We are expecting new crop organic Ethiopian coffee to arrive sometime in September.  For the first time Terroir Coffee will have two Ethiopian offerings - one from the Sidamo region, Adem Bedane Cooperative, which borders Yirgacheffe and has a slightly drier climate.  This coffee lot beat every Yirgacheffe sample we cupped this past year, with the exception of a very special lot from the Konga Cooperative - and this is the second lot we snapped up!  Both lots are superior to anything we have previously had.  The lots are vacuum packaged in Ethiopia to preserve these coffees' exotic flavors. The photo is from the Konga Cooperative and shows members sorting the coffee while it dries, over days, after processing.
All our new crop Kenyas have now arrived.  We have two lots from new sources that are in the league of Mamuto and will be offering them starting in mid-September.

Our Special Edition coffee for this Monday, August 11th, is Panama's already legendary La Esmeralda, new 2008 crop.

This coffee has, for the first time, been packaged in boxed vacuum-sealed bags at origin.  It makes a difference!  Full bodied with bold aromatic notes of peach.  Click here to read more or purchase - or call (866) GHH-JAVA.

New Special Edition Colombia will be roasted Monday August 18: Piedras de Afilar by Jeremias Lasso.

Last summer we spent weeks cupping through hundreds of tiny lots from small Colombian farmers; all our Colombian offerings have been chosen this way, including the Maria Santos and El Descanso - from blind cupping.  A few lots have come up as particularly noteworthy and rewarded with a substantially higher premium- the Villa Flor lots which we finished this week - the larger La Esperanza lot which we are featuring weekly, and now the final special edition lot of last year's series - Piedras de Afilar, meaning 'grindstones' - a mere forty pounds, to be roasted twice in twenty lb. lots. This tiny lot is a particularly sweet version of the classic Nariño flavor profile of black tea, mild notes of pineapple, and a hint of wintergreen.  While not certified, Jeremias uses no chemical products on his fields.
The second and last roast will be Tuesday, September 2.
Click here to order or call (866) GHH-JAVA.

Farmer: Jeremias Lasso
Region:  Nariño
Altitude:  5,900 ft.
Rainfall:  Moderate+
Soil:  Franco Arciloso
Arabica variety:  Caturra, Typica
Size of Farm:  approximately 2 acres of coffee
Roast: Full Flavor

Roasting on Mondays -
La Esperanza, Huila, Colombia

La Esperanza, is a jammy ripe dark plum saturated coffee, layered with tropical fruits and streaks of honeyed raw sugar cane. It is among the finest of any Colombian I have had, an exemplary coffee revealing a peak expression of Colombian terroir. We will offer this coffee as a special roast only on Mondays. Make sure to order yours ahead of time!
Click here to order or call (866) GHH-JAVA.

Vicente Curan's El Guaico, will be followed by Alejandro Ahumado's Boca Chica!

El Guaico exemplifies the special flavor characteristics of Narino coffee: Almond and a

tea core enveloped in notes of light tropical fruit meringue and just a trace of wintergreen.
Click here to order.

We are  nearing the end of our supply of El Guaico, and will switch over to Alejandro Ahumado's Boca Chica (pictured above) immidediately afterwards. Look for more on this fantastic crop and farm as we approach the transition.

Sale Coffees for August

Daterra, North Italian Style Espresso

Light Roasted, elegant, creamed-honey textured, sweet coffee with a fine marzipan-vanilla aroma.
Regularly $14.95 on Sale for $12.95
Click here to order.

La Minita Estate (SHB), Tarrazu, Costa Rica

This is the grand cru estate coffee. In my opinion, one of the most consistent, perfectly crafted estate coffees in the world, year after year. Full bodied, sparkling acidity, yet so smooth from hot to stone cold. Maple syrup, nuts and hint of peaches.
Regularly $14.95 on sale for $12.95
Click here to order.

Technivorm Sale!

Technivorm brewers are on sale!

We carry two models of the Moccamaster CD, one with a glass carafe. (Model KB741 pictured at left), and one with a vacuum stainless thermal carafe (KB741T ) These are the state-of-the-art for brewing perfect drip coffee time after time.

On sale for $209 for the KB741, glass carafe, (regularly $229) and $229 for the Moccamaster CD Thermo, thermal carafe (regularly $259.) Click here to order.

The Long Road to Coffee Quality [Part 13] Growing-planting  ©Jan - Aug 2008

To Read parts 1-12 of The Long Road to Quality© please click here.

Foundations of a functioning farm

Access to labor is the first necessity for almost all but the smallest or most mechanized coffee farms; small farmers in Colombia will harvest rotationally from one farm to another and back again. As farms grow in size, reaching twenty acres or more, they gain improved efficiencies, but also become dependent on seasonal labor for the harvest, which can no longer be supplied by neighboring farmers. Social networks and labor pools that have worked for many decades have been crumbling in the early twenty-first century due to chronic below-cost prices for coffee, leading to entire valleys being depopulated of the crucial hands required to service the surrounding, and now dwindling, coffee farms. This has led to importing pickers, often inexperienced, from further distances and to lower standards in picking ripe coffees because of labor shortages. Coffee farmers and their employees have formed a substantial percentage of the mass immigration into the US coming through Mexico.

A farm’s economic and quality sustainability is dependent upon access to transportation. The larger the farm the more dependent it is on a good road system within it. All farms need access to key nodal points, such as processing centers, agricultural supply centers, banks, storage facilities and ports. Transportation is particularly critical during the harvest when coffee cherries must be rushed within hours to a depulping center (to be covered in the post-harvest section). Smaller farms are often isolated and very poorly connected to regional grids. Indeed, many producing countries, poor in resources, have not invested in infrastructure sufficiently to properly support their farmers. Connecting Worlds - The Coffee Trail is a beautiful, almost hallucinogenic, photographic chronicle shot in Peru which dramatically illustrates the immense hurdles facing many small coffee farmers today. This problem often extends well beyond the farms: some great quality producers, like Rwanda and Ethiopia, are landlocked, making transportation of high quality raw coffee to port more expensive and logistically problematic at best; other countries have primitive ports under increasing strain to provide timely shipping (more on this further on).

Maintenanceof infrastructure is a yearly struggle in coffee farm country, given that the vast majority of coffee farmers live on mountainsides; farm roads are made of dirt and quickly turn into mud traps every rainy season. Large trucks, heavily laden with ripe fruit or coffee in parchment, tear these roads apart during the harvest season, often in rainy weather. The farms themselves are in danger of landslides, destroying crops, roads and sometimes lives. Additionally, too many farms are losing all their topsoil from run-off regularly caused by heavy tropical downpours. It is all too common to see steep mountainsides planted with coffee without undergrowth, thanks to herbicides and, just as bad, without contouring.

Contour planting involves creating parallel ridges, often with ditches, at right angles to the slopes, a laborious effort. Even slopes of more than five degrees should be contoured. In most coffee-producing countries contouring is almost non-existent. Villa Flor, in the state of Nariño, Colombia is one of the rare farms I have seen with contour planting in Colombia. Costa Rica’s La Minita, pictured here, below right, is contour planted.