Coffee reviews

Coffee reviews / Indo-Pacific

Coffee review: Papua New Guinea coffees

Recently, I posted a backgrounder on Papua New Guinea coffee. One of my favorite coffees is Allegro Coffee Roaster’s PNG Sigri Estate, which is not reviewed here because the crop ran out and it was unavailable at my local Whole Foods Market. In fact, it’s my understanding that PNG coffees are best when the beans come from the peak of harvest. So these reviews should perhaps be taken with a grain of salt, as this time of year last year’s crop (2006) would be a bit long in the tooth anyway.

First up is The Roasterie’s Kimel Estate, from the Eastern Highlands. This coffee was closest to a Sumatran of the three we tried. It was fairly heavy, sort of tannic and earthy, but not quite as in-your-face as a Sumatran. Very hot, it had sharp notes, but as it cooled the dull leathery tones emerged; I describe these woody/earthy flavors as wet cardboard, which sounds a little more unpleasant than it is.  We found this wasn’t a subtle, sweet coffee, and would be more of a hit with people who like more aggressive tastes. We gave it 2.5 motmots, but our take on this was at complete odds with the description at Coffee Review. Take two reviews and call us in the morning.

Ecco Caffe’s Purosa Estate is an organic coffee that is not technically from a single estate, but from small holders in Western Highlands. This coffee was very bright with a surprising citrus zing when hot.  It was full-bodied, and as it cooled it got a bit syrupy, rustic, and earthy. We found this generally very interesting, with many little flavors hitting the tongue throughout. 3.25 motmots.

Last up was Counter Culture’s Red Mountain, from the Waghi Valley in the Western Highlands. (Caveat: I know this was the last batch from the crop.) The most curious thing about this coffee was that the taste gave us no hint of origin. It was closest to a classic Central American, pleasant and subtle, but with few other distinguishing characteristics. All of us got a fleeting zesty sparkle on the first hot sip; like a shooting star it quickly faded into the dark night. Like the other PNGs, it was medium-bodied, but a bit lighter than the others, further obscuring a sense of source. 2.75 motmots.

These coffees were all over the page. It’s actually one of the things a couple of us really like about PNG coffees — they are a bit mysterious and hard to pin down, you just don’t know what you might get in the cup.  But given the age of the coffees in these reviews, we’re going to revisit PNG coffees when roasters start getting their 2007 crop because none of these lived up to what we have enjoyed in PNGs in the past. Stay tuned.

Coffee reviews / Latin America

Coffee review: Allegro Coffee Santa Adelaida

Plainspoken Coffee. A Coffee Review for Ordinary People by Ordinary People, #25.

We enjoy reviewing coffees from El Salvador, a country which has lost over 90% of its native forest cover, with 80% of its remaining tree cover represented by shade-grown coffee. Be sure to check our previous backgrounder on El Salvador coffees, which includes several reviews and the importance of the country to birds, with a number of links. Our latest tasting from El Salvador is Allegro Coffee Roasters Santa Adelaida.

Santa Adelaida cooperative is located south of San Salvador, in the Balsamo mountains near the San Salvador volcano, at an altitude of about 1200 meters. Nearly all the 500 members grow the bourbon variety on approximately 650 hectares.

In 2003, Allegro chose Santa Adelaida as one of their High 5 recipients. The High 5 For Farmers program provides support directly to the farms where the organic coffee is produced by providing $10,000 to growers to complete much needed community based projects in education, health care, agricultural programs and farm development.  The 2003 project helped the co-op recover from hurricane damage.

The coffee is Rainforest Alliance certified and certified organic, and can be purchased at Whole Foods Markets.  It was a light roast, and provided a snappy, juicy start, followed by medium-bodied sweetness.  Tasters detected hints of maple candy and caramel.  It had a really nice, creamy mouthfeel and a lingering finish.  It was a classic Central American, with just enough nuances to be considered a bit more interesting than many others from similar origins and making it our favorite El Salvador to date!  3.75 motmots.

See also Coffee Review’s 2003 review, when it scored 88 points.

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.

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.

Africa / Coffee reviews / Retail and specialty roasters / Starbucks

Starbucks Black Apron Terranova Estate

(Update: As of 2013, the family that owned Terranova made the difficult economic decision to cease farming coffee. More here.)

I have commented on two previous Starbucks Black Apron selections (Sulawesi Kopi Kampung and Ethiopia Gemadro Estate), so I may as well keep going. The latest Black Apron coffee is Terranova Estate from Zambia.

Recall that the Black Apron Exclusives are limited offerings that are described by Starbucks as being rare, exotic, distinctive, or unique in some way. Farmers receive a cash award of $15,000 for community projects.

As far as I can recall, this is the only coffee I’ve seen from Zambia. This country lags behind the big players on the African coffee scene, such as Kenya, Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Tanzania.  Zambia is a land-locked country, and at times its coffee has suffered from transportation problems getting to and sitting at port. Coffee is not a traditional crop in Zambia, which first began exporting only about 15 years ago in an effort to diversify the economy. The majority (greater than 95%) of Zambian coffee comes from the 30 to 50 large commercial coffee farms. About 40% of Zambian coffee is grown in the northeastern part of the country, the southern Mazabuka region accounts for about just under 50%.

So, what about the Terranova Estate? Terranova is one of the large estates, at 1000 hectares, of which about 20% is in coffee.  It supports a small village of 300 people year-round, and employs 2,500 people during peak harvest time. Terranova is located in the upper Kaleya Valley near the town of Mazabuka. The altitude is around 1000-1200 meters, at the low end of the arabica growing range.

During the European colonial era, when Zambia was known as Northern Rhodesia, large farms run by whites produced food for local consumption. Many European plantation owners left the country when it gained independence in 1964.  The Street family had been farming in the area for decades when they acquired Terranova in the mid-1980s.  In addition to other crops, including cut flowers for export, they began farming coffee with the help of financing from a number of sources, including the World Bank, the European Investment Bank, and the EU’s Export Development Programme.

The eco-friendliness of the estate is a bit hard to assess. Because coffee farming is relatively “new” in Zambia, the more modern techniques of pulp composting, water conservation, and natural pest control are often practiced. Southern Zambia has a very prolonged dry season, so coffee requires irrigation. In the case of Terranova, water is provided by at least one dam on the Kaleya River that was built by the Street family, as well as other advanced irrigation systems. However, there was nothing on the Terranova web site regarding their farming practices or sustainability measures.  The site does say that the “Estate contributes heavily to the wildlife management of the Lower Zambezi National Park.”

The export revenue as well as seasonal jobs provided by coffee is important to Zambia.  Zambia is one of the poorest nations in the entire world. Although I’m uncertain about biodiversity preservation measures at Terranova, there is a connection between poverty and environmental exploitation — and fighting poverty can preserve ecosystems. Terranova provides many jobs, and has constructed a school on the estate that has over 200 students.  It may very well be that this enterprise is a worthy cause to support.

As far as the coffee itself, Coffee Review pretty much flunked coffee from Terranova in 1999, calling it flat and woody. But according to Sweet Maria’s, 1999 was not a good year for Zambian coffee. Things have apparently improved.  Although not a fan of dark roasts, the Star[bucks]ling said that the Starbucks Terranova was incredibly complex, and fruity flavors emerging in stages as it cooled: blueberry, orange, apricot, and plum, with blueberry dominating.  He said it was “very African, like a fine, rich, wine,” and quite impressive.

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.

Coffee reviews / Latin America

Coffee review: Whole Foods (Allegro) Finca El Jaguar

Plainspoken Coffee. A Coffee Review for Ordinary People by OrdinaryPeople, #19.

Finca El Jaguar is a family-run farm in Nicaragua’s Jinotega province, 188 km north of the capital Managua. The farm is also a registered private reserve under the Alianza Para Las Areas Silvestres (ALAS), a bird conservation organization. It includes 70 acres of protected cloud forest, 60 acres of managed forest, and over a dozen coffee plots totaling 34 acres.  Another 35 acres is grassland.  The coffee is certified organic.

El Jaguar offers eco-lodging, with birders and researchers welcome. The farm is one of seven sites in Nicaragua with a wintering bird banding program, part of the important MoSI project (Monitoreo de Sobrevivencia Invernal – Monitoring Overwintering Survival).  This project is an essential tool that enables researchers to gain insight into what bird species winter in an area, the habitats they use, and their overwinter survival. Another Nicaraguan organic shade coffee farm and ecolodge is working on establishing a MoSI station, Finca Esperanza Verde. Their coffee is sold in the U.S. as Counter Culture Matagalpa Cafe San Ramon.

We have already posted on the importance of Nicaragua to birds, Nicaraguan coffee in general here.

Thus, it is a pleasure to review a coffee from a farm that represents what we focus on here at Coffee & Conservation — Allegro Coffee Roaster’s Finca El Jaguar, available at Whole Foods Markets. Finca El Jaguar was a recipient of Allegro’s High Five for Farmers program in 2003, which donated $4,000 to make improvements to the local school.

Allegro’s Finca El Jaguar is a light roast (full city), with a great, fresh, slightly nutty aroma. It was very smooth, and while not endowed with many distinctive flavors, it had a nice body and enough richness for one reviewer to comment that it would make a great afternoon cup. This is not a coffee that will knock your socks off — it has a classic coffee profile variously described by our reviewers as “simple,” “benign,” and “soothing.”  The Risky Kingbird noted, “It’s not too complicated — and I appreciate that.”  We gave it 3 motmots.

This coffee also garnered 90 points at Coffee Review.

I will add that the MoSI stations across Latin America and the West Indies operate on a shoestring, with local researchers enduring hardships and primitive conditions to do this important work.  You can sponsor a station for a winter season for only $300.  For more information sponsoring a MoSI station, visit the Institute of Bird Populations web site.

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.

Caribou Coffee / Coffee reviews / Latin America / Retail and specialty roasters

Coffee Review: Caribou Coffee Ecuador Changaimina

Plainspoken Coffee. A Coffee Review for Ordinary People by Ordinary People, #17.

Coffee from Ecuador is something you don’t see every day. In fact, I think I’ve seen more places offering coffee from the Galapagos Islands (which are Ecuadorian) than from the mainland. So I was surprised to see it offered at Caribou Coffee.  Their limited edition coffees are known as the Roastmaster’s Reserves, and the current selection is Ecuador Changaimina, from the southern province of Loja (red on map).

Coffee has been grown in Ecuador for generations.  The lowlands produce robusta, but the high mountain regions produce decent  arabicas. Most of the high-grown coffee, from Loja province, is grown on small farms with very little use of chemicals. The major co-op in this area is PROCAP (Asociacion Agroartesanal de Productores de Café de Altura Puyango), an
organization of 380 families of which about two-thirds are certified organic. The organic coffee from this co-op is sometimes marketed as shade grown Puyango (Puyango is a canton, or subdivision, in the province, and the most important coffee-growing area in Loja, if not the whole country). Typica, bourbon, and caturra are the most frequently grown varieties, usually all grown on the same farm.

The lack of Ecuador beans in the market has been due to a lack of attention to proper harvesting and processing, and the expense of transportation from the highlands to the ports. A lot of Ecuadorian coffee goes to making instant coffee, so the large corporate coffee roasters are major buyers of Ecuadorian coffee. Improvements have been made in production methods, and farmers are aiming more for the specialty coffee market, hence we may be seeing more Ecuadorian coffee in the coming years.

Based on this Caribou Ecuador Changaimina, we cannot say the region is quite ready for prime time.  This wasn’t bad coffee, just unremarkable. At the first tasting, three of us sat there sipping silently, unable to come up with much to say. The next day, I sent the Kingfisher off with it in his travel mug.  I asked him later what he thought of it.  He sort of summed up the whole experience when he replied, “I don’t remember.”  Not a strong endorsement, but considering you tend to remember bad coffee, not a strong condemnation, either. 2.25 motmots.

Coffee reviews / Latin America

Coffee Review: Whole Foods (Allegro) Honduras San Marcos

Plainspoken Coffee. A Coffee Review for Ordinary People by Ordinary People, #16.

The two major natural foods markets, at least in our region, are Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods.  There are more TJ’s close to me, but I’ve always been a bit frustrated by their coffees.  Determining origin on most of their self-branded beans is difficult, if not futile.  Some of their offerings are okay (the Organic Bolivian is decent), but even Coffee Review found most to be average (notice also the lack of origin info on most). More on TJ’s in this post.

Whole Foods, on the other hand, is much more transparent. Although they carry several additional brands (varies regionally), including Intelligentsia and Counter Culture’s Sanctuary line of shade coffees, Whole Foods features coffees roasted by Allegro Coffee Company in Colorado. Allegro is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Whole Foods, acquired in 1997.  The Allegro web site has a page where you can download their social responsibility scorecard and coffee sourcing report.

Today’s review is of Allegro’s Organic San Marcos from Honduras. It is a Special Reserve selection. Growers of Special Reserve coffees receive $10,000 to fund community initiatives.  This coffee is from the COCOSAM cooperative in San Marcos de Colon, Choluteca department in southwestern Honduras (red on map). Around half the growers of this nearly 100-farmer co-op grow certified organic coffee.  The varieties grown are bourbon, caturra, and catuai.

This is a light roast (full city). There was no roast date on the bag, but a “best used by” date of 3/23/07 and the healthy bloom when prepared on 16 January indicates a 12/23/06 roasting, or thereabouts.

As a mixed lot from a number of farms, I did not expect it to approach the excellence of the single estate Honduran El Puente from Counter Culture, one of my favorite Central American coffees. The San Marcos is also grown at a lower altitude than the El Puente, a factor that might also argue for points off the flavor profile. But the tasting panel agreed this was a really enjoyable coffee.

Like nearly all Honduran and Guatemalan coffees we’ve sniffed, the San Marcos had a beautiful aroma.  I don’t think I’d ever get tired of smelling beans like this, although the coffee rarely lives up to the (small) room-filling fragrance.  At any rate, the San Marcos had a profile typical of good Central Americans: hints of vanilla, milk chocolate, and caramel.  This coffee was very smooth, almost buttery, with an especially creamy mouthfeel that we thought added a lot to the experience.  This was, unsurprisingly, most pronounced when prepared in a press.  It was also excellent brewed, although I’d skip the paper filter and use a gold filter to preserve some of the creamy smoothness.  We give this 3.75 motmots.

Since they are so accessible to many people, we’ll be reviewing at least two more Whole Foods/Allegro coffees in the future.

Coffee reviews / Corporate coffee

Coffee Review reviews supermarket coffees

The latest at Coffee Review is a look at mainstream supermarket coffees.  Reviewing prepackaged, pre-ground coffees is a departure for Kenneth Davids’ site, which is the best source on the web for reviews of specialty coffees. Davids was honest, perhaps even courageous, giving a couple of coffees fair scores. However, his overview states that “the mainstream supermarket coffees reviewed here offered mainly mediocrity, bracketed by a couple of excursions into pretty good and more than a couple into sheer repulsiveness.”

Just because a few coffees scored “pretty good” should not encourage people to stick with these cheap beans, for reasons described below. He reviews 14 coffees available in major supermarkets, which include a couple I’ve never heard of (regional?) and some “crossover” products such as Peet’s and Starbucks.  You should certainly read the whole article, but I’d like to mention two points he makes about the big corporate coffees. He reviews Maxwell House and two Yubans (all owned by Kraft); four by Folgers (owned by Procter & Gamble); and MJB Premium (owned by Sara Lee).

All of these commodity brands share a similar heritage.  Davids writes:

Most of the robustas in the cans appeared to have been steamed to remove the sewery taints these coffees acquire through being dried inside the fruit in rotting heaps. The result is a neutral, cloyingly sweet, woody, vaguely nut-like cup, usually with a slight residual hint of rot. All of the standard branded, canned blends shared a similar steamed-robusta-heavy profile, with only minor differences.

Aside from the lousy taste, the corporate (and public) thirst for cheap robusta beans is what precipitated the coffee crisis, driving thousands of small farmers who grew quality arabica beans out of business. This is most often framed as a serious humanitarian crisis — and it is — but it has also been an ecological disaster. Plummeting prices led farmers to sell their farms, or convert them to less environmentally-friendly crops (including drugs) or to sun coffee. Please read more here.

Davids discusses what inexpensive coffees mean to farmers, even the theoretically beneficial types like the Rainforest Alliance certified Yuban blend (which I discussed in depth here). He notes, “mainstream supermarket coffees generally fail to provide much option for those of us who want to recognize and reward coffee growers as our colleagues rather than exploit them as unacknowledged drones in the vast global commodity hive.”

One coffee he reviewed, which got a decent score, was Wal-Mart’s Great Value 100% Arabica, which was also incredibly cheap (“someone got shafted..at the coffee-tree end of the supply chain.”) The importance of a retail giant like Wal-Mart in the coffee business deserves a post of its own, which will be forthcoming.

Coffee reviews

Coffee review: National Wildlife Blend

Plainspoken Coffee. A Coffee Review for Ordinary People by Ordinary People, #15. A review in our conservation organization coffee series.

National Wildlife Federation Blend (discontinued)

The National Wildlife Federation, founded in 1938, is a very well-known conservation organization whose mission focuses on protecting wildlife. In addition to lobbying and activism, NWF promotes Backyard Wildlife Habitat for homeowners and schoolyards, and publishes the popular magazines Ranger Rick and National Wildlife.

NWF coffee is available through Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, the Vermont company that donates 5% of pre-tax earning to environmental and social causes that has a firm commitment to sustainability. Happily enough, they are equally committed to good coffee.

The NWF blend is certified Fair Trade, certified organic, and shade grown.  According to the web site, it is a blend of Central and South American coffees.  It specifies one source, the La Trinidad Cooperative in Oaxaca, Mexico. This is in the Pluma Hidalgo region, where coffee is traditionally grown under dense shade. Although it is not noted at the Green Mountain site, this cooperative of 230 small holders is or was certified by Rainforest Alliance. So far, so good!

Browsing around the other organic offerings at Green Mountain provides clues to other components of the blend. The South American portion must come from the La Florida cooperative in the Chanchamayo region of Peru. This is a large cooperative (1000 farmers) and the last data I looked at showed 167 of them were certified shade grown by Smithsonian. Central American Fair Trade/Organic coffees include one sourced from the Segovia region of northern Nicaragua from the PRODECOOP coop — grown under heavy shade. Their Guatemalan comes from the La Voz Que Clama en el Desierto coop near Lake Atitlan, an area known for growing coffee in the traditional manner.  This is coffee you can feel good about drinking.

And you will not suffer for it. This was far and away the best “conservation coffee” we tasted, and the best blend we have tried, equaling many of the single origins we have reviewed here.  The large beans were roasted to full city, medium brown with a sheen but no droplets of oil.  The beans had an interesting whiff of tobacco, as well as a fresh grassy smell.

Bright and lively, it had a nice acidic zip and zing when hot (“It’s moving around my mouth,” noted CoalTit). It got smoother and mellower as it cooled, and maintained faint hints of chocolate.  We enjoyed much more than we expected, after the other coffees, and thought this would really impress grocery store coffee drinkers and gain converts to sustainable coffee; a couple of us thought we might like it for our everyday coffee ourselves.  3.5 motmots.