC Bird Friendly), and is certified organic and Fair Trade.

Coffee Labs sources Peruvian coffees from La Florida, which comes from the Cooperativa Agraria Cafetalera La Florida, a co-op of over 1000 members in the central Chanchamayo Valley, Junin department. Peru is the second largest producer of organic coffee (after Mexico). While much of Mexico’s organic coffee is grown in rustic shade or traditional polyculture, Peru grows a lot of its organic coffee in commercial polyculture or shade monoculture (definitions here), a less-desirable situation for biodiversity.  Therefore, knowing that La Florida is certified by Smithsonian as Bird-Friendly is reassuring, as their environmental standards are the strictest in the certifying business (see more info after the jump). Also, Peru produces a lot of inexpensive, mediocre organics often used in blends, but Chanchamayos are often considered the best in the country.

The El Salvador portion is from “Santa Rita,” in Sonsonate department of western El Salvador. I believe this is a farm or group of farms, certified by Rainforest Alliance, in the big Las Lajas cooperative.  You can read a lot more about El Salvador coffees in a previous post outlining coffee growing in the country and its importance to birds.

This is a “black and tan” blend — French roasted Peru, medium-dark with oil; and light roasted El Salvador, tan and dry. This was the correct choice for this blend — a dark roast would have overwhelmed the El Salvador’s more delicate flavor. It was a really pleasant cup — even brewed in our neglected office pot through a paper filter (what we consider to be the most punishing circumstances for a coffee being reviewed). We would describe it as subtle rather than complex, but the careful roast of each variety and the just-so proportions of each seems to have harmoniously balanced the flavors; each brought what it should to the cup. Several people independently noted that the flavor stayed consistently stable as it cooled, and even tasted decent cold. It didn’t acquire any funky flavors the way some dark roasts do when they cool.  The Doghouse Blend ended up with 3 motmots.

Coffee Labs does not have online ordering yet, but you can order the Doghouse Blend by email (coffeelabsroasters@mac.com) or phone (914-332-1479) for $12.50/lb. They have quite a variety of organic, Fair Trade, and SMBC Bird-Friendly coffees. Coffee is shipped within 48 hours of roasting.  It’s also available at several Whole Foods Markets near their Tarrytown location, with plans to distribute to the entire Northeast region in the future.

A little further information on Peru:

It’s important to be careful when purchasing Peruvian coffee. Here is an excellent example. At one time there was great bird diversity of rustic shade coffee in Villa Rica, central Peru (in Pasco department, north of Junin), and a Smithsonian survey in 1998 found Cerulean Warblers on these farms. A survey for Cerulean Warblers in these same farms in 2006 found none. Survey leader Gunnar Engblom noted,

“We hardly found any such habitat [rustic shade]. Most that was there 6-8 years ago has been replaced with fast growing Inga and Albizia as shade trees species that carry no epiphytes and less leaf cover. [There is a] strong indication that the coffee boom of shade-grown coffee does not promote the more bird friendly ”song bird coffee” plantations (rustic), but rather promotes more monocultures with Inga and Albizia. It seems that both yield and quality is higher in such conditions and that the market (ultimately the consumers) does not know how to separate between terms such as organic, song bird coffee, shade-grown coffee, etc. We interviewed people at the farms and it is clear that many of those area considered rustic has converted to being mono-cultures today. Maybe this is also the case with other areas north of Villa Rica.”

You can read his full report (PDF) here.

The Smithsonian Bird-Friendly certification requires a minimum shade cover of 40%, and the overstory should include at least ten different species of shade trees, with no more than 70% of the trees being Inga species, which means more habitat remains appropriate for birds.

Blends/Multiple / Coffee reviews / Corporate coffee

Coffee review: Millstone’s organic line

Plainspoken Coffee. A Coffee Review for Ordinary People by Ordinary People, #18.

I introduced the Millstone (Procter & Gamble) organic line of coffees in a previous post. This is a review of four of the five of the coffees in the line (I did not receive a sample of the Organic Mountain Moonlight blend).  There are four certified organic/certified Fair Trade coffees, and one Rainforest Alliance (RA) certified coffee.

The product brochure indicates these are grown in Central and South America, although they would not divulge any specifics, such as farms or co-ops, growing methods, or even country of origin for two blends.  The information says that this collection is “made from the very best arabica beans” although the product descriptions do not say “100% arabica.” However, these coffees arrived in coated paper bags, taped shut, with handwritten labels, so I don’t know what the actual bag might indicate.

These coffees made their biggest and most lasting impression right after I opened the box. The smell — presumably mostly from the paper-bagged varieties — filled the room in short order.  It wasn’t a pleasant coffee smell, but a very strong chemical/burnt rubber odor. It remained pungent for another 12 hours, as I took it all into work and had to move it out of my office because it smelled up my whole end of the hall. Happily, (but curiously), the odor disappeared by the next day, and even when we opened the packages, the beans mysteriously lacked real coffee odor.

Organic Nicaraguan Mountain Twilight Blend. This is described as “A medium-dark roast with a delightful aroma and smooth, rich taste.” Millstone would not answer a question regarding what co-op(s) in Nicaragua this came from; “blend” indicates more than one country of origin, but this information was not forthcoming.

The beans were quite dark, with a sheen but no spots of oil. The beans didn’t really smell like coffee, but had a dull burnt rubber aroma.  The coffee didn’t taste burnt, but lacked any richness.  One taster thought it tasted like coffee that was too weak made in a dirty pot (although it was made with our standard measurements, two tablespoons of grounds to each six ounces of water, in a french press for our first tasting).  This was just plain, mediocre coffee.  1.25 motmots.

Organic Mayan Black Onyx. “The darkest of our organic roasts with a smooth, bittersweet taste.” Again, no information on source.

These were dark beans indeed.  They smelled vaguely like burnt nuts (some debate on what kind of nuts — the kind that is the fruit of a tree, or the kind that is screwed onto a bolt). It was a surprise to us all that such a strong, dark and assertive-looking brew could taste so flat, insipid and lifeless. It left an odd coating on the tongue. I recall, back in the day, getting drunk, trying to sober up with coffee, then passing out. That stale taste left in my mouth the next morning?  Sorry, that’s what I thought of.  Our mean score barely struggled above 1 motmot.

Kenneth Davids at Coffee Review took a run at this one:

“A rather striking dark-roast coffee in its disconnected extremes of abandoned sweetness and charred bitterness.”

Organic Deep Peruvian Forest Blend. “A dark roast with a light, floral acidity and a clean finish.” No information on region of Peru, or if or what other countries contributed to the blend.

Yes, we kept going (we only tried one a day, to prevent any fatigue or bias). This was surely the strangest and worst of the bunch. Also a dark roast, but again a flat dark brown without surface oils. The beans had absolutely no coffee smell.  One reviewer said if he had been blindfolded, he would not have guessed it was coffee. Brewed, this blend had a truly strange oceanic smell, not coffee-like, but almost briny, a whiff of the sea. The taste was also genuinely odd — one reviewer (who has spent three summers in Alaska) said it reminded him of a hot puddle of seawater sitting on a pair of discarded rubber waders on a crab-fishing boat.  0.5 motmots

Rainforest Reserve. This was the only coffee that came in a sealed foil valve bag. It actually smelled like real coffee, but there was still a harshness to the odor that was faintly disagreeable. It is billed as a medium dark roast, but was identical to Green Mountain’s dark roast Rainforest Blend.

I was absolutely unable to get an answer from Millstone if this RA-certified Rainforest Reserve is the same as their Signature Collection Rainforest Reserve. If so, I found an old press release that notes it it sourced from the Lake Atitlan area in Guatemala. However, the Signature selection is not labeled organic, so I have to assume they are not sourcing from the same farms (remember that RA-certified coffee is not required to be certified organic, unlike Smithsonian Bird Friendly coffee, which is). The advantage Millstone has by not revealing the source of their beans is that they can change what goes into each variety, depending on availability and price.

This coffee was certainly the best of the bunch, which wasn’t saying too much.  It was slightly bitter, with a thin, metallic-tinged flavor that lacked richness. One person in our first group of four tasters did like it, and her score bumped up the average to our final rating of 2.25 motmots.

The only variety of the line not sampled was the Organic Mountain Moonlight.  However, the far-more-talented palate of Doug at Bloggle did review it. He notes “Its flavors tend toward wet earth and wood… and for a cup that tastes subtly of mud, it has surprisingly little body, but it does offer a fairly harsh, stale finish.” Check out the comment regarding why Millstone might be purposely marketing such characterless and uninspiring organic, Fair Trade coffee.

Parting thoughts
The thin body of these coffees, and their unappetizing aroma, were what really made them stand apart.  If we give Millstone the benefit of the doubt and believe that they use all arabica beans, then the lack of body and flavor can only be from poor handling and processing. This is a nice lesson in mass production versus hand-crafting. You can’t process and roast tens of thousands of pounds of beans with the same care and attention as batch-roasting to order.  The wheels just fall off.

Finally, a bit on Millstone and sustainability. I dug up P&G’s 2004 sustainability report (PDF).  It covers the whole company, not just the coffee, but has an index by subject. Under “Environmental Indicators, Biodiversity, Major Impacts on Biodiversity” there is no page reference, but a statement that says

“P&G does not track biodiversity land use as in general we do not operate in these areas.”

Indeed.

Blends/Multiple / Coffee reviews

Coffee review: Wild Birds Unlimited Birder’s Blend

Plainspoken Coffee. A Coffee Review for Ordinary People by Ordinary People, #14. A review in our conservation organization coffee series.

Wild Birds Unlimited Birder’s Blend. Certified Fair Trade and Certified Organic. Shade grown, as determined by roaster (see the review on other Songbird Coffees for that story) from regions that typically grow in shade (Matagalpa in Nicaragua and (Lake Atitlan in Guatemala).

Wild Birds Unlimited (WBU) is the largest franchise system of retail stores catering to the backyard bird feeding hobbyist in the U.S.  The stores are well-stocked with a lot of very high quality products, and employees, while often not bird experts, are well-trained and knowledgeable about bird feeding and its apparatus. WBU funds the Pathways To Nature grants which fund projects in the National Wildlife Refuge system, and partners with various organizations to support a number of bird conservation initiatives.

One partner is the American Birding Association (ABA), and a portion of the sales of the WBU Birder’s Blend go to the ABA, since this coffee is one in the line of Songbird Coffees, one of which we reviewed here. But since many people may first encounter a Songbird Coffee at a WBU store, we thought we’d review it separately.  It also gives us a chance to try one more in this line of a number of choices.

This was described as a light roast, but it was clearly full city, with all beans shiny with oil and medium-dark brown.  The package had no roast date, but there was a decent amount of bloom in the French press, so the beans were quite fresh.  However, this is unlikely to be the case if purchased at a WBU store, which probably don’t have huge turnover.

The first sip was pleasantly citrusy, very lively and bright. It had a nice sweetness with just a hint of caramel.  I think we were all happily surprised, and we found it better than the Panama blend Songbird Coffee.  Like that coffee, it also did turn a bit bitter as it cooled, and was better in a drip machine, as it lost some of the  brightness and liveliness in a French press. It earned 2.5 motmots, and we think it would turn at least some people on to sustainable coffee, except real cheapos.

An addendum: Curiously, the package uses a portrait of the Common Yellowthroat (Geothlypis trichas), a warbler that nests over much of North America.  It winters in the southern U.S. and much of Latin America from Panama north (although there are a number of resident subspecies in the tropics).  However, it is a species generally found wet areas, including marshes, reed beds, and mangroves — typical lowland habitats –not habitats where coffee is grown.  I found only a couple references to this species being found on coffee plantations (in Jamaica), where they were actually much more common in sun coffee than shade coffee.  It is certainly not a species characteristic of coffee farms.