Ethiopia Wet Process Bonko

I broke down recently and ordered a few more coffees which I don't need. My stash had run out of wet processed Ethiopian coffees, and there were a few interesting ones around, so....

On any given week my favorite coffees change a lot. One week it will be syrupy dry processed coffees, the next a light Mexican bean, and so on. However, I have a soft spot in my heart for wet processed Ethiopian coffees. I love the clarity of them, the intensely sweet citrus notes, so different from the brooding and fruited notes of their dry-processed brethren.

This coffee, with the delightful appellation of "Bonko" (a coffee mill) was roasted after a less successful roast of another WP coffee whose notes got lost in an unsuccessful attempt to get my roast log into a better electronic format. So much for progress. Here is the roast:

I tried to keep things fast and light, and was rewarded with a really spectacular coffee. In a vacuum pot the next day, it was so clean, so fruity and refreshing that it brought a smile to my face. There is no sourness or grassiness to it, despite the relatively light roast. There are lemons and graham intensely in the aroma, and that carries directly into the cup. As it cools, there is a touch of anise, surrounded with a sweetness that is so appealing. The acidity is bracing, but never jarring, playing so nicely with the citrus notes. I could drink this all day long. Highly recommended.

Uganda Bugisu Kawomera

The previous version of Uganda Bugisu I have been drinking for a while has been running low. That coffee has become the base for a lot of espresso blending I have been doing; I love the earthy, malty complexity of it. It also makes a delicious cup of drip coffee.

Since good Uganda coffees can be hit or miss in terms of availability, I snatched 5 pounds of this Kawomera when it became available. This is a really excellent cup.

The roast was fairly standard:


The sounds got a bit hard to hear, but I stopped the roast at what I believe were the first few snaps of second crack. The taste confirms this. I really nailed this roast, if I do say so myself. The hint of roast taste was perfectly integrated with the coffee, without being overpowered or carbonized.

There is rustic maple sugar in the aroma, which carries over into the taste. There is a thick body, but the overall effect is still refreshing. This is not a coffee you take one sip of and put aside because it is too rich. As the cup cools a bit, there is the most interesting cherry cordial taste that becomes prominent. It is a very sweet cup, with lingering butterscotch hints. All and all excellent - that cherry taste is fascinating! I'll be very curious to try this as espresso later in the week.

One other point I should make. This is a good example of a roast/coffee that is taken rather dark (compared to what I normally roast), but still has tons of origin flavors. It goes to show you that a good roasted can take coffees to both ends of the roast spectrum while maintaining the identity of the coffee.

Tanzania Organic AB Hope Project

The bad news is that this isn't the best Tanzanian coffee I have had in the past year or so. The good news is that it is a decent cup.

I have been trying to reduce my green coffee stash for the past few months with decent success. People at work have benefited greatly from this, since they are the victims of my coffee every week. When I saw a new Tanzania coffee crop up (pun intended)recently, I grabbed 5 pounds to try. Tanzania may well be my favorite coffee origin, so it was very hard to resist.

The roast was a standard affair:


This took a long time to get to first crack, which was odd. I didn't observe any temperature issues, so perhaps it was the bean itself. Grinding the beans, they looked quite light - this is a City+ roast - nowhere near second crack.

Drinking this over the past week, it is lighter bodied than I expected. It is balanced, with decent acidity. There is a dense nuttiness as well that I don't think I have encountered in a Tanzania coffee. In the background, there lurks some funk/jute/leather that reminds you that this is an African bean. It isn't unpleasant, but there is a "wilder" element to it. A day or two post-roast, a creamy cantaloupe character emerges, splashed with milk chocolate.

All in all, this is a nice cup, but it didn't blow me away. I need to play with the roast level a bit to see if I can improve it. I think a tad more roast might work well.

Guatemala Oriente Dry Process

There is definitely a trend for Central American coffee producers to be trying their hands at more traditional methods of production such as dry processing. I have had some excellent examples of these over the past couple of years. This was a coffee that came and went at Sweet Marias, and I didn't get a chance to order any. I ended up trading some green coffee with someone else to get some of this to try. It is strange stuff.

Here is the roast, though it doesn't tell the story:


This coffee presented a conundrum in that it seems to race from 1st crack to 2nd very quickly. I rely on the sound of the cracks as a key indicator of how the coffee is roasting, and this one made all sorts of sounds that were hard to differentiate. Luckily the results were good, but I have honestly no idea what roast level this coffee is. Most likely Full City. Actually, I have roasted this coffee twice and had the same experience.

For those who have tried the truly bizarre Anokhi coffee, which is a different coffee variety altogether (coffea liberica v. coffea arabica), this Guatemala coffee is quite similar, but not nearly as intense.

The best analogy I can offer is Frankenberry cereal. There are odd berry notes galore, but not the clean fruit you get from say a Kenya, but fermented, slightly "off" fruit. There are some grainy notes and chocolate as well. The overall effect is slightly offputting, but not altogether unpleasant. I am glad I had a chance to try it, but I have no desire to have any more. For those who are bored by coffee, here is one to wake you up.

Zen and the Art of Knife Sharpening

I was thinking recently of how modern man has changed so much from his forbears. The sheer amount of "on" time we have to deal with is astounding. Information flows at hyperspeeds, work hours are longer and longer, and even home time is filled with kids "playdates" (a byproduct of the modern age if ever there was one), homework, chores, and other various and sundry things. If you think about it, there is just so little downtime that we have to think and reflect. I find my soul craves that stillness so badly. Literally the only time I have during the day is about 10 minutes in the morning, sitting with my coffee, looking out the window, and getting ready to hop in the shower and go to work. No one is up besides me, there are no sounds besides the bubbling of my aquarium, and I am alone with my thoughts. Kind of sad....

Given all this, people tend to find unusual ways to find this stillness. Some people fix their cars, others stare blindly at the television, and some.... sharpen knives.

I am a fairly serious home cook, and as is often the case, I have acquired many tools of the trade. There is nothing more important to a cook then a good set of knives. Until fairly recently, I was content with the usual spate of European knives - the Henckels, Wustofs, etc. Then a friend introduced me to the glory that is Japanese cutlery, and there was no looking back.

Given the extreme hardness (and accompanying brittleness) of good steel, one must maintain the edges of your knives with some sort of sharpening media, generally waterstones. Doing this sharpening freehand presents many challenges since you must maintain the proper angles of each part of the bevel, the correct amount of pressure, etc. As you become more practiced, the repetitive motion, feel, and sound of sharpening can become quite, well, soothing.

I find myself setting time aside every now and then to work my knives on the stones. That time, that concentration, has become golden. Other thoughts drift away, and it becomes just the motion of the knife against the stone. It didn't really strike me until recently how much I value this time. There is the added bonus, of course, of achieving something difficult - insanely sharp instruments that simply can't be matched by most techniques. That actual building of something, something done with the hands, is important, and something that a lot us simply don't have anymore.

A couple of days I headed to Korin in Manhattan, and had a chance to watch a true master sharpener at work (see picture above). His movements were so economical, so quick, so effortless and graceful, that it was fascinating to watch. Also on display was the Japanese penchant for making task-specific tools; knives specifically for cutting octopus, for slicing sushi, and dispatching fish. I couldn't resist adding another knife to my arsenal, in this case a yanagi that doesn't fit well in this picture due to its length.

Roasting coffee, brewing excellent tea, sharpening knives, whatever - we all need to find that place where we can take a moment to relax and ponder the imponderables.

2008 Mengku Shuangjiang Bingdao Spring Cake

Here is a chubby cake of pu'er tea:

I am a fan of this factory's teas. This Bingdao cake is a refined affair; beautiful leaves and just the perfect amount of compression.



This is actually my first taste of this particular cake, as it has been sitting in my tea cabinet patiently for a few months. I had samples of it previously, so I was finishing those up before digging into the cake itself. I sampled this today with about 6 grams of leaf in my favorite 100mL Yixing pot. I rinsed the leaves twice before ingesting anything.

1st infusion: very light. Grainy aroma, no bitterness. Sweet, but clearly the leaves haven't given up much.

2nd infusion: malted barley aroma, grassy. A hint of bitterness at the end. More complexity and sweetness.

3rd infusion: Now we are talking. Shiitake mushrooms, grains. Still a light tea, but a lot of subtlety here. Bitterness is picking up, but it is a caress, not a slap. I feel the energy in waves.

4th infusion: More of the same goodness. Long, long huigan. Some cooling sensation in the mouth, but it is light. My head is throbbing - a good sensation.

It soldiers on until I give in, but there is plenty more to be had. I like this tea, though it is quite light. I think it is a good example of a "one step up tea" compared to the plantation teas that are out there. It is refined and honest, with no tweaking to the soup; its charms are one to savor slowly while watching the world go by. Looking at the leaves, it is largely buds and small leaf/bud sets.

Espresso Blends #4 - #6

This espresso blending thing is a lot more complicated than I originally thought. I am finding that even subtle changes can have a large effect on the shot. Iteration #3 was the best yet. As a reminder, it was the following:

50% Uganda Bugisu AA
25% Panama Lerida Estate "Miel"
10% Aged Sumatra
15% Ethiopia Idido Misty Valley '07

For the next variation, I decided to replace the Uganda base with some Brazilian coffee, in this case the Fazenda Barreiro that I did not care for as a single origin espresso. All other coffees and percentages were the same.

Net: yuck. I had low expectations, but this was terrible. I just hate that particular Brazil coffee. It just goes to show that you should take other people's recommendations with a grain of salt. This blend was 1-dimensional, woody dreck.

For blend #5, I decided to return to the successful #3 and try for a fruitier coffee. I upped the Ethiopia amount, and lost the aged Sumatra:

50% Uganda Bugisu AA
25% Panama Lerida Estate "Miel"
25% Ethiopia Idido Misty Valley '07

I also went a tad lighter in this roast, stopping at the onset of second crack. This was actually quite a nice blend. There was a lot of fruitiness in there, and the corresponding acidity level was increased as well. Shots of Misty Valley by itself remind me of the cherry liquor-filled chocolates that you can find, but in this blend it was tamed by the gentle earthiness of the other coffees. This blend rates as "very good", though it might be a bit intense for some people. Cappuccinos were interesting, coming out like strawberry milkshakes.

The last experiment was to swap out the Panama "miel" coffee for another coffee. I had some Costa Rica El Puente Caturra "Miel" hanging around, so I gave it a try in the "#3" blend:

50% Uganda Bugisu AA
25% Costa Rica El Puente Caturra "Miel"
10% Aged Sumatra
15% Ethiopia Idido Misty Valley '07

This again proved that if you don't like a coffee by itself, like the El Puente, don't waste your time blending it. This variation was flat, with some weird "off" notes to it.

I have blend #7 queued up at the moment. Stay tuned.