Plainspoken Coffee. A Coffee Review for Ordinary People by Ordinary People, #5.

As promised in my previous backgrounder, a review of Hacienda la Esmeralda from Intelligentsia.

The beans: This was quite a light roast, just at city, medium brown with no oil on the beans.  They had a spicy odor that several of us immediately identified as smelling like pizza crust.  It was amazingly distinctive, and we thought that five of us coming up with the pizza analogy was remarkable.  Pizza crust is probably not an odor you’d want in your coffee, but rest assured, it did not taste like it smelled.  On day 2 post-roast, the freshly ground beans had a strongly floral smell, like a meadow in the hopper.  It faded quickly, and we couldn’t find it later.

Brewed: We tried this brewed in a drip on days 2 (gold filter) and 4 (unbleached paper) post-roast, and in a press on days 7 and 8.  We all agreed that the Ethiopian heritage was easy to distinguish, citrusy and very reminiscent of a Yirg.  In the press it was especially citrusy, with a mouthwatering juicy taste at first sip.

Several of us found it to be quite tea-like, in particular the aftertaste which was the most pleasant and non-coffee-like I’ve ever experienced, astringent like a good Darjeeling.  Kingfisher tasted cherries, and the Risky Kingbird could detect floral notes.  Overall, we were unable to pull out jasmine, green grape or apple, or some of the other exotic flavors experts found.  While we used a burr grinder and measured more carefully than usual, our pedestrian home gear and brewing style probably did not do this bean any favors.

We we blown away?  Not really, although some of us were pretty impressed. Star[bucks]ling thought this would be a coffee that could turn him on to a light roast. “This is the best cup of coffee I’ve ever had, but I don’t know why.” Coal Tit merely said “Whoa!”  She paused.  “That’s all I have to say.”

Other opinions: In the previous post I linked to reviews of earlier crops at bread coffee chocolate yoga; here is her take on this one.

Jim Schulman of Coffee Cuppers summarized the opinions at a tasting on one of the Coffee Geek forums:

“The Geisha had the across-the-room aromatics on Wednesday, but lost steam in the subsequent days.  The taste was sweet…with musky florals and cinnamon notes when warm, cooling to a spicey apple when cool. … In general the feel was that it tasted intermediate between a typical Central and an Ethiopian coffee; and that it would not have caused the same sort of sensation among tasters if it had been entered in the Ethiopian auction.

Is this worth the price of $50 green? In terms of absolute taste, probably yes. But there are other coffees in the same league…that sell for $8 to $12 at auction. After it’s performance and reputation in
the last two years, the bidders came ready to pay any price for this now legendary coffee, and the price reflects that, rather than its superiority to the other great coffees out there.”

Bottom line: No doubt, this was a lovely coffee, and in no way do we mean to dis it here. But for those of us without trained palates — and for the average, less-careful home consumer — it was nowhere as distinctive as the hype suggests.  We would not pay $30 a pound for it, much less $100.  We think, in fact, it would be a disservice to offer this coffee to a Maxwell House drinker with the idea of converting that person to quality coffee.  They would taste it and think it was great, but to an average joe, it would not be wildly removed and in a completely different class from what they were used to. We fear they’d think that if this was an example of the finest coffee in the world, there wasn’t a real need to change from commercial coffee. And that would be a shame.

Nonetheless, we are glad we tried this. With me, it averaged 3.75 motmots, but I was the stick in the mud with this coffee.  I just didn’t get into it.  So I will exclude myself from the scoring, which leaves it with a solid four motmots, with two people giving it over 4 motmots.

When to drink this coffee (field oriented): At the banquet when you are celebrating discovering a new species.

More on this coffee:

Interest percolating for rare cup of joe, Chicago Sun-Times.

I will be writing in the future about the Cup of Excellence and the Rainforest Alliance Cupping for Quality award programs for specialty coffees, and the role they can play in bringing attention to small farms, roaster relationships, and quality sustainable coffees.  Another one of these competitions, which it is timely now for me to mention, is the Best of Panama competition, sponsored by the Specialty Coffee Association of Panama. For the last three years, one farm has placed first in this competition, Hacienda la Esmeralda, in Chiriqui province on the slopes of Volcan Baru in western Panama (click map to enlarge).

This story is exceptional in several ways.  First, the bean and coffee are unique.  Second, this coffee has set records at auction, with the 2006 lot being the first green coffee to sell for over US$50 a pound green and US$100 a pound roasted.  I’ll give a little background here, because the cash-poor but burningly curious C&C coffee tasting panel raided their piggy banks and sprang for a half-pound of Esmeralda from Intelligentsia.

The Esmeralda Jaramillo Especial story: Hacienda La Esmeralda was purchased by the Peterson family in 1996. Previously, different coffee varieties had been planted about the farm, which has altitudes range from 1,450 to 1,700 meters.  Daniel Peterson cupped beans from all over the farm, and discovered the pleasant citrusy flavor present in the mixed beans from the farm as a whole were being flavored by some outstanding beans from a 50 hectare plot in one small valley at the high end (1550 m) of the farm: the Esmeralda Especial.

The microclimate of this valley is quite cold.  The bean is an arabica variety called Geisha or Gesha, a long-bean type with Ethiopia heritage brought to Panama in the 1960s via Costa Rica. It is low-yielding — 50 to 100 (60 kg) bags a year — in part because of the long “internodes” or space between the beans. It is likely a combination of the climate, bean, and (wet) processing that brings us this unique cup.

Auction price history: The Esmeralda set price history in the 2004 online green coffee auction, sponsored by the the Specialty Coffee Association of America. That lot sold for US$21 a pound and was huge news in the coffee industry (the average lot goes for about US$4 a pound). This year the lot, of five 60-kg bags, sold for US$50.25 a pound.

The lot was purchased by the Small Axe Coffee Alliance (Sweet Maria’s, Stumptown Coffee Roasters, Intelligentsia Coffee Roasters, Groundwork Coffee Company, and the Norwegian company Kaffa).  The first out of the gate with a public offering of roasted coffee was Intelligentsia. Sweet Maria’s offered the green beans as a set along with beans from the second and third place winners, Bambito Estate and Carmen Estate.

The farm and environmental sustainability: Hacienda La Esmeralda is Rainforest Alliance certified, and their coffee won first place Rainforest Alliance Cupping for Quality in 2004 and 2006. The farm is not certified organic, and does use glyphosate as a herbicide, and some fertilizers, according to the “Sustainability” portion of its web site. Use of pesticides is not specified, but it sounds like they are usually avoided.

The page indicates that there are about 75 large trees per hectare which add to the leaf litter of the coffee plants, and there is a photo of coffee growing under shade in their photo gallery. The farm does not prune trees during bird nesting or migration season.

As an ecologist, I would like to comment on a statement on the page: “A producing farm undoubtedly has a higher animal biomass than virgin forest as well as a higher photosynthetic rate. It is producing’ — it is not in a resting equilibrium as is a forest.”

Animal biomass is not a relevant yardstick of sustainability (although I don’t know if that’s the point that was being made, necessarily). Here’s why: A cattle pasture, with cattle, would have animal biomass that far exceeds tropical virgin forest of comparable size, but one could hardly say that is a makes it a better or more sustainable use of the land.  Likewise, photosynthetic rates themselves alone don’t have a lot of meaning. Fast-growing plants have higher photosynthetic rates, which are also influenced by light, temperature, vapor pressure deficit, and carbon dioxide.  Fast or slow, one is not “better” than another. And I’d venture to say that a tropical forest — any forest for that matter — is never at a “resting equilibrium” but is always dynamic, and always “productive”!  I’m inclined to take exception to the statement “Enormous tracts of virgin forest have little to do with sustaining people…”  As “the air conditioner of the earth,” tracts of virgin tropical forest sustain us all through many important ecosystem functions.

That being said (and whatever the intent), this is not obviously not sun coffee, it is RA certified, and the web site does note other environmentally-friendly practices. Stay tuned for our impressions of this highly-touted bean!