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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 news and miscellany / Retail and specialty roasters / Starbucks

Green Mountain and Starbucks make top 100 list

The CRO (Corporate Responsibility Officer, formerly Business Ethics magazine) has just published its eighth annual 100 Best Corporate Citizens, considered the third most influential corporate ranking.  Companies are rated on their performance in eight categories:  shareholders, community, governance, diversity, employees, environment, human rights, and product.

Coming in at #1, for the second year in a row, is Green Mountain Coffee Roasters.  The Mermaid also made the top 10, placing ninth; Starbucks has made this list all eight years. Whole Foods Market (owner of Allegro Coffee) was at #54. Missing from the list were any of the big four corporate coffee pushers.

Corporate coffee / Nestlé/Nespresso / Retail and specialty roasters / Starbucks

Nestlé and Starbucks respond to illegal coffee report

In an article in an Indonesian newspaper, Nestlé and Starbucks both responded to the report that they had been purchasing robusta coffee beans illegally grown in a Sumatran national park in Lampung province.

Nestlé
A spokesman for Nestlé Indonesia made this statement:

“Nestlé never willingly purchases coffee from dubious sources. However, the company admits the difficulty of determining the precise origin of a coffee bag which has passed through different hands before it reaches the Nestlé buyer.”

The emphasis is mine, which precisely sums up why I continuously recommend not buying supermarket coffees.  If the companies themselves don’t know where their coffee comes from or how it is farmed, how can we know it is farmed sustainably?  Or believe them?

Nestlé also said that the coffee they purchase from Lampung (around 12,000 tons a year) goes to make instant coffee. So brands to avoid = Nescafé and Taster’s Choice.

 


Starbucks
A spokesperson for Starbucks’ Indonesian partner denied that the company purchased coffee from Lampung (the southern province in question), or any robusta beans from Sumatra at all.

Starbucks is listed in the report on page 50, in an appendix on recipients of tainted coffee.  The list was compiled from records of the Cooperative Industry and Trade Service of Lampung province. It’s possible these records could be forged or falsified, I suppose. There is nothing as yet on the Starbucks web site concerning this issue.

By the way, buyers of Lampung beans should know better.  It was in 2003 that published reports [1,2] revealed that 70% of Lampung’s beans came from inside or adjacent to Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park and that endangered animals were threatened from the illegal cultivation.

[1] O’Brien, T. G. and M. F. Kinnaird.  2003.  Caffeine and conservation.  Science 300:587.

[2] Kinnaird, M.F., E.W. Sanderson, T. G. O’Brien, H.T. Wibisono, and G. Woolmer. 2003. Deforestation trends in a tropical landscape and implications for endangered large mammals. Conservation Biology 17:245-257.

Hat tip to bccy.

Blends/Multiple / Coffee reviews / Retail and specialty roasters

Coffee review: Audubon coffee

[For reference only…Audubon Coffee Club is now defunct]

Plainspoken Coffee. A Coffee Review for Ordinary People by Ordinary People, #13.  Audubon Premium Shade Grown Coffees. A review in our conservation organization coffee series.

The National Audubon Society promotes a small line of “habitat-friendly certified organic premium shade grown” coffees*, which are available at some supermarkets, and via their Audubon Coffee Club web site. All the coffees are Rainforest Alliance certified. They are distributed by Rogers Family Company, whose other brands include San Francisco Bay Gourmet Coffee, The Organic Coffee Co., Fairwinds Coffee, Cunningham’s Coffee, Pleasant Hill Farms Quality Coffee, and East India Coffee and Tea.  Rogers Family Company only buys beans from “farms that have demonstrated an interest in environmental responsibility” and in fact, owns at least two plantations.

Several kinds of Audubon coffee are offered: a Breakfast Blend, Rainforest Blend, French Roast and Decaf, and can be purchased ground or whole bean at the web site. Nowhere on the web site or package can you determine the country of origin of these coffees, much less a region or farm (although they may be sourced at least in part from the Rogers Family Panamanian farms). Nor do you get a choice of roast.  A roast level is not indicated on the package, but on the web site, away from the individual product pages, it notes that beans are “roasted to their fullest flavor point – a little darker than most coffees.” (Update: the web site is now much more thorough, and the coffees are now certified organic and 100% Rainforest Alliance certified.)

In my local grocery store, Audubon coffee was only available ground, at about $9.50 for 12 oz.  I purchased the Breakfast Blend, featuring the John James Audubon portrait of a Red-shouldered Hawk on the label.  An interesting (odd?) choice of bird, as many populations are not migratory, and those that do winter in the northern tropics are found in lowlands and avoid higher elevations, where most coffee would be grown.

The bottom of my package indicated it was distributed by JBR Gourmet Foods, Inc.  JBR changed its name to Rogers Family Company in late 2005.  I hoped this coffee wasn’t that old!

As luck would have it, there were many people hanging around the day we tried this coffee, so we had a lot of opinions. Most of us were unenthusiastic.  The most frequent comment was that it tasted over-roasted, burnt, and bitter.  Even fresh, it kind of tasted like coffee that had been left cooking in the pot too long.  It was quite acidic, but left a “hairy” feeling on the tongue. For the tasting panel regulars, it was not much beyond diner coffee.

Ergo, regular reviewers gave this coffee a very low score, averaging 1.25 motmots.  Two reviewers who frequently drink grocery store coffee liked it more, and their average score was 2.5 motmots. This was an interesting result, and indicates that this coffee might be a “step up” for ordinary coffee drinkers and convince them to switch to sustainable coffee.  However, I expect that many people would need to be farm more impressed to spend the extra money.  It is probably better fresher, or whole bean, but alas, I picked this up the way many people might — off the shelf of a busy grocery store.

I’d like to try this fresher, and whole bean, via the coffee club, or hear from folks who have tried it this way.

*There is some interesting history to this coffee. According to “Sustainable Coffee at the Crossroads” (Rice and McLean, Consumers Choice Council, 1999), Audubon originally sold the very first coffee using Smithsonian’s Bird-Friendly certification criteria, around 1997. It was originally roasted by Boyd’s Coffee and called Cafe Audubon. Audubon dumped it because they were not happy with the sales and marketing revenue.