Coffees were ordered from all of our green suppliers last week and these have started to arrive today with the delivery of Guatemala Antigua La Flor del Cafe and Sumatra Mandheling. Another truck is scheduled to arrive tomorrow with coffee from Papua New Guinea, Java, Ethiopia, Uganda, and other places. Some of these will be used to develop a new espresso blend. I don't have a date for the third truck containing Kenyan, Tanzanian, and Rwandan coffees. I am roasting the last bag of each of these, but the new coffees should arrive before I run out of any of these. Farther out, new crop Yemen will arrive some time next month. This will most likely be sent with a few other coffees I plan to order later.
The new Guatemalan looks great and has a nice aroma. I did not notice anything amiss while roasting samples to cup and I look forward to cupping this coffee roasted 24 different ways tomorrow morning. I have enough of the previous lot to produce one more batch, so this coffee will be available very soon.
The Sumatran had me worried. I opened a bag expecting to see something similar to what I have always seen with this particular mark of Sumatran coffee. Instead, I found that there is considerably more color variation. This could be indicative of a problem, so I decided to test the coffee sooner than I had planned.
To test this coffee, I pulled a 300 gram sample and sorted it into two piles: one containing dark green beans matching the color and appearance of the previous lot and another containing all of the other beans which ranged in color from a lighter green to a yellow. Further sorting of the yellow pile would be possible, but I did not consider it necessary for this test. The sample consisted of 124.1 grams of lighter colored beans and 174.4 grams of darker colored beans. The missing 1.5 grams is easily attributable to the limitations of my gram scale.
Once this sorting was done, I roasted some of the dark green beans, some of the yellow beans, and some unsorted Sumatran.
The most important of these batches is the unsorted Sumatran. If that was defective, the sorted samples would provide a possible means of isolating the defect. Otherwise, the other samples would be nothing more than an interesting diversion as I do not have ready access to a mechanical color sorter and no part of the shop can be easily remodeled to accommodate one.
The unsorted coffee is delicious. It tastes exactly as it should and exhibits no trace of defect. The flavor is sweet with a slight earth note, less prominent than in many Sumatran coffees. The body is fantastic and the acidity is very nice: higher than the typical Sumatran coffee as has been the case with this mark (Sumatra Iskandar, available through Hacienda La Minita) but it does not unbalance the cup.
Tasting the sorted coffees, there is noticeable difference between them. The darker beans have good body, but the earthiness is somewhat excessive and the cup lacks vibrancy. This (and the other two samples) was roasted on the light side as the intent was to detect defects and discern differences among the samples. Had I received this coffee with only the dark green beans, I would probably determine its ideal roast to be considerably darker. The light green beans lack the earth notes of the darker beans and it is clear that these provide the sweetness of the unsorted sample. The body is not as heavy as I would like in a Sumatran, but I would find it acceptable in coffee from Java.
Apart from each other, these coffees are good, but not excellent. Together, they make a truly excellent coffee. Exercises such as this call to mind a production step that is easy to forget about at this end of the production chain. It is common for a roaster to blend coffees to produce a flavor profile not found in the individual coffees available. Some prefer to blend these coffees after they have been roasted, others before, but most roasteries attempt to find the single best coffee from a particular origin so single origin blends are often restricted to blending a single lot of coffee roasted to two or more degrees or styles of roast. At the mill in the country of origin, however, there are often coffees from more than one local farm available that might be distinguishable from one another and there are machines available to sort by size, density, and sometimes other characteristics such as color. For many coffees, at some point in the production chain prior to the coffee leaving the country of origin there is someone highly skilled at cupping and blend development producing coffees that are better than the parts that going into them.
There is one other bit of news from today. Last night I received an email at home requesting a donation of espresso blend for use in the Beginning and Intermediate Espresso Workshops at the SCAA conference. As strange as it may seem to take roasted coffee to Seattle, I will be packing twenty pounds of Viking Blend Espresso to deliver the day after I arrive.