Coffee reviews

Coffee reviews / Latin America

Coffee review: Birds, Bees, & Trees

In recognition of National Pollinator Week, another review of a coffee with a great backstory.

Plainspoken Coffee. A Coffee Review for Ordinary People by Ordinary People, #44.

The Great Northern Roasting Company [now Roaster Jack] out of Traverse City, MI has started an initiative called Birds, Bees & Trees. They will donate 3% of all proceeds from Birds, Bees & Trees-designated coffee to the Pollinator Partnership, a non-profit organization geared toward the preservation of bees and all other pollinators.

About the Pollinator Partnership
P2, as they call themselves, is one of the best sources for information on pollinators and pollination, including many resource links and excellent planting guides for North America. They also manage a number of projects, such as the North American Pollinator Protection Campaign (NAPPC) a collaborative group of over 120 organizations and individuals that promote and implement a continent-wide Action Plan to encourage activities to protect the numbers and health of all pollinating animals.

GNRC joins a number of other companies (Burt’s Bees, Häagen-Dazs) as a supporting partner of P2. Since arabica coffee is self-pollinating and P2 appears to be exclusive to North America, at first blush this might seem like an odd partnership. However, a number of studies have shown the importance of shade coffee to pollinators in general, and the benefits of cross-pollination to coffee fruit set. The NAPPC does include Mexico and a number of Mexican organizations are partners.

About the coffee
GNRC has chosen their Terruño Nayarit Sun-Dried Organic as their primary Birds, Bees & Trees coffee. (This is currently available online from their site, and the BB&T-badged version, which will generate the donations, is coming soon; I’ll post a link as soon as it is.)

This coffee comes from cooperatives in the west-central Mexican state of Nayarit, mostly around the extinct Cerro San Juan volcano west of the capital Tepic. This is one of the northernmost locations in Latin America where coffee is grown. Most is grown at over 1100 meters, and is of the bourbon, typica, and caturra varieties.

Care to know more? Every bag of coffee has a coded label. You can go online to Track Your Coffee, enter the code, and trace your beans to their source. Our bags, for instance, were comprised mostly of beans from the community of El Malinal (86%) along with 14% from Xalisco, processed at the IPCONAY mill. There’s even a link to a map. No secrets here — and you know how much I like transparency and making it easy for consumers to know more about their coffee.

Terruño Nayarit coffee is available exclusively via San Cristobal Coffee Importers, which has done a tremendous amount of work helping small holders in this area of Mexico. I had the pleasure of seeing founder Jim Kosalos speak at the recent SCAA conference on his work, and found him and it remarkable. You can learn more: in this article: Mexico’s Nayarit Coffee Producers’ Quest To Quality Continues — Tea & Coffee Trade Journal, Aug 2003.

We tried both a light and a dark roast, supplied by GNRC’s owner Jack Davis. The aroma of both — redolent of blueberries — gave it away as a natural (dry) processed coffee. The light roast also hinted at dried summer grass; a hint of oregano was detected by one taster. The flavor was much more gentle than the dry smell would suggest. It was smooth, and prepared as a drip and in a French press the fruit flavor developed as the cup cooled, but it never was as aggressively berry-forward as natural process Ethiopians can be, for example. We like it best made in a Chemex. It really shined: clean, with a little more piquant acidity (“lemon rind at the edge of conjecture” one taster rather poetically intoned). The light roast scored consistently at 3.5 motmots. The dark roast was a tad too dark for many in the tasting panel — dark roast aficionados rated it highly at 3.75, while light roast lovers pegged it a full motmot lower. Everyone should be able to pick a favorite.

Great Northern Roasting’s Birds, Bee & Trees will be an ongoing campaign, with other or more offerings in the future. While they gear up, please honor the many pollinators — birds, bees, bats, flies, mammals, and more — by learning more about why they are important, how to garden for pollinators, and what to plant in your area. Biodiversity preservation starts at home.

Coffee reviews / Latin America

Coffee review: Café Choco Andes

Plainspoken Coffee. A Coffee Review for Ordinary People by Ordinary People, #43.

Coffee reviews have been a little sparse lately. The focus of reviews here is evolving, with an emphasis on educating about corporate coffee, and on sustainable coffees with great backstories or associated projects. This coffee is one of the latter.

Café Choco Andes is about more than just coffee. This project includes multiple international partners working not only to improve coffee quality and move toward organic production methods, but also has reforestation, biodiversity, ecotourism, and educational components. It is part of the larger Choco-Andean corridor project, which seeks to create a network of protected areas, both natural and restored and managed, from northwestern Ecuador to the Pacific coastal mangroves.

Location and background
The Café Choco Andes project takes place in northwest Ecuador. This is an area of very high biodiversity, and the Maquipucuna-Rio Guayllabamba Important Bird Area (IBA) is located here. Over 350 bird species have been recorded in this IBA, including the near-threatened Toucan Barbet (top) and the vulnerable Giant Antpitta (middle). The bulk of the IBA consists of the Maquipucuna Reserve, founded in 1989 by the non-profit Maquipucuna Foundation. The reserve is 6000 ha and located about 50 miles northwest of Quito. It is surrounded by another 14000 ha of protected forest, much of which is undisturbed cloud forest. Altitudes range from 1000 to 2800 meters, thus encompassing coffee-growing zones. It includes an ecolodge and scientific station.

In the late 1990s, the University of Georgia’s School of Ecology and the Maquipucuna Foundation began a project to preserve the area’s biodiversity while improving the livelihoods of residents. Goals included reforestation and creation of forest corridors to improve habitat, especially for migratory birds, and working with coffee farmers to re-establish shade trees and convert to organic production. Over 50,000 coffee trees have been planted since 2000, and over two dozen farms have received organic certification. Other sustainable cottage industries help diversify local income and prevent habitat destruction: beekeeping, paper making, hand-crafted jewelry, jam production, and shade-grown cacao. The project now includes over 160 coffee farmers and 400-plus cacao growers.

The importance of the shade coffee is reflected in research that takes place on these Maquipucuna Foundation-owned lands. A recently published paper [1] by University of Georgia and Foundation researchers looked at the response of resident forest birds to disturbance and canopy cover in this area. It found that 18 species of specialized forest birds sharply declined in areas with less than 21 to 40% canopy cover. The authors noted that this threshold level is the same as the 40% minimum canopy cover recommended for Bird-Friendly and Rainforest Alliance certified coffee.

Around five years ago, additional partners, including the State Botanical Garden of Georgia, the Georgia Museum of Natural History, and the Georgia Environmental Education Alliance established Our Shared Forests (Nuestros Bosques Compartidos in Ecuador). This bi-national education program for schoolkids focuses on awareness of migratory bird species that the two countries share, such as Summer Tanager, Blackburnian Warbler (right), and Red-eyed Vireo.

The coffee
The Macquipucuna Foundation’s coffee is roasted by 1000 Faces Coffee, located in Athens, GA. This particular microlot comes from one of the farms owned by the Foundation that is part of the Café Choco Andes project; Finca Orongo in Pichincha province, near the community of Palmitopamba. At one time, it was completely deforested. It consists of typica and caturra, and is grown at 1400 to 1700 meters.

This coffee is not certified organic or shade-grown, although it is grown under these conditions. Coffee & Conservation readers know that I have mixed feelings about certification, in particular because I don’t believe requiring small producers who grow coffee in perfectly environmentally-sustainable ways should have to pay for it. Many are unable to cover the costs (especially if we as consumers are unwilling to make it worthwhile) or even have the skills and time to manage the paperwork.

The last time we reviewed an Ecuadorian coffee, we weren’t especially impressed. That was a Caribou selection, and it was from Loja. Although it wasn’t a dark roast, it was a tad darker than we tend to like. 1000 Faces roasted this coffee lighter. The roast level indicates medium, but it was on the lighter side. This lighter touch served the coffee well.

This was a solid, middle-of-the-road coffee that reminded us of a good Colombian or Central American coffee. The sweetness was subtle; 1000 Faces describes it as raw honey which seemed apt to me. There was an interesting smoky accent which appealed to some panelists, while others perceived it as ashy. It had a quick and pleasant finish that I associate with a solid, reliable breakfast cup. Nothing else stood out to tasters, but I will say that it was a coffee that seemed to taste better a little further past roast day (at around ten days) than really freshly roasted. It mellowed and had a more rounded and balanced personality, losing some of the ashy notes that we detected at our first tastings. It was much better than the Caribou Ecuadorian selection; we gave it 2.75 motmots.

Read more:

[1] Mordecai, R. S., R. J. Cooper, and R. Justicia. 2009. A threshold response to habitat disturbance by forest birds in the Choco Andean corridor, northwest Ecuador. Biodiversity and Conservation 18:2421-2431.

Toucan Barbet photo by Michael Woodruff via Wikimedia Commons; Giant Antpitta photo by Andy Jones, Cleveland Museum of Natural History; Blackburian Warbler by Petroglyph, all under Creative Commons licenses.

Coffee reviews / Indo-Pacific

Coffee review: Doi Chaang Wild Civet Coffee

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.

Blends/Multiple / Coffee reviews / Latin America

Coffee review: Arbor Day blend

Plainspoken Coffee. A Coffee Review for Ordinary People by Ordinary People, #41.

Introduction
The Arbor Day Foundation‘s mission is to “inspire people to plant, nurture, and celebrate trees.”  The first tree-planting holiday, dubbed Arbor Day, took place in Nebraska in 1872. The last Friday in April — today — is National Arbor Day in the United States, celebrated with various tree planting activities.

One of the Arbor Day Foundation’s projects is Rain Forest Rescue, which has supported development of a conservation plan and land purchases in forested areas of Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala. Related to that effort, the organization sells Arbor Day Specialty coffee. In addition to bags ranging from ten ounces to five pounds, various samplers and gift boxes and a coffee club of two bags of coffee a month are also available.

Coffees
The regular offerings are the Arbor Day blend (medium roast), an Italian dark roast, and two flavored varieties (hazelnut and a cinnamon hazelnut). The medium roast Arbor Day blend is also available in decaf through the coffee club. There is currently a limited edition Colombian from Mesa de los Santos which I won’t go into here; I wrote about this Smithsonian Bird-Friendly and Rainforest Alliance certified origin in a previous post.

Aside from the limited edition coffee, there is no further information about the the origins of the Arbor Day selections on the web site. However, I was told that Arbor Day sources from Fair Trade co-ops in Mexico depending on availability: ISMAM and Nubes de Oro.

ISMAM (Indigenas de la Sierra Madre de Motozintla) is a cooperative with nearly 2,000 members of Mayan heritage, growing coffee on 9,700 ha of land, mostly on plots of less than 5 ha. It is based in Tapachula, Chiapas, near the Guatemalan border, and all members have received organic certification. Coffee is grown between 800 and 1600 meters (other sources I’ve seen give the altitude at 1,100 meters; the lowest elevations are robusta coffee, not included in this blend), and is the arabica varieties typica and bourbon.

ISMAM-grown coffee is touted as shade grown. One larger ISMAM farm, the 200 ha Finca Belen, is  Smithsonian Bird-Friendly certified. It’s a farm where Smithsonian researchers have done a number of studies on shade coffee and biodiversity. It’s not possible to determine how much, if any, of the Arbor Day coffee comes from this particular farm. Shade management across 2,000 farms will certainly vary.

Nubes de Oro is also a Chiapas cooperative, located near the El Triunfo Biosphere reserve (see this Starbucks review for more info) and headquartered in Mapastepec. There are over 400 members. As with ISMAM, Nubes de Oro grows typica and bourbon, and the altitude ranges from 900 to 1300 meters. This cooperative is also listed as Smithsonian Bird-Friendly certified, although the certification may involve only some of the members.

The Arbor Day coffees are roasted by The Roasterie in Kansas City — a really good specialty roaster, not some big anonymous commercial roaster, which I think is great.

Review
We reviewed the Arbor Day Blend in both regular and decaf. When I received the coffee, the Fair Trade certified label was prominently displayed, but I had to search for the organic seal. Curious.  Anyway, as advertised this was a medium roast, with most beans showing a sheen of oil, and some with blobs of oil.  There was no roast date on the package (which was not a valve bag), but when hot water hit the freshly ground coffee it did have a decent bloom.

In the French press, this coffee was pleasant, but did not have the acidity we may have expected from a Mexican coffee, especially from Chiapas. Some chocolate notes were there, but more people commented on flavors tending toward nutty or earthy. Several people thought it was sharp, slightly bitter, or better with milk.

Brewed, this harshness was gone for the most part, but it was still not as lively as we would have liked. To be fair, this is in all likelihood, given the season, the end of last year’s crop and therefore would be more apt to be a little dull. One taster said that it didn’t knock his socks off (actually, I think he said “my socks stayed on when I tried it.”). But, he said that didn’t mean it was bad — just a decent cup of coffee. It was just what you’d expect from this origin, balanced, not really complex, a good everyday cup.

I don’t drink much decaf, so I wasn’t sure what to expect from the decaf version. I thought it was better than the regular — a little smoother, without the sharp notes, even in the French press. It had no “off” taste, but was a little weaker than the regular, even when we experimented with grind and brew times. Had I been served this, I would not have known it was decaf.  Overall, these coffees scored 2.75 motmots.

For those seeking decently-sourced, organic, Fair Trade, and generally shade grown coffee — especially by subscription — I’d say to certainly give the Arbor Day coffees a try. In particular I think the average American coffee drinker, who is used to darker roasts or coffee shop coffees, would be pretty pleased with this.

And on this Arbor Day, consider planting some trees. If you order from the Arbor Day Foundation, you will be directed to select trees that will grow in your region. I implore you to make sure to select species that are native to your area. Arbor Day sells a lot of species that are not native to North America, including a few that are considered invasive in some regions. Using native species is really important to keep ecosystems functioning normally — and it will help the same migratory birds than benefit from your choice of shade grown coffee!