• La Montana, El Salvador’s 2007 Cup of Excellence 1st prize winner, full flavor roast: Perfect balance, classically proportioned, ultra-sweet and pristine craftsmanship.
• La Esperanza, Colombia’s 2007 Cup of Excellence 1st prize winner, North Italian espresso roast: a garden of sweet, mellow, sensuous tropical fruit.
• La Esmeralda, Panama, 2007 crop.  La Esmeralda’s history-making Gesha variety perfectly crafted and yielding powerful notes of sweet peaches and apricot.

Click here to read about all three and/or to order.

Click here to see the video!  In the adjoining article, The Magic Brewing Machine, Mr. Kummer goes on to review, in his inimitably lively way, the comeback of light roasts in the US and the coffeemakers which really do deliver the message.  Needless to say, the Technivorm occupies the place of honor.  Click here to read more and order now.

Maria Santos’ Los Sauces, El Descanso (a 2006 Cup of Excellence winner) and a large collection of other very exciting Colombian micro lots from the 2007 harvest have just arrived!  We are offering both the Los Sauces and the El Descanso.  Our customers will have a chance to compare two coffees representing the best qualities from two different regions of Colombia, the first Cauca and the other Huila. –

And this is just the beginning!  Welcome to the world of the micro-lot!  As the months go by we will be going through eighteen different micro-lots from eleven different Colombian farms.  A micro lot represents a single day’s harvest that has been processed and dried separately and then kept apart.  Some of these lots are as small as 75 pounds (a masterpiece!) and the largest is 1,600 pounds.  Our team cupped hundreds of Colombian micro-lots this summer to select the best we could find; we feel this lengthy costly method, from farmer to roaster, allows us to pinpoint and deliver some of the finest coffee jewels of Colombia.  It is also an investment in farmers, no matter how small they are, who believe in quality, giving them real incentives to produce great coffee, not merely what is acceptable, and giving them the monetary means for sustained growth. 

For the third year in a row we picked Maria Santos’ coffee (three micro lots!) - blind.  We picked four such lots from newcomer Marco Aurelio Ortega, two of which received our highest scores.  We purchased every entry this farmer produced – quite a feat!  He has been too small to get costly certification but he is naturally committed to organic farming regardless of financial reward.  More on him and our other discoveries later…. The El Descanso, a 2006 Cup of Excellence winner, is even better this year, and we’re making it available immediately to the many loyal fans that have come to expect the extraordinarily well balanced qualities El Descanso offers.  

All our micro-lots have been specially packaged in vacuum-sealed bags at origin to protect them in the long journey from tropical port to our roasting facility.

Maria Santos’ Los Sauces

For twenty years Maria Santos Montilla Cerón, now over 84, has grown, harvested and processed coffee, as well as other crops, on her small farm in the mountains of Cauca, Colombia.  She is an exceptional woman.  Widowed for many years, she lives alone, with one permanent employee; her daughter, Cecilia Diago.  Cecilia is seen here holding a photo of the coffee drying beds she and her mother hope to set up in the near future.

Her production is miniscule.  No herbicides or pesticides are used and Maria Santos applies mostly organic fertilizer using chicken manure and compost from her farm.  Despite limited resources her processing center is a model of cleanliness and efficiency, so necessary for quality production.  For the third year in a row she continues to impress us with the exceptional quality of her output.  We are thrilled to have purchased and proud to present all of her top grade coffee again.  The cup bursts with honeyed tangerine, ripe pomegranate and pear notes embedded in crisp, dark chocolate with a smattering of mixed nuts.

Farm: Los Sauces
Farmer: Maria Santos Montilla Cerón
Region: Cauca
Varietal: Caturra
Altitude: 6,200 ft.
Vintage: 2007
Roast: Full Flavor

El Descanso

El Descanso means rest, or respite.  Their new lot is exemplary, perfect for understanding what fine coffee from Huila can taste like.

Jesus Orlando Lopez merged his brother’s farm and now owns 20 acres of farmland at over 5,600 feet.  His partner, Custodio Quira, lives on the farm with his family and manages it.  They have been reforesting the land and have obtained Rainforest Alliance certification.  The photo shows the Farm house and the structure for drying coffees beans.

Ripe, elegant and velvety, the cup is full-bodied with moderate acidity with flavors suggesting sensuous tropical fruits, honeyed citrus, hints of blackberry, aromatic wintergreen, vanilla and a touch of chocolate truffle.  This is coffee for Juan Valdez’s gourmet uncle! 

Farm: El Descanso
Farmer: Jesus Orlando Lopez & Custodio Quira
Region: Huila
Variety: Caturra
Altitude: 5,600 ft.
Vintage: 2007
Rainfall: moderate+
Roast: Full Flavor

Three Coffee Specials for November

We are offering $2 off each of the following three very popular and outstanding coffees for the month of November.

Matalapa, La Libertad, El Salvador

Matalapa is a fourth generation 190 acre farm at 4,100 feet above sea level. It was founded in the late 1800’s by Fidelia Lima, great grandmother of the current owner, Vickie Ann Dalton de Díaz. She maintains 14 acres of virgin tropical forest and keeps her coffee plants shaded with over forty varieties of shades trees.

I have been following this farm for three years now and have been very impressed with each year’s improvements since winning in the 2003 El Salvador Cup of Excellence. The 2007 crop is very impressive for its sweetness and buttery body, ideal for espresso and French Press brewing.

100% Bourbon. Layers of refined deep sweet citrus with no edge coated with creamed nutty caramel.

Read more and order here:  $10.95, regularly $12.95

Farm: Matalapa
Farmer: Vickie Ann Dalton de Diaz
Region: La Libertad
Altitude: 4,100 ft
Rainfall: 86 – 98 in. per year
Soil: Clay loam.
Varietal: 100% Bourbon
Vintage: 2007
Roast: Vienna

Kigutha, Kiambu, Kenya

Kigutha Estate is a cooperative society of 25 members on 242 acres of farm in the district of Kiambu, just a few miles north of Nairobi. It is situated at 5,400 feet above sea level in the Kamiti Valley. This coffee’s strong black-currant notes are particularly suited to a slightly darker full flavor roast, ideal for French Press coffeemakers. Makes a great dark-berry flavored iced coffee.

Roast Style: Dark Shade of Full Flavor Roast Spectrum

Read more and order here:  $11.95, regularly $13.95

El Injerto, Huehuetenango, Guatemala SHB

Huehuetenango is a spectacular region of sharp-toothed mountains and narrow valleys. Warm winds from the hot Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Mexico, to the north, flow through narrow north-south valleys, warming the mountainsides and allowing coffee growth at far higher altitudes than would ordinarily be possible.

The cup has dazzling razor-fine acidity with honeyed citrus, red currant and other berry notes and a touch of anise. Full bodied. 100% Bourbon variety.

Roast Style: Full Flavor Roast

No pesticides, fungicides or herbicides are used.

Rated Best Overall by The Wall Street Journal

Read more and order here:  $9.95, regularly $11.95

We now have the new Technivorm brewers, called the CD Moccamaster models. These are the same outstanding brewers you are used to with a slightly smaller foot print on your counter.  Internally and functionally, they are identical, using very high quality components from Europe.  Prices are slightly higher due to valuations of the U.S. dollar against the Euro, and may be  going up again in January.

This brewer received top honors in this months issue of  The Atlantic when compared to three other home brewers in a similar price range.  Among Corby Kummer’s conclusions were that the Technivorm brewer matched the quality of commercial brewers in extraction quality, and brought out the best flavor highlights in lighter roasted coffees, especially as they cool and reveal the complexities of a lighter roast flavor profile.

A full pot of coffee brews in 6.5 minutes flat; it is simple to use, easy to maintain and comes with a one year warranty. We carry two models of the Moccamaster CD, one with a glass carafe (Model # 9932), and one with a vacuum stainless thermal carafe (Model # 9580). The Technivorm was designed by Gerard-Clement Smit, who was awarded this year’s Technician Award by the Specialty Coffee Association of Europe. Both models are $10 off regular price. These make an excellent gift for the holidays.

We recently tested the Technivorm against several current home brewers, and plotted the actual performance results here. As you can see, the Technivorm coffee brewer reaches the proper extraction temperature fastest, and holds it there for the entire brew time, and they also finish first. Unlike other brewers, they maintain the proper extraction temperatures regardless of batch size.

We include a scoop with all models. Order yours here.

Baratza Virtuoso Coffee Grinder, for $189.95, normally $199.
A real burr grinder is the gateway to making full-flavored fresh coffee with maximum sweetness. Getting the right uniform grind is critical to producing great coffee - you want to extract all the sweetness while holding back harsher notes due to over-extracted finer particles. The Virtuoso does the best job on the market in this price class and offers a wide selection of grinds to suit your brewer's needs. It is easy to clean, has a powerful motor and uses slow spinning conical burrs to keep the coffee from heating. It is solidly built. A great gift! Click here for more information and to purchase. Time to junk the blade grinder for convenience and accuracy!

We last saw the four quality decision points a coffee farmers must make: location, seed (variety), care (nutrition and maintenance), and harvest.  We will now look at the first of these: where should the farmer grow her coffee?

All coffee grows in the tropics, within the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn.  Fine coffees grow at about 3,000 feet in altitude to over 6,000 feet.  Some rare exceptions exist: Hawaiian Kona is so far north of the equator that coffee cannot be grown higher than 2,000 feet; it is simply too cold.  Imagine Garden of Eden conditions with year-round moderate average temperatures between 68 F and 75 F; this is where you will find happy coffee plants.  Freezing will kill the coffee plant and temperatures over 90 F will affect quality and even productivity negatively. 

Moderate rainfall is ideal, distributed in just the right way:  there should be a dry season immediately before, during and after the harvest, followed by “blossom showers,” which soak the earth just enough to initiate simultaneous flowering of all the coffee plants, during which time the showers politely stay away so as not to mess with the setting of the fruits which, once set, announces months of rains that conveniently arrive in the afternoon, after a glorious morning, and depart in time for a spectacular sunset!  Some years in certain places can be like that; the Tarrazu area of Costa Rica flirts with this pattern.

Of course almost none of the coffee growing areas meet this “perfection”.  The great Kenya coffees grow in arid conditions while other famous growing areas such as Coban, Guatemala have heavy rains, even during the harvest.  Indeed, apparent handicaps may often also be responsible for special overall environments conducive to creating unique flavor profiles, or terroirs, once obstacles are understood and accommodated.

Cloud cover, position of the sun, temperature range, rainfall and its pattern of distribution, soil composition and structure, accessibility ­- all play a critical role in the production and cost of quality.  Higher altitudes can produce longer growing seasons and more ideal temperatures, below 90 F and above 45 F year round, with high diurnal contrast, ideal for growing complex, floral, bright yet balanced coffees – but often very expensive to develop or maintain due to the steep slopes’ poor accessibility and proneness to erosion.

Places like the Cerrado of Brazil provide still a different environment: here the land is at 3,000 to 3,500 feet, can be very flat, and is ideal for mass production, including mechanical harvesting.  Lack of rainfall is not necessarily a problem, where water can be brought from rivers near the Amazon to the north.  Extreme dryness allows farmers to provoke an even flowering, and therefore an even-ripening harvest, with controlled water applications.  Excess heat and poor drainage, on the other hand, can lead to severe quality problems and lack of complexity in the cup.  Such coffees, when grown with great care requiring full labor, do best as espresso, a brewing method which applies very high pressure to the coffee grounds and squeezes out every drop of acidity, thus establishing good balance between liveliness and the heavy body produced by such environments.  While these areas can produce high quality within a certain flavor spectrum by far the majority of production is dedicated to extreme productivity at minimal cost, particularly labor.  This  mass production is slowly improving in quality, as technology becomes more efficient and precise, and now challenges the vast majority of coffee growers living on mountain slopes who compete on price in a coffee world that still has very little price-quality segmentation, compared to wine and tea.  More on this in another article!

Flat Rate shipping program continued…indefinitely

Due to popular demand, and your support, we have made the Flat-Rate Shipping program permanent

$4 for shipments of 3-7 coffee items, to a commercial address;
$5 for shipments of 3-7 coffee items, to a residential address
via UPS Ground service.

For more than 7 coffee items, just add $1 per bag.

All other types of shipment are at standard rates.

Please help us continue this well received program by changing your ship-to address to a commercial address , and help to reduce green-house gases. If you would like us to modify your ship-to address to a commercial one, please e-Mail instructions to Jenny@terroircoffee.com or call us at (866) GHH-JAVA.