In June, a month that has 30 days, we cupped 30 coffees. I wish this had been on purpose, or it was the result of some expert planning, like deciding to cup exactly 7 coffees each week, plus two on the last day of the month, but we aren't that organized. This is just the total we ended up with.
Aside from the lovely round number of coffees tasted and evaluated, June was a fun month for us. We traveled to Portland, one of the country's very best coffee cities, for Coffee Fest. CF Portland was a great opportunity to see friends from the West Coast and reconnect with Mill City customers and former students we haven't seen for a few years. It's also just a great city to visit, walk around in, and eat fantastic food (shout-out to Lovely's Fifty Fifty and Olympia Provisions, where our team enjoyed some great meals).
We also hosted our largest group for Roasting 101 since moving into the new building. This class features students from all corners of the USA, and was a fun cohort of mostly brand-new roasters. It's always nice to watch people roast their first batch of green coffee or participate in their first cupping, and it's even more special watching people do it with other excited, nervous, and enthusiastic students. In this month's class, we worked with coffees from Peru, Ethiopia, Brazil, and Colombia. Students roasted a LOT of coffee, and we tasted a bunch of it together. Almost everyone's roasts were on point, and we can't wait to see many of them apply those new roasting skills in their businesses back at home.
Students on the roasters in Roasting 101
As for the rest of our month here at Mill City Roasters, we filled it with a lot of sampling, profiling, roasting, calibrating, and learning more about coffee. Here are a few highlights from the cupping table.
EA Decaf Colombia
We always have a decaf on our greens page and Toll Roasting Menu. Carrying a great decaf isn't optional. For the past few years, the decaf coffees we gravitate towards are Ethyl Acetate (EA) method decafs from Colombia. This is a gentle, natural, and chemical-free way to decaffeinate coffee using banana peels or sugarcane.
This Spring, the EA decaf on our menu comes from the Huila region of Colombia. It's a blend of regional varietals, including Castilla, Caturra, and the Colombia varietal, and we like it at a medium roast level. This month, our tasting notes highlighted the sweetness of this coffee with flavors like toffee, brown sugar, and sugar-coated cranberries. We love the spice characteristics of this coffee, as well, which remind us of molasses cookies or snickerdoodles. If it's been a while since you experimented with a great decaf, maybe it's time to brew some up. You can grab a 10lb or 40lb bag of this EA Colombia on our website. For tips on roasting EA method decafs, check out my YouTube video from our Demystifying Decaf Series.
Cold Brew Blend
It's no surprise that our Cold Brew Blend is a popular coffee right now. The blend is always a best seller, but during the summer months, we go through tons of it. Staying on top of a pre-blend that's on our menu year-round is a challenge for Bryant, our Director of Coffee. He has to maintain an inventory of the component coffees for this blend and work to source replacements when one or more of those coffees become unavailable. Right now, Cold Brew is a blend of coffees from Brazil, Guatemala, and Ethiopia. The Ethiopia coffee is a natural process, which provides fruit flavors and syrupy sweetness to the cup.
As we work through the last of our inventory of Guatemala, we'll start to look for replacements that will work in this blend. In previous seasons, we've relied on coffees from Peru, Mexico, or Colombia to do that job. For Cold Brew, this Latin American component needs to bring flavors of toasted nut, vanilla, and bakers' chocolate into the mix. On the cupping table this month, this coffee appeared multiple times. Each time, we tasted chocolate, almond, sweet red fruit, and we enjoyed its smooth and buttery body. Even though it's marketed as a cold brew, we love it on drip as well.
Liberia Robusta
I think we learn a lot from the lower-quality coffees that pass across our cupping table. Usually, that lesson is how much we appreciate specialty-grade coffees in comparison. We evaluated a green coffee for a client from a new producer in Liberia, and, unfortunately, there was a lot of room for improvement. The greens had multiple issues with defects: full blacks, insect damage, and a lot of chipped and cut beans. These defects can be the result of inexperienced producers, lack of resources, rushed harvesting and processing, or a mix of many things.
Coffee with a high frequency of defects never tastes good. Still, when we're hired to evaluate a coffee and write up a cupping report, we must taste it and document the flavors. Notes like chlorine, latex, and rubber were prevalent in this coffee. There was a high bitterness, a chalky body, and a long, unpleasant finish. The report we delivered to our customer had very few positive attributes to share about the coffee, but we had a chance to chat with them before sending it over, and explain why these issues were present. More importantly, we were able to explain that this was not a good green to purchase, and we saved our client a lot of money by convincing them to continue shopping for a different green to work with. That's one of our goals with our Green Coffee Evaluation program - to help roasters make smart buying decisions and to better understand the coffee they're considering.
Looking Ahead
At the time of this writing, the C-Market is back down under $3.00/lb, something I said would probably never happen again (it's great to be wrong!). We're trying to take advantage of this dip in the market and forecast a little into the future. This month, we'll be bringing in samples of coffees from Brazil to have on hand for all of our blends, where Brazil serves as the base coffee. We're also going to bring in some Nicaragua samples to consider for both retail and wholesale roasting.
On the fun and fruity side, we're shopping for fresh crop coffees from Costa Rica, specifically, coffees from the Micromill of Cerro San Luis. If you saw us at Coffee Fest last year, chances are good that you tasted an Anaerobic Honey SL-28 from this Micromill. We brought that coffee to a number of events last year and sold it on our retail greens page, as well. This year, we're shopping for a similarly adventurous and unusual coffee to bring to Coffee Fest LA and Orlando. We'll also be roasting this coffee with students this August in our Advanced Roasting Workshop. Check back here next month to see what we end up purchasing and what the cupping notes are!
