I recently went on a coffee origin trip in Kona, Hawaii, accompanying –and following the adventures of- London Canada’s Fire Roasted Coffee, owner David Cook and manager Patrick Dunham.  The trip was to learn from David and Patrick’s process of meeting with coffee farmers, and forming long-term relationships with them.  On a side note, we were also on a fact-finding mission regarding the malicious borer beetle that has been eating half of Kona’s vaunted coffee crops.

Read: Touchdown in Kona Hawaii
Read: What is Decimating Coffee Crops in Kona?

     One of our first stops was to Greenwell Farms in Kona.  The Greenwells have been growing coffee in Kona since moving there from England in 1850.  It is now a third-generation family-owned business, today in the heart of the Kona growing region.   The family’s farming practices have been modernized, but on the same farmland that was first cultivated in the 1800s.  Their scale also allows them to buy coffee cherry from other farmers in the area, which they pulp, dry, store, and roast, all on-site.

The three of us went on a tour of the farming and processing.  The images above show the progression of coffee growing from initial stumps to trees carrying the coffee cherry.  At the time of our tour, the cherries were nowhere near being ready for picking, obvious by their bright green color in the far right image above. 

     Coffee cherries ripen to a dark red before they are ready to be picked.  The coffee beans that we know are the seeds of this coffee cherry, and there are two such beans per cherry.  I had learned much of this growing process on my last trip to Kona, and it is fascinating to see in person.  It tends to change your whole appreciation for the coffee in your cup.

Read: Profile Ueshida Coffee Corp

 In the above image, Lola is the “groundskeeper” dog.  The Greenwells are hunters, and their companion dogs have a great “retirement home” full of space and friendly people like us to play with them.  In this image, he is rooting around in the coffee trees, possibly looking for borer beetles!

Further in the process is where the coffee beans are dried.  The beans have been separated from the cherry, and from the mucilage that encases them.  From there, they are evenly spread out as you see above to dry in the sun, before they are warehoused.

     Accompanying Fire Roasted Coffee on this trip was a great experience, not just for myself but for the tour guide and other patrons.  In this image, the tour has turned to David Cook to walk us through the roasting process with the beans after they’ve been shipped from the farm to roasteries all over the world.  Having followed the growing process through, it was very cool for David to explain this last step that local roasters carry out in their communities with beans from farms like these. 

     Finally, David and Patrick wanted to learn more about Greenwell’s own roasting practices for the retail and wholesale coffee that they sell locally.  We were given access to the roasting operation where David and Patrick could compare notes with Greenwell’s roasters, both on properly roasting their specific beans and on the equipment that they use.

     Like a kid in a candy store, I could have bought every coffee they sold.  They had samples of nine varieties of their coffee, including roasted to different degree, in one case flavored, and as you can see by the one I selected, the peaberry variety of coffee bean that I love so much.  It didn’t survive the trip home – David, Patrick, and I made short work of it in our remaining time in Hawaii.

I strongly recommend that you try Greenwell’s coffee.  You can order it by visiting their website.  While locals tend to prefer their coffee roasted dark, my personal preference and the rest of us off the island, it seems, is a medium roast.  If you’re looking for suggestions of what coffee to buy from their site, I suggest either the medium roast or peaberry coffee, both excellent.  You will be very happy with either one.

     I recently went on a coffee origin trip in Kona, Hawaii, accompanying –and following the adventures of- London Canada’s Fire Roasted Coffee, owner David Cook and manager Patrick Dunham.  The trip was to learn from David and Patrick’s process of meeting with coffee farmers and forming long-term relationships to roast their coffee in Canada.  On a side note, we were also on a fact-finding mission regarding the malicious borer beetle that has been eating half of Kona’s vaunted coffee crops.

Read: Touchdown in Kona Hawaii

I met Dave and Pat several years ago, when I decided it was time to upgrade my coffee.   I had already decided how much better the coffee is when you stop buying it pre-ground in a giant tin can from the grocery store.  However, the only better coffee I knew was the charred whole bean coffee by the pound from Starbucks locations.  One day, I was shopping in a market that is a vendor of Fire Roasted’s coffee, and saw their stand, inviting people to visit their roastery in person.

Read: Profile Fire Roasted Coffee Company

     Dave Cook is a world traveler, visiting coffee and cacao farms all over the world to stay in touch with the source of his product.  Dave has a culinary background, and after having heard him speak with farmers, clearly a deep appreciation for growing practices and the communities he visits.  One of the first things he shared with me when I first met him was his sympathy for the coffee farmer, the worse off in the supply chain while we all enjoy their product.  Fire Roasted Coffee has been an advocate of Fair Trade and Organic coffee to support the communities that grow coffee, and raise awareness of poverty there.

     For me, there was no substitute for this experience.  I was already familiar with the standard of quality from Fire Roasted, but to hear Dave and Pat talk shop with the coffee farmers themselves made me realize the importance of quality throughout the supply chain, not just when the green unroasted beans arrive in London.

Kona is full of small coffee farms.  In fact, almost 700 of them are on less than three hectares of land.  While we talked coffee with one of the local farmers, a sight like these two donkeys getting frisky with each other wasn’t uncommon.  Get a room, donkeys!

     I also got to live like a world traveler.  Here’s a picture of me on Day 4.  To quote Patrick, “That’s what I love about the coffee business, I don’t have to shower as much.”  Here, you can see that I was sleeping on the right side of my head, likely very shortly before taking this self-portrait that I don’t quite remember taking.

     With Kona’s reputation for quality coffee, it’s no surprise that there are cafes everywhere, serving “100% Kona coffee”.  If you ever visit Kona, I suggest looking for the less obvious and less trendy looking cafes.  They may all be advertising the same coffee, but coffee is a perishable product whose flavor and freshness depends on care.

      We learned that lesson from the café below.  They may be serving a quality coffee to their retail customers, but we learned differently when Pat bought a pound of their coffee to bring back to our apartment for the week.  The bag advertised “100% estate-grown Kona coffee”.  Both parts of that tagline are true, it is from beans 100% grown in Kona, and use of “estate” is vague so that if a land can grow coffee, it is an estate.  And behind this fancy marketing was a burnt, stale coffee that we made once in the apartment, before throwing the rest out.

An excellent lesson.  Sometimes, all the right words can be used, and it still doesn’t mean quality.

An amazing experience for me as a coffee enthusiast.  To watch the process from the beginning has given me an even greater appreciation for the steps that go into a quality cup of coffee.  Any weak link in the chain will impact the flavor in your cup.  If you are visiting a country of the world that grows coffee, I suggest going on a farm tour, and gaining that appreciation for yourself.

   I recently had the opportunity to join Fire Roasted Coffee’s owner David Cook and manager Patrick Dunham on a coffee origin trip of Kona, Hawaii.  Both were in my city of Portland, Oregon for the industry’s largest trade show and were flying to Hawaii from Portland when the show ended.  How could I not jump on that opportunity?

Read: Touchdown in Kona Hawaii

Kona produces one of the world’s most vaunted coffees, costing roughly triple what other coffees cost.  Fire Roasted already sells Kona coffee, but had two goals on this trip: first, to make direct contact with farmers in the area, and two, to learn more of the borer beetle that is decimating Kona’s coffee crops.  The borer beetle was news to me, but as a coffee enthusiast (read: snob), I was blown away by what I learned.  The beetle snuck onto crops across Kona undetected, actually mistaken as a harmless twig beetle.  The result: half of Kona’s coffee crops have been destroyed with an impact of approximately $20 million on the local economy.

   Our first stop was at Greenwell Farms, a third-generation coffee farm and one of the oldest on the island.  If Kona coffee has a global reputation for quality, this is one family that has had an undeniable influence.

   David and Patrick wanted to know how they could make arrangements to source green unroasted coffee beans from Greenwell.  The answer was sobering: it would be March of 2013 before this farm, one of the largest in Hawaii, would have any green beans that they could supply.  After satisfying local obligations as well as contracts already in place with other companies, there was simply no other coffee to sell.  The borer beetle has hit all farms in the area, and the impact to one of this size is huge for the market.

   From there, we got up to speed on this major threat, courtesy of the Kona Coffee Farmers Association and the College of Tropical Agriculture.  The Coffee Berry Borer lives on surface of coffee cherry.  

When the cherry matures and hardens, the beetle drills its way into the cherry, destroying it from within, and destroying farmers’ crops.  The two organizations are collaborating to provide instruction on how to protect crops from this threat, and promote field sanitation.

   We moved on to Mountain Thunder, another Kona farmer that David and Patrick wanted to meet.  The answers there were no less inspiring.  Like all farmers, they too had been badly hit.  One of the family that runs this farm even broke open a coffee cherry for us, so we could see the tiny borer beetle that had destroyed it.  The beetle was almost literally as small as the head of a pin.

   What does it all mean, and why should you be interested?  If half of Kona’s capacity for coffee is not making it out of Kona, and since Kona is such a vaunted name in coffee, there are a number of repercussions.

   First, “Kona blends”.  Since everybody wants Kona but so many shop on price alone, if ever you see Kona advertised as anything other than “100% Kona”, don’t get too excited.  It’s vague and for all I can tell, means there’s at least one Kona bean mixed in with who knows what else.  This is how Jack in the Box can sell a Kona Blend coffee.  Don’t be fooled.  As the reduced supply of Kona coffee drives up prices to unreasonable levels, expect even more “Kona blend” coffees and expect them to get even worse as the actual Kona content decreases.

Second, if you want Kona in the next year, be prepared to pay for it.  It’s supply and demand, and supply has been rocked.

   Third, trust in your local roaster to be providing you with real Kona coffee.  I expect imitators will flood the market as they did for equally-priced Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee.  The difference however is that to a large extent from lack of control, Jamaica allowed such imitation to happen.  The state of Hawaii takes its reputation for coffee seriously, so it will be difficult for imitators to pull the wool over our eyes, at least in the long run.

     I was on a coffee origin trip with my former roaster, London Canada’s Fire Roasted Coffee Company.  Owner David Cook and manager Patrick Dunham were in Portland for the year’s largest coffee industry trade show, and the three of us flew to Kona, Hawaii from there.

Read: Touchdown in Kona Hawaii

David is also the owner of Habitual Roasters, a chocolate roaster in London, bringing the same awareness of quality and experience to chocolate as he does to coffee.  David wanted to find a source for cacao beans while in the area.  He explained to me that it’s rare to find regions suited to grow both coffee and cacao, and that Hawaii was one of them.

 The biggest secret in chocolate is not how they get caramel in Caramilk bars, it’s that there is great complexity and grade of quality in chocolate, just as there is in coffee or wine.  Different regions of the world produce cacao of varying taste, and David processes and roasts cacao to bring people bars of chocolate sourced from different parts of the world.  To date, David does not have a Hawaiian chocolate bar, nor do any other chocolate craftspeople in the area.  He wanted to bring something new to London. 

David had learned of a small farmer on Hawaii’s Big Island that was growing cacao.  His name was Sharkman.  On our second night there, David made contact with him and set up a meeting to tour his farm and learn more about his farming practices.

“Is his name really Sharkman?” I asked.

“I don’t know, but he insisted that I call him that.” Dave answered.  How could this not be interesting?

From our rental in Kona, we would be driving virtually the entire Big Island to get to Sharkman’s farm and back. 

The Big Island boasts of an unusual number of individual climates over one land mass.  As you can see, we drove through distinct three weather patterns in less than three hours.  The weather and landscape changed as quickly as it changes in these images. 

As we approached, I became the co-pilot.  With Patrick in the back seat with our map, and David driving the car, I manned the phone and took directions from the Sharkman himself.

 “Hi there!” Sharkman bellowed over the phone.

 “Is this the Sharkman?” I asked.

 “Yes it is!” Sharkman answered with enthusiasm.

 “Is that what I should call you?”  Yes, I thought it was pretty cool just to say we were going to meet somebody named Sharkman. 

 Sharkman proceeded to give me directions that even a local would have had to write down.  I scribbled them down furiously, occasionally shouting out random city, river, or street names, looking for confirmation from Patrick in the back seat that he could see any of these places on the map.

This was old hat for David.  David has been on coffee origin trips to Latin America, and assured us that you rarely find a farm without getting lost along the way.  We didn’t get lost too badly.  Deep into farming territory, we realized we were on the wrong road and had to turn around.  Sharkman had said he would leave a white lawnchair on the street in front of his property so we wouldn’t miss it.

We passed this cute future café along the way.  Sharkman is renovating it to feature the coffee and chocolate that he grows on his own farm.  Customers at that café will be treated to product as fresh as it comes.  Farm fresh.  The future café was on the way to his farm, so Sharkman asked us to stop there and throw some energy at it.

We eventually found the white lawnchair, and Sharkman’s farm. 

 His name is Thomas “Sharkman” Sharkie.  I asked him to pose for this picture, I really liked his “Happiness is a cup of coffee” shirt.  On his small farm, he grows coffee, cacao, and small amounts of other produce, some of it unique to Hawaii’s growing conditions.  He roasts and processes both coffee and cacao on-site, selling it locally as Hilo Shark’s Coffee and Hilo Shark’s Chocolate.

 Sharkman took us on a tour of his farm.  It was important for David to understand what exactly he would be buying, and farming and processing practices were essential to David’s decision.  With his knowledge of how cacao is supposed to be grown and handled, there were specific things that David needed to see, hear, and understand from Sharkman.

From cacao pod to the drying process to the roasting to forming the bar itself.  I will never look at chocolate the same way again.  It was an incredible experience.  Sharkman had us each try fresh soft chocolate made from the cacao trees we were just looking at.  You don’t find chocolate like this at 7-Eleven.

From coffee cherry, to the green bean inside it, to the roasting, to grinding and brewing a cup.  We also sampled some delicious coffee, in case David had an eye towards one day sourcing this from Sharkman as well.

 Have you ever seen on the Simpsons when Homer is easily distracted by the dog with the fluffy tail?  Well, I’m like that for dogs in general, regardless of their tail.  Sharkman’s dog Lola accompanied us on our tour, and I was side-tracked playing with her.

Just as interesting as any other part of the experience, was how the meeting ended.  Many business owners feel that brow-beating their suppliers is part of regular business.  David and Sharkman ended on a different note altogether.  Once the tour was over and all questions were answered, David shared his company’s vision with Sharkman, who was as interested to hear about David’s business as he was committed to providing him with a consistent quality product.  When it was over, the two men hugged and agreed to a long-term partnership.  No agreements were signed, and there wasn’t a single dispute about price.  Sharkman will bring the cacao into the world.  David will raise awareness in his market of just how special and unique it is.  One is buying from the other, but the two formed a business partnership that day.

Sage advice from the Sharkman…

One of my coaches and mentors recently returned from a trip to Mexico with his family.  When he returned, all tanned and disgusting for us rainy Portlanders to look at, he told me about a coffee stop he had made across the way.  The roaster’s name was Baja Beans Roasting Company, located in Pescadero, Baha.

He told me a few things about them that intrigued me right away, and were familiar with other roasters I’ve met in my travels.  First, that all of the coffee they sold was locally grown, so I could only imagine from direct relationships with farmers of choice, and at a price that supports the community.  Second, that they organized local fun events, and that their very location was a form of community center.  And last, that they were Canadians which means they’re good people (yes, I am Canadian ).

I had to learn more.

I could tell the latter was true simply by visiting their website and seeing the upcoming community Ping Pong tournament that they were organizing.  When I contacted them directly to learn more, owner Alec Tidey was all too happy to share of their cause and story with me.

Traveling from Vancouver, Canada to Pescadero, Mexico, they were helped by Vancouver’s Cowboy Coffee in establishing a roastery in Mexico.  Their mission was simple: feature the best coffees of each of the premier growing regions of Mexico.  They learned Spanish, practiced the coffee craft until perfect, and got to work.

Their first tour of a farm was in the hills of the Sierra Norte, and involved two days of touring the plantation and processing plants.  They were drawn by the family structure of the farm and environmentally sustainable practices, far in excess of the standards required by the seal on their coffee.  This is the same Arabica coffee that Baja Beans serves today.  Expertly roasted and brewed.  Supporting the local community.  Emphasis on quality.

As far as social events, they have enough “stage space” for bands to perform for tourists and locals while enjoying great coffee.  I hope to see it for myself one day.  With beans grown locally and roasted professionally on-site, they travel a very short distance before they end up in your cup, and that kind of freshness is going to make for an amazing cup of coffee.

“Let’s make a toast to the roast.” – Ben and the Men (house band)

Learn more about Baja Beans.  Or, visit this short promotional video.

My father is a modern day Indiana Jones.  He has the travel bug that I am happy to have inherited.  In November of last year, he spent a month traveling between Belize and Guatemala in Central America.  And lucky me, he brought me Guatemalan coffee from the source.

I’ve had many different great coffees, but Guatemalan coffee is one of my consistent favorites.  I had concerns about whether the coffee that my father bought would be up to standard.  Ironically, because of Guatemala’s economy, their best coffee is generally exported.  Imagine, you could have a better cup of Guatemalan coffee at Starbucks than you could in Guatemala.

I am about halfway through the two pounds of this coffee that he brought back, and it’s great.  There’s also a romantic quality to drinking it, since it comes from the source.  My father bought it from Cafe Toliman – don’t try to find information online, I already tried.  Toliman is one of three volcanoes between which Lake Atitlan formed.  Yes, a lake held together by three volcanoes – my father says it’s breathtaking.  The soil is volcanic ash, rich in organic matter, a perfect altitude, climate, and soil for growing coffee.

You don’t need to fly to Guatemala to enjoy their amazing coffee.  Peets sells a special blend from the Guatemalan province of Antigua, its Guatemala San Sebastian.  I have included this variety in every “coffee tour” I’ve bought from Peets – it’s an amazing coffee.  Click here and enter “Guatemala” in the search field to learn more.

Alternatively, your local roaster definitely carries a Guatemalan coffee, and is a great source for fresh coffee.

It’s always fun for me when a bunch of coincidental things happen at once.  Earlier last week, I was e-mailing back and forth with Shreerag Plakazhi of India.  I had misunderstood that he was asking me if I’d ever tried coffees from India.  There is coffee production out of India, most of it from small growers, and responsible for about 5% of the world’s coffee production.  Shreerag was actually referring to a unique coffee brewing method called Indian filter coffee or South Indian coffee.

True Indian filter coffee is made with a unique two-cup metal contraption, and I don’t have one.  It’s also made with a combination of dark-roasted coffee and chicory.  A week later, I received an email from a visitor to the site named Makeda Queen, asking me if I had any advice on adding chicory to coffee.  Last but not least, this week, a new book entitled “The Romance of Indian Coffee” was released, and I knew the stars must be aligned for me to experiment with something new.

• Ask Marc: Got a question about coffee?  Any question?

Here’s the best that I figured I could make my own Indian filter coffee at home:

- It’s made with roughly a 80% / 20% mix of dark-roasted coffee and chicory.
- I don’t have any dark-roasted coffee at home, but I did just receive my home roasting equipment.  If you follow me on Twitter, you know I’ve been having lots of fun home roasting again.  I took the last of my unroasted Nicaragua Maragogype beans that I bought from Toronto’s Green Beanery and roasted them as dark as I could without burning them, or setting off the fire alarms.
- On my last trip to the grocery store, I bought some chicory from the baking aisle.  I’m not the culinary type, so I confess I don’t quite know what exactly chicory is.
- I’ve decided the method I will use to brew in absence of the true equipment is by Chemex pourover.

• Follow me on Twitter
• Read: Profile – Toronto’s Green Beanery

The magic all happens tomorrow.  I don’t know what to expect, but the only way to truly appreciate the wide world of coffee is to try as much of it as you can.  You don’t need to roast your own beans and buy chicory from the grocery store, but if you love coffee, experiment with it.  Try one you’ve never tried before.  And when you visit your local roaster, take the time (and theirs) to learn what they have to offer that you would enjoy and haven’t tried.

I have friends that just returned from Ecuador.  Like any good friends, they brought me back coffee fresh from the source.  I was excited to get it home and try it, as I’ve never tried coffee from Ecuador.  Coffee is very much like wine, in that it takes a sample of the world’s offering to fully appreciate every flavor and variety.

Coffees of Ecuador

Ecuador is one of the top 20 producers of coffee in the world.  Although the country itself is small, its varied ecology makes it possible to cultivate all of the varieties of coffee within its borders, including premium Arabica beans and less-expensive Robusta beans.

Coffee cultivation and export is a significant portion of the country’s economy.  While they presently export to the US as well as all over the world, it is not very prevalent in the US.  As a result, very little is written about its unique qualities, and to the best of my knowledge, this would be my first cup of coffee from Ecuador.

El Tostador

The packaging of my friends’ coffee is entirely in Spanish and I am definitely not smarter than a fifth grader yet in Spanish.  But, I know key words so I gave “reading” about the coffee my best shot.  Naturally, I could see that it was produced by El Tostador, Cafe Tostado y Molido, where my friends bought it in Ecuador.

The first thing I noticed is that the words Arabica or Robusta were not printed anywhere on the package.  My rule of thumb when I see this is that it is probably cheaper Robusta beans.  After all, you would promote that you are selling Arabica beans, so if nothing is said, I assume it’s Robusta.  However, I was able to identify from the packaging, the region where the coffee was grown…the province of Loja.  The variety of coffee grown in Loja is Arabica – great news. 

The frest-roasted coffee was ground to order for my friends who brought back a pound for themselves, and brought back a pound for me.  It was ground fine, so I’ve been preparing it by pourover moreso than by press pot, since you would generally use a coarse ground coffee in the press pot to avoid overextraction (sludge).

Read: Pour-Over Brewing Method
Read: Fresh Press Brewing Method

In the end, I couldn’t help but take some of the Spanish from the packaging to a translation website, which told me:
“From the quality coffee plantations of the highlands of the province of Loja, a tradition of flavor and natural fragrance is born.”

Challenges

Ecuador has a couple challenges in order to have its coffee included in the list of Specialty Coffee origins.  First, it hasn’t actively promoted itself as a source of fine coffee to the US market, and promotes itself in the European market mainly on price.  The climate of Ecuador is similar in characteristics to other countries who produce well-recognized coffee.  This leads to the second challenge, that the country’s harvesting and processing standards are not as tightly regulated by the state since other exports, such as bananas, have increased in importance.

I was happy for the opportunity to try a new coffee I hadn’t tried before.  The only way to truly appreciate the world of coffee is to try coffees from around the world.

  At a recent coffee tasting at the Fire Roasted Coffee Company (FRCC) in London, Canada, I learned something VERY cool about coffee.  I was complaining to head roaster Patrick Dunham and owner David Cook about how I have a hard time describing what exactly I like about certain coffees.  I’ve yet to buy a coffee from FRCC that I didn’t like, but without a culinary background or a terribly sophistocated sense of taste, I have a hard time pinpointing or describing what I like. 

One guest to the website suggested that I develop a scoring system, similar to Coffee Review’s score out of 100.  But I’m still at the point of finding the right words, let alone as sophistocated a system as that.

Then Patrick showed me what you see in this image, a set of 36 small numbered  bottles with a legend to match each number to a corresponding flavor accent.  The set is called Le Nez du Cafe, French for “the nose (or scent) of coffee”.  A whiff from any of the 36 bottles provides an overpowering emphasis on that one particular flavor characteristic. Each bottle is identified by number so that you have to take in the aroma before referring to the legned in the guide to determine its identity. At the bottom of this post, I’ve listed the 36 different aromas in Le Nez du Cafe.

It begged the question, where do all of these flavors come from?  David explained to me that throughout the cultivation and handling of coffee, it picks up accents from its environment.  During cultivation, the coffee will pick up accents from the different product grown in that same source.  And so, coffees of a certain source might contain hints of certain fruits like lemon.  Or depending on care at the source, could contain earthy tones that are not enjoyed by everybody.  I was surprised that one of the 36 scents was rubber, an unenviable flavor that could be picked up in handling, tarnishing the coffee.

Le Nez du Cafe set costs $300-400.  I have no doubt that given enough practice both with this set, and using a newfound sense of taste applied to the coffees I drink, that I would learn to accurately identify flavor characteristics in coffee.  It’s a little out of my coffee budget however, so I’ve committed to the following instead and I suggest that you do as well:

Any good roaster will describe the flavor characteristics that you should be looking for in their coffee.  I am going to pay close attention to these descriptions from now on, and look for these characteristics in the coffee I drink.  It may take me longer than if I invested in the set but doing it this way means learning by enjoying coffee, and taking the time to enjoy what makes that coffee unique and great.  Pay attention to the roaster’s description before drinking the coffee, and attempt to capture what they describe.

  This past weekend, I enjoyed yet another awesome coffee tasting at the Fire Roasted Coffee Company (FRCC) in London, Canada.  For $10, anybody could walk in and sample seven different exotic coffees from around the world.  The FRCC is one of my favorite spots in the city to hit on a regular basis.  You shouldn’t have too much stock of coffee in your house at any time, so a weekly or bi-weekly trip to your local roaster ensures you have fresh coffee all the time.

Read: My First Coffee Tasting Experience
Read: Profile Fire Roasted Coffee Company (my first of many trips)

This past Saturday, the subject of the tasting was Peaberry Coffee.

What is Peaberry Coffee

  The pit of a coffee cherry is made up of two coffee beans.  That is, about 95% of the time.  Both sides of the seed in the other 4-5% of coffee cherry do not both fertilize and as a result, the cherry only yields a single rounded oval-shaped coffee bean.  This is called the Peaberry.  Once separated from the rest as defects, it was only a matter of time before somebody realized that no only does the peaberry bean make a great coffee, but one with a flavor slightly different than the regular bean from the same source.

Fire Roasted’s Peaberry Coffee Tasting

  The tasting was hosted by FRCC’s head roaster Patrick Dunham and owner David Cook.  There were seven coffees to be sampled:

- Tanzanian Peaberry: I’ve bought this one from FRCC before and have always enjoyed it.  It is one of Patrick’s picks.  Bright and crisp, Tanzanian Peaberry is intentionally cultivated, as opposed to other sources that treat it as an afterthought.  For that, the Tanzanian variety has a strong following.

- Cameroon Peaberry: A wilder coffee than the Tanzanian.  The sample of green unroasted beans in front of the pot showed an inconsistent color throughout, with some of that inconsistency translating to the coffee itself.  Still delicious, it had an earthy taste like an Ethiopian Harrar.  This is the only one that I didn’t love – a tasting novice, I described it as “paper-y”, which Patrick and David pointed out would be terrible coffee marketing .

- Rwandan Peaberry: A tangier coffee than the previous two.

- Jamaican Blue Mountain: Not a peaberry, but Patrick wanted guests to compare the following coffee to this one.  As I’ve heard more than once, for a coffee that fetches a premium, the Jamaican is no longer the prized coffee it once was.

- Jamaican Blue Mountain Peaberry: Roasted darker than the regular variety, it had a slightly different taste but hard to justify the premium, roughly the same as Hawaii Kona coffee, triple the price of regular coffee.

- Papua New Guinea Peaberry: Patrick’s pick of the bunch.  Bright and clean.

- Papua New Guinea: Same roast and source as the previous, Patrick wanted guests to appreciate two great coffees.

What Makes Peaberry Different?

Patrick had some great insight into what makes peaberry coffee taste different:

- The rounded shape of the bean without a flat side makes for more even and consistent roasting.
- The same flavor characteristics are concentrated into the bean, capturing the “terroir” of the source.  I won’t lie to you, I had to look up the word when I got home – often used to describe flavor in wine, terroir denotes the special characteristics that the geography, geology and climate of a certain place bestows upon the coffee.
- Finally, peaberries have to be individually hand-picked, meaning a tighter selection and more consistent quality.

Try a Peaberry coffee.  I don’t find them commonly sold by the cup, but any good roaster sells pounds or half-pounds to take home. 

Read: Make Good Coffee’s articles on Peaberry coffee