Description
BCT’s coffee special includes three of our best dark roast coffees. Featuring our:
Brazil Mogiana Guaxupé 15/16 FC SS
A lovely Brazil arrival. Smooth, clean and rich, these beans make an awesome single origin cup, or blend base. This is a Fine Cup (FC) and Strictly Soft (SS), the highest cup category in the Brazilian coffee grading. 15/16 is the bean size, referring to normal sized beans, not strictly large, or overly small beans.
As the world’s largest coffee producer, Brazilian lots often come from larger estates that use highly mechanized processing strategies to manage larger volumes. The Mogiana region, split between the states of São Paulo and Minas Gerais, is the most renowned of three major Brazilian growing regions. This region has rolling hills and uneven terrain lending to farms that are small to medium in size.
This particular lot comes from Cooperativa Regional de Cafeicultores em Guaxupé (Cooxupé), which was established in 1937 and currently has 14,000 active members. Producers typically have farms that average 60 acres in size. Each producer cultivates and harvest their own cherries and places them on patios to dry to 15 percent moisture after which the coffee is moved to mechanical driers to precisely finish the drying to 11 percent moisture. Coffee is carefully stored until it is time for milling and export, which all takes place at the Cooxupé dry mill where traceability and quality control are carefully managed so each producer can be paid according to the quality of their coffee.
Tasting notes:
A very fresh and tasty Brazil! Best from medium to dark roasts. Lighter roasts show a sweet edge with lemon, floral & soft fruit, contrasted by a nuttier (almond like) darker undertone. With a little setup, the tones will combine to provide hints of caramel, a very tasty cup especially for the price. Too close to first crack will throw some herbal tones, but not far after first crack it will taste clean and defined. Medium roasts are richer, more of a developed chocolaty tone and decently less nutty; mutes up the sour floral edge, retains a little hint of soft fruit as the cup cools. Fairly neutral tasting and very chuggable. Darker promotes a thicker body and introduces a slightly bitter contrast that works very well for espresso.
Roasting Notes:
A nice large screen, fairly even roasting bean (will see a couple beans lighter than the others). Medium to high chaff. Avoid light roasts unless you like sharper cups, quite tasty but will have a little acidity which many Brazil fans will shy away from. Most will like it best at a medium roast, especially for single origin drinking, or into the darker roasts for blending.
The Indian Monsooned Malabar is a very unique and exotic coffee; usually people have a love/hate relationship with this bean but it is one of our top sellers year in and year out.
Monsoon Malabar coffee is prepared from Arabica cherries (“cherry” refers to dry-processed coffees in India). After grading, the coffee is transported to the coastal city of Mangalore where the “monsooning” is carried out in large openwalled warehouses.
During the rainy months of June through August, the coffee is spread inside the warehouses with very good aeration and ventilation at a particular thickness so that the coffee slowly absorbs moisture. After it absorbs sufficient moisture and bloats in size, it has to be periodically bulked and bagged and stacked so as to ensure proper and uniform “monsooning.” This process has to be carried out many times during the months of the monsoon.
After September, when the rains subside and the temperatures are higher, the ghostly white and swollen beans are sent through the final grading (gravity tables and hand-sorting) in order to obtain the Malabar export quality. The farmers not only produce coffee, they also grow pepper, cardamom, and oranges. Most of the farms are 80 to 100 years old and belong to third generation growers.
Tasting Notes:
The Indian Monsooned Malabar is a very low acidity, thick and creamy, overly earthy style cup of coffee. There is a lot of sweet tones in this cup depending on the roast and one can taste a little hint of the natural processing soft fruit tones and classic Indian spice notes. A pretty wild cup for you stronger coffee fans or espresso heads.
Roasting Notes:
Usually used for espresso at the darker roast points but many of our customers enjoy the single origin drip brew or french press at a slightly lighter roast point.
Indonesian Sumatra Gr. 1 – Mandheling
“Mandheling” is one of the broadest coffee trading terms for a regional blend in Indonesia, applying to almost any blend of wet-hulled coffees from across the northern half of the island of Sumatra that suit a generic cup profile that is heavy on the palate, earthy in balance, and complex. Regional coffee blend distinctions in the northern provinces of Sumatra were originally based on human ethnicity, rather than geography: Mandheling is a widespread cultural group found across Sumatra and Malaysia; “Batak”, to use another example, is a Mandheling sub-ethnicity based around Lake Toba and considered a smaller regional coffee pedigree unto itself, and often marketed as such.
The large majority of coffee blends labeled “Mandheling” tend to be drawn from across a variety of local parchment collectors across two main coffee producing provinces, both of which are fortified with volcanic soils: Aceh and North Sumatra. Aceh province (pronounced AH-CHEY) is the northernmost province of Sumatra and its highland territory, surrounding Lake Tawar and the central city of Takengon, is considered to be the epicenter of one of the world’s most unique coffee terroirs. North Sumatra province, just below Aceh, is a varied territory with high elevation grasslands, mountain ranges, and the massive Lake Toba, another of the island’s most famous coffee producing areas.
Tasting Notes: A very clean traditional Sumatra cup. Best from medium to dark roasts. Fuller bodied with some nice exotic incense spice notes intermingled with a bakers chocolate and smoky cup profile. Light roast are not recommended (for almost all Indo coffees). Medium roasts were nice and balanced, a little lemony acidity upfront mixing with a bunch of spice and hints of an earthy slightly peaty chocolaty factor; a decent roast point for pour-overs or drip. Darker roasts were fuller bodied and very smoky with the spice lingering in the aftertaste, very low acidity; good for dark roast fans, espresso or blend bases.
Roasting Notes: A nice screen for a Sumatra makes it a bit easier to roast then many Sumatra beans. Low in chaff due to the processing (wet-hulled). A longer setup is nice for this cup, gives much more rounded edges and smooth characteristics. Very light roasts are to be avoided, a medium to dark roast matches the cup profile very nicely.
Sumatra’s smallholder coffee is a complicated process. Notably, processing is typically not overseen by a single individual or team; instead, coffee moves task by task through different parties before reaching its final, fully-dried, state. Coffee farms tend to average 0.5-2 hectares each. Every coffee village has a collector (or more) who receives fresh-picked cherry, or humid parchment, for processing each day. Once a batch of coffee has been depulped, fermented overnight, washed clean, and then quickly sun-dried to the touch, each collector then delivers the batch to a central miller. It is at the mill where the coffee is mechanically hulled of its parchment, leaving behind just the soft, high-moisture coffee bean (thus earning the term “wet-hulled”), all of which is spread out on large patios to continue drying.
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