May-Jun: New Beans
2012 is the year that we’re really pushing seasonality in what coffees we offer, so despite interesting beans being offered to us lately, we’ve been saving ourselves for the onslaught of fresh coffee from Central America and East Africa that is almost upon us!
May-June will be a bit of a taster of what’s to come, with fresh beans from Ethiopia’s Jimma region and a sneak peek of the 2012 crop of our Thailand La Mai coffee!
Hawisa, Ethiopia:
This is a washed coffee from the 235 members of the Hawisa cooperative in the Jimma region. Like much of Western Ethiopia, these are OLD coffee trees grown under existing forest. Most likely, they are rarely pruned or fertilised; simply growing wild in their native habitat. The altitude is around 1650m asl.
The total production from the cooperative equates to 150kg of exportable green coffee per member. As a rough estimate, that would be 300-400 trees or one acre of land per farmer – pretty low even by Ethiopian standards.
We’ll add our cupping notes next week! For now, our supplier suggests that this coffee will be very floral and perfumed in aroma, with a creamy body and some tropical/stone fruit acidity.
A great offering from a lesser known region in Ethiopia!
Thailand La Mai (2012 crop):
It’s exciting to be able to offer coffee from the villages we visited in January (see blog posts).
Once we got home, we were sent around 10 samples from different villages in Northern Thailand. Some of them were real stand-outs!
They will be landing in Melbourne tomorrow (!) so we can expect them in our warehouse in about two weeks (Godspeed, AQIS!).
I can confirm that one of the villages we’re getting coffee from this year won best Thai coffee at a recent Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) meeting! That means we have good taste.
That’s it for May; June will see a few new beans arriving, but July will be a cracker of a month for new coffees! We are excited.
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