Don't miss this new addition in our series, featured below in full.

Ken Davids calls it a "stunning coffee, both grand and balanced." Click here to read his full review. Supplies are limited and we expect what we have left to go pretty fast. Click here to order:

In the meanwhile I am thrilled to say that we have purchased the Mamuto crop from the latest harvest of November - December 2007. It should be here towards the end of May - early June. The cup was as good as any Mamuto I have had AND, for the first time, it is specially packaged to seal in every bit of freshness throughout its long journey to Boston.

I could not agree more with Ken's description: "In the cup smoothly and gently acidy, delicate in mouthfeel, with a continued tart, marmalade-like, orangey sweetness complicated by cocoa, cedar, and continued flower and honey notes. Oranges and flowers carry into a cleanly sweet finish." This is the classic Guatemala coffee from what has become its premier region, Huehuetenango. Click here for Ken's review. To purchase, click here.

The Latin American coffee-unlike-any-other! Made from 100% Geisha variety - a twentieth century arrival from Africa that was almost discarded by farmers because of its low productivity until Price and Daniel Peterson brought it to the attention of the specialty coffee world in 2004. If you have not tried it, taste what has had the specialty coffee world abuzz for the last three years. This is coffee with powerful, deep notes of peach and apricot. Beautifully crafted coffee! Click here to read more and/or to purchase.

I co-founded Cup of Excellence in 1999 in order to promote coffee farmers who were deeply committed to the craft of great coffee-making. Cup of Excellence is an annual competition of a country's finest coffees judged by an international panel of coffee cuppers followed by an internet auction in which roasters around the world compete to purchase the winning small stellar lots. Farmers who would otherwise remain anonymous have emerged from shadows that cloaked them in a permanent state of subsistence agriculture. It is now in seven Latin American countries and this year will jump to Rwanda which will host the first such event in Africa . Cup of Excellence has set new standards wherever it has gone and many farms have come to thrive because of it. La Esperanza is just such a farm. We will see it in years to come because its owner is a born craftsman who needs to produce the best he can produce. Such people are rare individuals. To read the story on La Esperanza and its special owner and/or to order please click here.

Sumatra Mandheling is one of the greatest coffees in the world - potentially. This batch comes closer to fulfilling that promise than any previous lot we have offered. It has just arrived from Medan , Sumatra and it has, of course, aged on the very long way across the Pacific, as it always does (until the day we do away with jute bags - as we have with other origins). This aging imparts strong cedar and other wood notes to the coffee. It is a flavor which many love and others do not. However if any coffee does well aging it is this coffee. This particular lot is sorted very few Sumatras are - to near perfection - and the coffee rings with very deep very sweet syrupy tones of butterscotch and malt beneath its cedary, cigar box exterior. It has a heart of true gold. All Sumatra fans should try this coffee - it is very special! To order please click here. Some of you may note that do not specify any farm regarding this coffee; we have yet to succeed drilling down that far. Rest assured we will get there!

I was interviewed this past weekend by reporter Oliver Schwaner-Albright from the New York Times, while tasting many cups of their coffee prepared different ways in Harvard Square , over recent efforts by Starbucks to improve their image and their offerings. To read what I said and the reporter's observations click here.

To read parts 1 through 6 of The Long Road to Quality © please click here.

Ethiopia : Wild Arabica coffee plants still grow in the mountains of southwestern Ethiopia bordering on Sudan and Kenya . The first coffee farming was done near the Ethiopian city of Harar , one of Islam's most sacred cities, to the east, closer to the Red Sea . The finest coffees were reputed to come from here during coffee's first years in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Coffee beans from most coffee plants grown in Ethiopia are small, elongated, mild and quite perfumed in aroma. Some believe this to be another variety of Arabica which they call Ethiopica. As coffee became more popular in the late 15 th century within the Islamic world it was increasingly cultivated in the mountains of Yemen , known as Arabia Felix, the breadbasket of the Arabian Peninsula .

Mocha: Yemen and Eastern Ethiopia maintained a monopoly on coffee trade for the first two hundred plus years of its commercial existence. Coffees were brought to the Yemeni port of Al Mukah , on the Red Sea and today silted over, to be shipped to the capitals of the Middle East and, a little later, to the capitals of Europe . The Europeans associated the name of this exotic beverage with its provenance and gradually the name Al Mukah transformed into Mocha. Today coffee people associate Mocha with a particular flavor profile coming from Yemen and from the region of Harar in Eastern Ethiopia . The leaves of the coffee trees and its beans are very small. The literature is still vague on this as it is with Harar coffee, but it would appear that the Mocha from Yemen is a distinct variety not commercially grown elsewhere at this time due to very low productivity.

Typica: Sometime around 1600 the South Indian Muslim saint Baba Budan smuggled a few seeds from Yemen to Malabar on the west coast of India . The Dutch then imported seeds from Malabar to the island of Java , Indonesia in 1699. These coffee plants, first adapted to western India and later to the Javanese environment, evolved into the Typica variety of Arabica, dramatically different looking than the Arabicas grown in Yemen. One single plant of this heirloom variety, Typica, was taken to a glass house in Amsterdam in 1706 and thence to a glass house in Paris in 1715. In 1723 Gabriel Mathieu de Clieu successfully transported and planted a single tree from Paris onto the Caribbean island of Martinique . Arabica Typica would be spread from this one plant to most of South and Central America and later back to Africa ( Malawi ). Typica was smuggled from a separate small planting in Dutch Surinam to Brazil in 1727. Only one other Arabica variety would make it to the rest of the world before the mid-twentieth century: Bourbon. The vast majority of Arabica coffee produced in the world today has an extraordinarily narrow genetic base, while the genetic richness of Ethiopia 's wild forests is only starting to be tapped.

Bourbon: A few years after coffee made it to Java the French succeeded in planting Arabica on the island of Reunion , in those days called Ile de Bourbon, in the Indian Ocean off East Africa . Between 1715 and 1718 only two plants survived migrating to the island but, once established, multiplied. The second heirloom variety, Bourbon, was born. The Typica tree produces very little fruit and its fruit and beans are elongated. The Bourbon, on the other hand, produces at least 30% more fruit and its beans are more compact and hemispherical. An exemplary Typica will tend towards lighter more floral profiles while Bourbon will have more body and slightly earthier flavors. Over a hundred years later, in 1864, Bourbon was planted in Brazil , and in 1890 it was planted in Tanzania .

Bourbon and Typica are the two universally recognized varieties of Arabica coffee. Forty to fifty Arabica cultivars exist, produced by natural mutation or crosses from these two varieties and their cultivars. We will explore these next.

Daterra Special Reserve, Cerrado, Brazil - new crop! The best it has ever been! A discovery even for Daterra fans….

On Sale Now $11.95, regularly $13.95 Click here to purchase and for full description.

 

 

El Descanso, Huila , Colombia - Ripe, elegant and velvety, the cup is medium-bod ied, suggesting honeyed citrus, plum, and pomegranate mingling with soft streaks of aromatic ripe pear, wintergreen, vanilla rounded with chocolate truffle. Colombia has a huge number of terroirs. El Descanso embodies the characteristics found in the state of Huila.

On Sale Now $14.95, regularly $16.95 Click here to purchase and for full description.

 

Kangocho Cooperative, Nyeri, Kenya - sumptuous creamy mouthfeel and sweet b lueberry notes, melding harmoniously with the classic grand Kenya riot of blackberry and black currant flavors from one of the great Kenya small farm coffee cooperatives (a Coffee Connection favorite!).

On Sale Now $13.95, Regularly $15.95 Click here to purchase and for full description.