They differ from most pour-over or filter coffee makers in that the coffee will remain infusing in the top section until you put it on your cup. This opens the “clever” valve and allows the coffee to drip through.

How to use the Clever Dripper:

You will need:

• Clever Dripper (we sell them here);
• Filter papers;
• 30-35g coffee, ground coarsely;
• 500mL boiled water;
• A small jug.

What to do (for 2-3 cups):

Step 1: insert a filter paper and fill Clever Dripper with boiled water. This rinses the paper and pre-heats the Dripper.

Step 2: drain water and discard, then add ground coffee and 500mL water. Water temperature determines flavour - we measure with this IR device and aim for 85-90C.

Step 3: after 30 seconds, stir again to break up the floating coffee.

Step 4: about 2½ minutes* (after adding water), place the Dripper onto your jug.

Step 5: it should take another minute* for all the coffee to drip through - then pour into your cups and enjoy!

[* = these times depend on how coarsely you grind - if you grind finely, you'll need to start the draw down earlier; if you grind very coarsely, you can afford to start the draw down later. The total brew time should be around 3½-4 minutes, but you can experiment with longer; if your brew turns out bitter/tannic, you might have brewed too long.]

Cleaning up is super simple: just shake out the spent coffee and filter paper and give the Dripper a rinse.

The Clever Dripper gives you complete control over brewing: you can grind very coarsely and infuse for 4-5 minutes, if you like, for a really smooth and interesting brew. Long infusions can help you get good extraction from lighter roasts (ie. when the beans are still fairly hard), for example.

We’re now selling the Clever Dripper on our website if you’re interested in having a go!

Look for us in the Two Hands Coffee cart at stall number 20, next to the main stage.

What is Festivale?

Festivale is a three-day celebration of Tasmania’s great food, wine and beer (and coffee!).

Held in Launceston’s City Park (map).

• Friday- 5:30pm – 10:45pm ($20 entry)
• Saturday- 11am – 10:45pm ($20 entry)
• Sunday- 10am – 4pm ($15 entry)

You can find all the info you need on the Festivale website.

We have two great coffees brought directly from Brazil and Colombia by our supplier. Both are long-term projects which are seeing a difference made in the lives of the coffee farmers through linking them with buyers like us.

Furthermore, we’re buying HEAPS of them, so the next seasonal blend will cover Autumn and Winter (5-6 months’ worth).

There’s Brazil Fazenda Laranjal, and Colombia Asociación Los Naranjos – both awesome coffees in their own right – which will form the backbone of our Autumn-Winter Blend.

We’re also excited that announce that Thailand La Mai 2012 crop (fresh from the villages!) will be reappearing in the blend once it arrives in March.

Brazil Fazenda Laranjal:

Fazenda Laranjal is near the town of Poços de Caldas in the South of Minas Gerais state. As I’ve said before, a lot of our favourite coffees from Brazil come from this area!

Our supplier has been working closely with this large farm and selected some excellent lots to send to Australia.

These are all natural-process beans of the Yellow Bourbón variety (I’d love to know what flavour differences there are between yellow and red ripening beans!) grown at around 1250m asl, which is a very respectable altitude for Brazil.

MAP: you can zoom right in to see the landscape of the area.

Colombia Asociación Los Naranjos de San Agustin:

San Agustin is in the renowned coffee growing region of Huila in the South of Colombia. This association started in 2001 and now has around 50 families involved.

Colombia has two harvests per year – one large, one small. In the main harvest, members from this association have enough coffee to sell as microlots, and one member – Arnulfo Leguizamo – came 1st in Colombia’s Cup of Excellence in 2011 with his coffee!

This coffee is from the mitaca (small harvest) and comprises some of the best coffees from throughout the association. It was all washed and dried on the individual farms at 1350-1900m asl.

MAP: you can zoom right in to see the landscape of the area.

Our supplier (Cafe Imports) was kind enough to let us share this video of their most recent visit to San Agustin:

You can expect detailed profiles on both these coffees in the next few weeks!

ITDP has assisted around 30 villages in planting coffee so far. Some of these projects are well established (10 years plus), while some are quite new, and more a being planted every year. We visited two coffee growing areas.

The first was a group of seven villages with a communal processing station where all the cherries are collected and processed. It was west of Chiang Mai, at about 1000-1100m asl, and most of the coffee was grown under thick native forest on steep hills with nice red soil. The plants pictured are 7-8 years old; the project began 9 years ago.

First village: thick native forest provides a great environment for growing coffee.

The second was a group of four villages (south-west of Chiang Mai, near the Burmese border), with a single plot of 500 coffee trees. This plot was at around 1100m asl but the surrounding villages have suitable land up to 1300m or more. This had been established by ITDP to demonstrate to the villagers how to grow coffee. The demonstration plot had it’s first (small) harvest this year, three years after planting, and having heard how much the coffee was sold for, the surrounding villagers are very keen to start planting more! This plot was planted on cleared land, so it was necessary to plant shade trees to protect the coffee. It lies on moderate hills with lovely red clay soil (see right).

Second village: young coffee plants under partial shade (bananas and pigeon peas)

The second village had a plant nursery, where thousands of new seedlings were being prepared. The seeds take 3 months to sprout, and can be planted out after 12 months. From that point, it takes another 2-3 years before they first significant harvest.

Some very healthy coffee (and macadamia) seedlings.

ITDP encourage using organic farming practices, but generally the farmers can’t afford chemical fertilisers and sprays anyway. Coffee plants can be fussy and disease-prone unless they are grown in their natural environment (under shade, in rich soil with lots of mulch and organic matter). The main variety grown by ITDP is Catimor, which is disease-resistant but has a mixed reputation in terms of cup quality. Mike said they have some other varieties including Typica and, believe it or not, the famous Geisha (coffee nerds will get it)!

Like a lot of fruit trees, coffee needs a good prune after fruiting to be really productive. On this young plot of coffee (second village), they had pruned the plants to create two or three main stems. This means shorter, bushier plants which should be more productive.

Pruning to create multiple stems = more productive plants. (Note the spider webs which are proof of organic farming here!)

Ideally, coffee plants flower in the wet season and are ready to harvest in the dry season (which means the beans can be dried fairly quickly). That is the case in Thailand, although like many other origins the drying can be interrupted by sudden rain storms.

The harvest in Thailand happens between November and February, with the majority ripening December and January – earlier in the warmer microclimates; later in the cooler and higher altitude regions. In well established areas like the first village, ITDP has helped the villagers build a processing station where all the surrounding farmers can bring their cherry.

This farmer's last 100kg of cherry for 2012 - mostly ripe (some red, some yellow) with some under-ripes which he harvested because it was his final picking.

The processing happens in several stages:

1. The cherries are submerged in water and any "floaters" are removed. These are cherries that did not develop for one reason or another. The floaters are dried separately and sold as a lower grade.

2. The cherries go through a pulper, which removes the skin and spits out clean beans. At this point they are still covered in a sticky mucilage.

3. The pulper in action. Clean (but sticky) beans on the right; improperly pulped cherries on the left; cherry skins exit out the back.

4. The next stage is fermentation. The beans are submerged in water (floaters removed again) and left for 12-36 hours until the sticky mucilage has broken down. Then they are washed in clean water.

5. The clean beans (foreground) are then laid out to dry - in this case on raised beds. The floaters are being dried whole without having been pulped.

6. Drying takes around 2 weeks in most cases. At this stage, the beans still have their "parchment" layer - a thin protective layer.

7. The dry mill. This is where the parchment layer is removed, simultaneously sorted by size into A, B and Y grades.

8. After hulling, the beans are sent away and hand-sorted, after which they come back to the dry mill for a final sorting (by density and size).

Lots of people have pointed out that getting coffee from the plant to the cup in a FAR more complex process than they realised! Hopefully these photos showed you some of the hard work that goes into it.

As for this year’s La Mai coffee, we will be getting samples over the next few weeks and a large shipment in March. We are very excited about the potential of this coffee this year and into the future!

Whatever my expectations for the trip (I can’t really remember now…), I can guarantee that they were blown out of the water! It was a confluence of passionate people and eye-opening experiences.

The trip was planned by Bright Hope World – a wonderful bunch of people (volunteers, mind you) from Australia and New Zealand whose work in Thailand centres around the La Mai coffee project.

There were 11 of us – 4 from Bright Hope, 5 other Aussies with various interests in helping aid projects in Thailand, and two coffee people (myself and Lindsay from Land of a Thousand Hills Coffee in the US) specifically looking at the villages involved in growing and processing the La Mai coffee. The group was great – with at least three Australian states represented – as well as New Zealand – there was plenty of rivalry and banter to be had!

What was unexpected (for me) was how well the varied interests and passions of the group – and of the projects we visited – combined into an all-round goodwill for the people of Thailand. We met people who teach others, people who rescue girls out of prostitution, people who provide water and farming skills to isolated and very poor villages… a truly diverse range of ways of helping people.

But somehow it all fit together – water projects giving villages better health and more free time, meaning the kids can go to school, and parents have time to grow crops that might provide them with a better income, which means they won’t sell their children into prostitution or servanthood, and the kids’ education provides for the families’ future, and the increasing prosperity of the village attracts skilled people like teachers and nurses… It all fits together!

Most of these projects were instigated by Mike Mann who runs the Integrated Tribal Development Program (ITDP), based in Chiang Mai.

Mike is a pretty amazing guy. He’s from the US, but grew up in Thailand and has spent nearly 50 years there working to help the impoverished hill tribes of Northern Thailand. Not only does he want to help the hill tribes grow coffee, but he has a real vision for producing coffee of a very high quality!

For us, quality comes first, which is why direct trade is the best model. If we wanted “ethical” coffee of middling quality, we would buy Fair Trade coffee. But fostering direct trade relationships means we can find people who are willing to go the extra mile to produce great coffee for us, for which we are more than willing to pay a decent price!

Helping people to grow quality coffee creates demand for their product, protecting them from market fluctuations.

I was very pleasantly surprised by what I saw in terms of coffee quality. Everything from the climate and the soil, to the standards for picking and processing, to the infrastructure – everything was far more suitable for producing quality coffee than I had anticipated!

As such, we are really excited about this year’s crop of La Mai, which we are expecting some time during March.

In the next post I’ll give you a guided tour of how La Mai coffee is produced…

On Saturday, roaster Stu will be joining a number of others involved with Bright Hope Australia on a trip to Thailand! The aim of the trip is to visit some of the projects happening there including, of course, the La Mai coffee project.

Our visit will coincide with the middle of this year’s coffee harvest and will be an important part of the trip.

We hope to learn more about how the coffee is farmed and processed in the region – Northern Thailand up in the hills from the city of Chiang Mai – and what we can do to better support the project.

We’re really proud to be able to do this! It will be our first visit to a coffee growing region outside of Australia, and represents a significant step forward in our aim as a company to close the gap between growers and consumers to support ethical coffee trade.

The trip will also make connections with other projects that our partners at Bright Hope are involved with, including one rescuing girls out of prostitution and rehabilitating them into communities such as those growing the coffee.

We can’t guarantee (m)any to-the-minute updates while we’re visiting remote parts of Thailand, but keep an eye on the blog (and maybe Facebook/Twitter) to see lots of photos and news as soon as we can get it there!

The new crop will hopefully get to Australia in April.

Finca La Montaña is in the Chalatenango department, near the city of La Palma which is quite close to the border with Honduras. It is owned by Raúl Ochoa Hernández and comprises Pacas, Pacamara and Bourbón varietals – although this lot is 100% Bourbón. The average age of his trees is under 20 years, owing to a lot of new plantings over the last few years. The coffee is cultivated at around 1350-1400m asl.

La Montaña has consistently placed highly in El Salvador’s Cup of Excellence program, taking out the top spot in 2007 for its Pacamara varietal.

Roast Level:

Versatile; medium-light (212°C on our roaster) is a lovely level for espresso and brewed coffee. A little darker (215°C) brings out more cocoa. You can go even darker, if that’s your thing, but I prefer the syrupy mouthfeel of the lighter roasts.

Preparation Method(s):

El Sals make a naturally great brewed coffee because their acidity and sweetness are so balanced. On the other hand, the Bourbón varietal can make a beautifully sweet espresso and this one does not disappoint.

Cupping Notes:

Lemonade acidity, sweet, berries, orange liqueur; ultra clean, zesty, lime/mint note; buttery mouthfeel.

Overall Impression:

Sweet and lively, beautifully balanced; a really well rounded and pleasant coffee.

Welcome to the Summer Blend: equal parts two different El Salvador lots and our La Mai coffee from Thailand. Simple formula with delicious results!

El Salvador Finca Plan de la Batea:

This coffee has pedigree. It has everything you expect from a good El Salvador – sweetness, balance, orange acidity – but better!

The sweetness has hints of honey and dark chocolate; the acidity is refined and elegant. Yum.

El Salvador Finca La Montaña:

A chocolatier once demonstrated how cocoa butter melts around body temperature, which means it can fully dissolve in your mouth, creating that lovely coating texture of high-quality chocolate.

This coffee seriously has that mouthfeel – it’s super creamy.

It’s also very sweet and balanced, with a zesty lime acidity.

Thailand La Mai:

We are really happy with how this coffee bolsters this blend – adding an interesting walnut-hazelnut note which comes through the milk beautifully.

It won’t be too long until we see the new crop of this great coffee from the La Mai project in Thailand (what? You haven’t heard about it?), but this 2011 crop is a great component of the Summer Blend!

Aida Batlle (pronounced “Bat-yeh”) is the fifth-generation in a family of El Salvadorean coffee farmers, but she grew up in the United States owing to the civil war in her home country. This dual cultural upbringing meant that, when she returned to El Salvador to farm coffee, she could bridge the gap between coffee grower and consumer. That her family’s farms have impeccable geography and climate didn’t hurt, either! She has since built a reputation for fantastic coffees – well grown and processed, often adventurous in methods, and always delicious.

There three lots from different regions of El Salvador have been selected by Aida Batlle and represent some of the excellent coffee coming from this great origin. They are all fully washed coffees, and all are the Bourbón varietal (one of them specifically Orange Bourbón).

Each of them is sweet and delicious, with citrus notes and the silky mouthfeel of cocoa butter.

As shown on the map below, the farms are Finca Nazareth (left), Finca Plan de la Batea (centre), and Finca La Montaña (right). The samples really impressed us, and we’re expecting the coffee to arrive in time for Christmas.

Finca Nazareth:

This farm is owned by Mario Ernesto Acosta Oertel and is near the city of Ahuachapán in Eastern El Salvador – quite near the border with Guatemala. The farm dates back to 1908 and Sñr. Oertel is a fourth generation coffee farmer. This microlot was grown between 1300-1450m asl. and is 100% Bourbón varietal.

Bourbón is typical in El Salvador – it isn’t as productive as other varietals, but it typically lends a wonderful sweetness to the coffee which works very well for espresso.

Finca Nazareth ranked 21st in this year’s Cup of Excellence competition with a different Bourbón microlot! Over a third of 2011 CoE winners originated from near Ahuachapán. So we’re talking serious pedigree!

This coffee is sweet and clean – a textbook El Salvador. The sweetness is fruity (orange, raspberries) with a hint of chocolate; the acidity is bright and crisp (like Meyer lemons), and it finishes very clean and smooth.

Finca Plan de la Batea:

This farm is owned by Ricardo Augsburg – another fourth generation coffee farmer – who purchased it in 2009. This microlot comes from a section (tablon) of the farm called Miramar, which is planted with a sub-varietal called Orange Bourbón which ripens to orange instead of red. Tablon Miramar is 1400-1550m asl., which is pretty high for El Salvador.

In the cup, this coffee has something extra. Its sweetness is more intense – like honey and melted vanilla icecream; its acidity is likewise amplified – like freshly sliced lime (zest and juice). It is a delightful coffee, and a wonderful selection from Aida Batlle!

Finca La Montaña:

This farm is owned by Raúl Ochoa Hernández and is different from Nazareth and Plan de la Batea in that it was only planted with coffee from 1986. The average age of the coffee plants is only 15 years. Although this lot is 100% Bourbón, most of the farm is Pacas (a natural mutation of Bourbón) and Pacamara (hybrid of Pacas and the giant Maragogype bean). The coffee is cultivated at around 1350-1400m asl.

La Montaña has consistently placed highly in El Salvador’s Cup of Excellence program, taking out the top spot in 2007 for its Pacamara varietal.

The first time we cupped this coffee it scored consistently well, but flew under the radar a little. The second time it blew us away! It was bursting with sparkling lemonade acidity and sweet berry and fruit notes. There was an enticing hint of orange liqueur, too. The aftertaste was ultra clean, with a zesty lime and mint note. It also had a buttery mouthfeel which translated into a stunningly smooth milk drink.

Photos courtesy of Cafe Imports.

Espresso + Ice Cubes:

Probably the simplest method here. All you need to do is to pull a normal double espresso (say, 50mL) directly on top of a couple of ice cubes. Espresso is full of aromatics which disappear soon after brewing (which is why you want to drink it quickly), but cooling the shot straight away stops many of these delicious volatiles from escaping.

You can then use this cooled, slightly diluted espresso any way you fancy: add a bit more iced water for a cool long black; add some cold milk for a chilled latte; add Kahlua and vodka for an espresso martini… the possibilities are delicious.

Affogato (Espresso + Icecream):

Put a scoop of quality vanilla icecream in a cup and pull a double espresso (around 50mL) directly onto it. Icecream is just as effective as ice at trapping all the delicious volatiles in the drink, but of course the result is rich and sweet and creamy. I’d normally run a mile from any recipe that adds sugar to coffee, but happily make an exception for the affogato!

Cold-brewed Coffee:

Brewing coffee with cold water is simple as! I use a plunger (French press) and add coarsely ground coffee at a rate of 100 grams per litre of cold water – almost double the usual amount of coffee. You could alternatively use an Aeropress (upside-down method) or any other full-immersion brewing method. Then let the coffee brew in the fridge for at least 8 hours – anything up to 24 hours will work (there’s virtually no risk of over-extraction because the water is cold).

The result is not what you expect. The flavour is grainy-sweet with a whole range of subtle coffee nuances which develop in the long, long aftertaste. I think it tastes like the aroma of ground coffee. Delicious!

You can drink it straight, or with a dash (or more) of milk, or use it as a base for any kind of iced coffee or cocktail. One of my favourite coffee experiences was cold-brew coffee served through a beer tap – carbonated. Strange but delicious.

Some cafes offer cold-drip coffee which is a similar product, brewed using a sometimes very elaborate apparatus of glass tubes. In this method, cold water is slowly dripped onto a bed of coffee; the extract drips through and into a vessel. It is similar to pour-over in that sense, except the brew takes 8-16 hours instead of 3-4 minutes.

That’s it. Iced coffee can be very simple, and doesn’t need to be sweet and creamy and milky to be delicious on a hot day!