It feels like every cupping recap starts with the observation that "last month was a busy month" but, for October, that's especially true. In between our regular schedule of roaster sales, in-person training and classes, production roasting, and consulting, Coffee Fest came to Minneapolis and we hosted a huge kick-off party for attendees and the greater Twin Cities coffee community.
Having a trade show in our hometown was fun and exhausting. Being able to spend the day teaching and meeting people on the show floor and then go to bed in your own house is a real treat. But being the local hosts meant even more after-hours events, dinners, and running back and forth across town to keep things running smoothly at the office and our own homes. In the end, we had a blast and hope to see Coffee Fest return to Minneapolis soon - but we'll appreciate the trips to New York and LA even more next year when we can focus on the show and then relax at the hotel.
In between all of our events, we still got a lot of work done in the roastery. In October, we cupped 60 coffees including the final iterations of our new Holiday Blends, a Robusta from Vietnam, samples from Papua New Guinea hand-delivered by the producer (a student in this month's Roasting 101 class - hi, James!), fresh crop offerings from Peru and Honduras, and plenty of production roasts.
Here are a few highlights from the table:
Holiday Blends
I wrote about this year's Holiday Blends already for the blog, but October was when the blends got completely dialed in and went live on the website. Tasting coffees for Holiday Blends is always a fun project. By the end, we cup them blind alongside many of our production roasts from the toll roasting menu, and it's so satisfying to see my cupping notes fill up with cozy, seasonal tasting notes like cherry cordial, fruit cake, sweet spice, pomegranate, and cranberry. It's validating and a good reminder that these coffees really do conjure up the flavors of the holiday season.
We also had the chance to create a totally new third holiday blend this year, after several years of releasing just two blends. Snowbird started as an option for our returning blend, Snowblind, but the flavor profile wasn't exactly what it needed to be. Still, we liked the blend so much we decided to launch it as a separate blend. I think of it as "Snowblind for washed coffee lovers". It has all the brightness and lightness of Snowblind but with even more crisp clarity.
China Yunnan Arabica
An importer that specializes in emerging coffee regions in the Asia and Pacific region, Pacifica Renew, dropped off a few samples early in the month. One coffee, from the Yunnan region of China, impressed us with its round sweetness and fruit character.
I didn't record a lot of details about the greens, but looking at my cupping notes I'd have to guess this was a natural or anaerobic coffee. The acidity was lactic and my flavor descriptors were raisinets, berries and cream, lavender, and butterscotch. Bryant's notes were calibrated to my own, listing butterscotch in the aroma, along with flavors of black cherry Kool-aid and mango.
Specialty coffee folks will be aware that the coffees being produced in China are getting better and better every year. As an emerging origin for specialty, they are pushing the quality and experimenting with different processing methods to attract new consumers, and this coffee really characterized those advancements.
Fresh Crop Peru
Bryant's favorite origin and a mainstay on our menu between the Fall and the Spring months, Peru is a coffee-producing country that we get really excited about. One of the benefits of being friends with your importers is that you'll request 3 samples of something from one country and they'll send you 6, just because they want you to taste everything. That's what happened this month when Cafe Imports overloaded us with Peru options.
The green we selected for purchase, from Lima, was full of sweetness and complexity. Cherry candy, yellow citrus, Key Lime, and a soft, velvety body were notes from the sample roast. Once profiled, it developed further into dark chocolate with a floral flavor like rose hips, plum and apple notes, and was super balanced. This coffee will be offered as a single origin on our toll roasting menu and, when we run out of the Guatemala Huehuetenango, we'll use it in our blends to add richness and roundness.
Chalatenango, El Salvador. Photo by Sam Miller. Image courtesy of Cafe Imports
El Salvador Chalate, Finca San Nicolas
This natural-processed coffee from El Salvador found a home as the second component of our holiday blend Hibernate, where it pairs with an earthy and spicy Papua New Guinea to create flavors like mulled wine, fruit leather, and sweet Pu-erh tea.
We don't know for sure if we'll have enough in stock to offer it as a single-origin, but just this week we cupped it on its own to gather notes just in case. This coffee is, in a word, wild. It's truly a coffee for big, fruity, natural coffee drinkers, and feels like a neon sign in a cup, buzzing with electricity. For fragrance and aroma, we smelled guava, watermelon taffy, and fresh kiwi. In the cup, we tasted fruit punch, Gobstoppers, strawberry kiwi juice, lemon-lime soda, and pink grapefruit. It's a punch in the mouth like a 1990's commercial for Gushers.
Next month, we're looking forward to a slightly slower pace, a little break around Thanksgiving, and finally starting the process of moving into our brand-new facility. Yesterday, a few of us did a walk-through and planned where the water towers, grinders, and commercial brewers will get installed for cupping and QC. It was fun to take a moment in that vast, empty space, and think about all of the cups of coffee we'll taste there in the coming years. We'll be sure to share the highlights with you here.
