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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.

Coffee reviews / Latin America

Coffee Review: Counter Culture Mesa de los Santos

Plainspoken Coffee. A Coffee Review for Ordinary People by Ordinary People, #21.

Counter Culture Mesa de los Santos, Colombia.
This coffee is certified by both Rainforest Alliance and Smithsonian — rest assured your purchase supports biodiversity if it complies with the strict environmental rules set forth for Smithsonian Bird-Friendly certification. It is also certified organic. In fact, Mesa de los Santos (actually, the name of the farm is Hacienda El Roble) is a model for sustainable coffee.  The 500 acre farm, in the same family for four generations, has largely been replanted from former pastureland.  There are now around 50 species of trees providing multi-layer shade for the coffee. The farm owners fund a biannual biological research project, which evaluates the farm’s biodiversity. New bird species continue to be detected on the farm.

The location of the farm is also about 30 miles from the important Cerulean Warbler reserve I’ve written about, about 150 miles closer than the source of Thanksgiving Coffee’s Cerulean Warbler coffee that was reviewed here. The Counter Culture is also less expensive, especially if you factor in the waste from the defects in the Cerulean Warbler coffee, discussed in that review.

The hundreds of workers are also well cared for, earning 65% more than country’s minimum wage and receiving all health care, and the farm funded the local school. The web site includes an entire section on birds.
Mesa de los Santos coffee is quite popular, and is carried by a number of roasters.  I trust Counter Culture to take great care of their beans, and they came through as always.  CC roasted the Mesa de los Santos light. Aside from a few oddly-shaped beans (fewer than five per two-tablespoon portion), it was free of defects. We reviewed it 5, 8, and 10 days past the roast date stamped on the package.

This coffee was subtle-bodied, with a nutty (almond-y?) complexity and distinct soft butterscotch notes in the cooling cup. The description also mentioned “buttery” and I very much agree with that description. So often, flavors are superior in the French press and muted in drip-brewed preparation. The Mesa de los Santos was an exception.  It started with a bright crispness but again gained the sweet, soft notes as it cooled. Two reviewers didn’t like it piping hot, but within five minutes were won over as the gentle flavors emerged. We concluded, therefore, it would make a great morning coffee, especially for a commuter.

One reviewer (perhaps because he has a short commute!) had another vision of when he’d drink this coffee. He pictured a bright, dew-drenched May morning, he would be setting out for a bird survey, anticipating the migrants he would encounter. “…There might be a White-eyed Vireo singing across the meadow…” he mused, thoughtfully sipping. We give this a solid 3 motmots.

Brief review at BCCY. Review of two Mesa de los Santos lots purchased green at Coffee Cuppers.

Coffee reviews / Latin America

Coffee Review: Thanksgiving Coffee Co. Cerulean Warbler coffee

Plainspoken Coffee. A Coffee Review for Ordinary People by Ordinary People, #20.

Thanksgiving Coffee Co. Cerulean Warbler Coffee.

Update: We re-reviewed this coffee, and the results of the second tasting are below the first.

Background:

This coffee is being marketed as part of the Save the Cerulean Warbler campaign.  I wrote about the importance of shade coffee farms to Cerulean Warblers in this post, which introduces the conservation status of this beautiful bird, and the establishment of a Cerulean Warbler reserve in Santander, Colombia. I followed it up in a post about the Save the Cerulean Warbler campaign, and provide more background on this coffee.

As I noted in that post, the Cerulean Warbler reserve is in Santander, but this coffee is sourced from COOPERAN, a cooperative in southwestern Antioquia province (see that post for a map). This coffee is not certified organic, and is labeled shade grown but is not certified as such by Rainforest Alliance or Smithsonian.

Review of first bag:
This is listed as a light roast, but all beans were generally dark and there was oil on most of them. I say “generally” because there were a fair number of lighter beans, too — it reminded me a bit of a “black and tan” blend, except that the beans were not uniformly dark and light, there was a range of colors, so much so that I wondered if the batch didn’t roast evenly. Or it may not have roasted evenly because there was also an easily-seen variety in the size of the beans.  I showed these beans, without comment, to several people, who immediately made the same observations.

Very disappointing to me were the large number of defects in this coffee.  I doled out five two-tablespoon (~12 gram) portions of beans and sorted through them. The average portion had 23 “bad” beans (113 total) — mostly broken beans, shells, and insect damage, but also some malformed beans and a few sticks. The pile amounted to two tablespoons, or 25% of the total volume (click to enlarge the photo at left, a portion of the defects).  If this is a representative sample, then no matter how kindly I look at it, using the SCAA’s standards for imperfections, this is off-grade coffee, far from specialty grade. This was shocking to me, and I can only hope this bag was from a bad batch (the defects appeared throughout the bag).

Fortunately, it tasted better than it looked or smelled. There was no roast date on the package; there was a modest bloom when the hot water hit the grounds in the French press.  In the cup, it was a bit thin-bodied despite being prepared in the press. There were no distinctive flavors, and it was just semi-lifeless. It quickly became bitter when it cooled.  It was less bitter when brewed through a paper filter, but was nonetheless unremarkable.  We ran this coffee by more people than usual, because the cause — helping the Cerulean Warbler — is one we strongly believe in.  But the average rating still came out to only 2 motmots.  Maybe this was a bad batch of coffee, but if so it shouldn’t have made it out the door. We’d be willing to try it again, but frankly are unwilling to pay for another bag.

Review of second bag:
We received a new bag of this coffee from Thanksgiving Coffee, which they sent after seeing the review.  It was clearly roasted with more care than the first bag. (I had a coffee expert look at the photos of the beans, and he agreed it was a problem with the roasting, including a too-fast and hot roast that causes beans to explode; the divots that I thought might be insect damage were in fact from a rapid roasting process.) The bean size and roast color were much more uniform.  The smell was far more pleasant, as was the flavor. A few people noted they thought that there was something really special in this coffee that could be coaxed out with an even lighter roast.  Maybe Thanksgiving would offer this coffee in more than one roast in the future! Anyway, a new round of tastings boosted the rating to 2.75 motmots.

ABC also contacted me and once again emphasized that their Colombian bird conservation counterparts, ProAves, is inspecting the Antioquia farms where the coffee is currently sourced to insure the coffee is grown under shade.  And, they are working hard to transfer the sourcing of the Cerulean Warbler coffee to the newly-purchased shade coffee farm adjacent to the Cerulean Warbler reserve in Santander.

I encourage you to support the Cerulean Warbler campaign by donating directly to the American Bird Conservancy.

We will be tasting this coffee again when we receive news of the switch, and look forward to providing updates on the success of the Save the Cerulean Warbler campaign!

See this review for an alternative coffee from Santander, Colombia closer to the reserve and certified organic, Rainforest Alliance, and Smithsonian Bird-Friendly.