November: New Beans
For our last arrivals before some exciting new Summer Blend components in December (shhh), we have a nice line up of fresh beans this month.
There’s a great natural-process bean from Brazil’s Fazenda Monte Alegre, a zesty bourbón from Rwanda’s COOPAC cooperative, and the downright delicious Gómez Mora Excelso from Colombia.
Brazil Monte Alegre natural:
Fazenda Monte Alegre is a large company, even by Brazilian standards, producing 100,000 bags per year. Their size makes some buyers suspicious that their coffee will be generic in quality and flavour.
Well this coffee combines the best parts of mechanised coffee production (efficient processing, sorting and defect removal) with the focus on quality you often only see in smaller producers.
The intense smell of the green coffee – sweet and apricoty – is, uncharacteristically, reflected in the roasted beans. There’s also lots of smooth chocolate in flavour and mouthfeel. This is one of the best natural process Brazils I’ve had this year.
It will be replacing the Brazil in our Spring Blend from this week!
Rwanda COOPAC washed:
I’ll admit that it’s a little late in the season for Rwandans, but we made an exception because this coffee is delicious! From a cooperative called COOPAC in Western Rwanda, this is a fully washed coffee, mostly bourbón varietal.
Another great example of a quality-focused cooperative, COOPAC has grown from just over 100 members in 2001 to more than 2,000 today.
The coffee is rich and bright, and will be adding its wonderful zesty acidity to our Spring Blend (until its impending phasing-out around Christmas!).
Colombia Gómez Mora excelso:
We haven’t offered a lot of Colombian coffee, and I’m beginning to wonder why that is. There’s some stunning coffee grown there.
Well, we have some very exciting Colombian microlots coming at the end of this year, but until then we have this quite delicious example from Sevilla in the Valle de Cauca region of South-western Colombia.
The coffee is very complex – lots of acidity that has an almost savoury quality to it; sweet like fairy floss; reminds me of apples in the aftertaste.
We will be offering this as a single origin, and it will soon be substituted into our Reserve Blend for good measure.
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