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August
21,2010

Why local roasters are awesome

Author | Marc Wortman

I buy my coffee from the Fire Roasted Coffee Co. in London, Canada.  Like many, I used to buy all my coffee from the grocery store, already ground and in a big steel can so I wouldn’t have to worry about it for a month or so.  After all, if you never try great coffee, you’ll probably never be unhappy with decent coffee.


This point was driven home for me when I recently went on vacation with friends to Hawaii.  They both love to drink coffee but like me, only knew coffee from a grocery store in the steel can.  While we shared a beachhouse, I took responsibility for coffee, including selecting what we drank and making it every day.  To their surprise, they never had coffee so good.  I made coffees from both Kona and Kauai, and they were blown away.  They had only one question: how can I get coffee that good when I get home?

For this job, I recruited Patrick Dunham of the Fire Roasted Coffee Company.  The challenge: send two pounds of their coffee to my friends on a monthly basis and use their feedback to decide which ones they might like best in each next month’s installment.  My friends live a distance from the roastery, but it was easy enough to do since Fire Roasted Coffee can take orders and ship from their website no matter where you are.

It would take quite a bit of trial and error to do this on your own, but thanks to Patrick’s expertise, we’re able to cut down the number of coffees that my friends likely won’t enjoy based on their feedback of ones they’ve been sent previously.  In their first shipment, Patrick opted for a couple rarer coffees, including a limited-supply Haitian coffee that my friends really liked.  In their second installment, an Indonesian Sulawesi that got mixed reviews and a Bolivian Peaberry coffee that my friends liked so much, we’ll be including it as a repeat in the occasional future order.

Most recently, Patrick shipped them two varieties of Ethiopian coffee, a Sidamo and a Limu, as we both wait for my friends’ verdict.

You can’t get this kind of service, expertise, or quality from a grocery store and despite the smiles and friendly service, not likely from a Starbucks either.  You can only get this kind of service from a local roaster that gets to know their customers and know their coffees so well that they can make smart matches like my friends are getting.  Even when I walk into the Fire Roasted Coffee Company today, the same gentleman that sold me a pound of Hawaiian Kona coffee still remembers that was the first one I bought from them.  And that’s why local roasters are awesome!

Categorized In | Buying Coffee

May
15,2010

My First Coffee Tasting Experience

Author | Marc Wortman

On a recent tour of the Fire Roasted Coffee Company (FRCC) in London, Canada, owner David Cook set up me up with a half-pound of Papua New Guinea coffee and a half-pound of Ethiopian Harrar coffee.  As I was preparing this morning for my first formal coffee tasting experience, to be hosted by the FRCC, I went with the Ethiopian coffee in my cupboard over the Peets Blend 101.  I figured for consistency, if I was going to drink FRCC-roasted coffee all morning, I should stick with this roaster’s product from my first cup of the day.

Coffee Tasting

These tastings are done 4-6 times a year by the FRCC.  As roaster Patrick Dunham explained to me, it isn’t to provide a lesson in tasting as if you were on a winery tour and learning to properly pick up accents in sips of wine.  Rather, the tasting is for the FRCC to profile their more exotic coffee offerings – and often, some new shipments.  The FRCC serves a high-end local coffee market that wants to try new varieties and knows they can count on the FRCC to research and source everything the world of coffee has to offer.

Here’s what I tried…

Kopi Luwak Civet Vietnamese Coffee – the “cat’s ass” of coffee


If the word “civet” caught your eye and you remember it from the movie Bucket List, I won’t sugar-coat it for you.  This feline loves to eat the coffee cherry but its system only partially digests the seed (the coffee bean itself).  What’s more is that its digestive system “processes” the bean in such a way that it gives it a flavor coveted by many coffee drinkers.  Yes, the civet’s poop is collected, roasted as a coffee bean, and ground and brewed just like regular coffee.

Some of you know that Vietnam’s entry into the coffee growing market going back some 15 years has been mainly the cheaper robusta coffee.  But this is the higher-quality arabica species of coffee.  How high-quality?  Retail price is $240/lb versus conventional $15/lb.  And FRCC has no doubt they will move all of the Kopi Luwak coffee that they recently ordered in.

Hawaii Kauai Estate Reserve

This was a great reminder of the Kauai coffee I was drinking on a recent trip to Hawaii.  Not to be overshadowed by its neighboring Kona coffee, Kauai coffee is a more reasonably-priced well-balanced coffee.

Hawaii 100% Kona

Also nostalgic of my recent trip to a plantation in Kona, Hawaii, FRCC sources their Kona coffee from the Greenwell Farms.  I certainly recognized the Greenwell name from my trip.  FRCC sells this coffee for $40/lb so not quite three times as expensive as your “regular” coffee.  While American wages and other associated costs drive up the retail price of Kona coffee, it is not without its merit for fetching a premium among coffees.  A nice acidity and unique flavor.

Jamaican Blue Mountain

Along with Kona coffee, Jamaican Blue Mountain is the other “mainstream-popular” coffee that fetches a premium over other specialty coffees.  Of the handful of plantations there, this particular bean is one of the lower-grown and that means FRCC can sell a pound of it for $30, rather than the typical retail price of $60/lb.

But as far as whether the low-grown nature affected flavor, this was one of my favorites of the day, simply because it had the most distinct flavor in my humble opinion.  Without a very sophisticated sense of taste, I had David explain to me what makes this one different.  David explained that basically, there are three stages to experiencing coffee flavor: the first that it touches the taste buds, the main taste recognition of flavor that follows, and finally, the after-taste.  The Blue Mountain coffee in the middle main phase offers sweeter tones than most.  This was probably my pick of the day.

Bolivian Peaberry

My first peaberry coffee was from Kauai.  The peaberry is a “coffee aberration” in that the two parts of the seed within the coffee cherry are not separate as is normally the case but rather grow together as a single rounded oval “coffee bean”.  It isn’t necessarily a better coffee, but a different coffee with its own flavor characteristics.  The medium-roasted Kauai peaberry coffee I’d tried while in Hawaii was a big favorite of mine…this Bolivian coffee didn’t quite knock my socks off as much.

But having said that, I didn’t have a single bad coffee today.  They were all great and unique in different ways.  The coffee tasting itself was a great experience, and I thank David and Patrick for spending as much time with me as they did to answer my million questions and make me that much coffee-smarter.  Check out the website for the Fire Roasted Coffee Company.

Categorized In | Uncategorized

April
13,2010

Tips for getting through LOTS of coffee

Author | Marc Wortman

Good coffee is fresh coffee.  And coffee is only going to stay its freshest inside of (roughly) two to three weeks of when you bought it.  If you buy coffee from a grocery store instead of a good coffee shop or online source that takes this into consideration, then it’s less than three weeks.  Learn more about the Golden Rules of Good Coffee.


I go through approximately a pound of coffee every 2-3 weeks. That means I shouldn’t have much more than a pound in the house at any given time.  The problem is that for various reasons, I now have over SIX pounds of coffee in storage.  Here’s how I handled it and some tips on how you should manage your own overstock of coffee to ensure it stays fresh.

These tips are alternatives to freezing the coffee, as many people do.  Unfortunately, coffee is different from other perishable goods and freezing your coffee is NOT a good idea.  Learn more about Storing Coffee.  We need to be more creative.

1. Don’t roast your green coffee
Most coffee drinkers don’t roast their own beans at home, and I do so mostly as a hobby.  As you’ll see going through these tips, I have way more roasted than unroasted coffee.  Coffee only really starts going stale after it’s been roasted.  Unroasted coffee can keep for up to two years.  So if you’re working through a coffee overstock at home, put your green coffee at the back of the cupboard and focus on what’s been roasted.

In my stock, that includes a pound of Guatemalan coffee and a pound of Hawaiian coffee that I bought from the Fire Roasted Coffee Company (FRCC) on my first visit there.  It also includes a pound of Nicaraguan coffee recommended to me by the Green Beanery‘s roastmaster on my recent visit there.

2. Pick your spots.
A logistician will tell you that there are at least two ways of managing inventory: first-in first-out or last-in first-out.  You either want to brew the coffee that’s been roasted the longest so that you can enjoy it before it goes any more stale, or you want to brew the coffee that’s been roasted the most recently so that out of your overstock, you’ll at least get some amazing pots of fresh coffee.  If you brew in the order that the coffee has been roasted, it means you will KIND OF enjoy all of the coffee on hand.  If you brew what’s been roasted most recently, it means you will REALLY enjoy half of what’s on hand while the other half continues to get more stale before you get to it.

This one is to your personal taste.  Because I buy my coffee carefully and from good sources only, all of my coffee is relatively fresh.  For that reason, I’ll brew what’s been roasted the longest before it gets any more stale and will miss out on that amazing pot of the coffee that was more recently roasted.

For me, this includes working through two coffees right away.  First of all, the last of a pound of Starbucks House Blend that I’ve had for over a month now.  I really like this coffee and even after a month, it still tastes great to me, if not quite as fresh.  Following that, a pound of Kauai Coffee Company’s Blue Mountain Peaberry.  I bought this one right from the plantation itself so I’m confident it can sit a little longer before showing signs of starting to go stale.

3. Invest in a vacuum sealer.
Meant to keep perishable items lasting longer, this is my last resort for coffee I can’t get to within the next three weeks.  I have two pounds of coffee in this category, both of which recommended to me by David Cook of the FRCC.  One is a Kenyan coffee, the other an Ethiopian Harrar.  These remain in the FRCC’s retail and airtight packaging and even before giving them the benefit of opaque, room-temperature storage behind the cupboard door, I have vacuum-sealed the packages themselves.  This will add a few days to the fresh clock of these coffees as they are now truly airtight, if even there was some air escaping from the retail packaging.

4. Share
Oh yeah, there’s always the option to share with other coffee lovers.  Why let good coffee go bad when you know people that would help you enjoy it, and enjoy it while it’s still fresh?  I have a friend with a soft spot for New Guinea, and while it has nothing to do with their coffee necessarily, I knew he’d enjoy one of the more underappreciated coffees of the world, so I passed on a half-pound of it. This friend doesn’t have a grinder at home, so I had to grind it for him. Ground coffee expires at a faster rate than even roasted whole beans, so I’ve let him know he’s got to drink it fast!

Categorized In | Storing Coffee
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