Cocktail-do ~ OLD COFFEE SPECIALITY

Here again, the old coffee specialty: Cocktail Do coffee roaster. 

Cocktail Do offers so called Aged beans, also called aged coffee or old coffee, just like CAFE DE L'MBRE with much bigger business scale.  In terms of food “business”, bigger in size often means poor in quality.  Fortunately, Cocktail Do does not follow that formula, although taste of their beans cannot hit center of my expectation for “aged beans”.

Old coffee should be categorized separately from new crops and thought separately from images generally given by the word, “OLD”.  So, what is Old coffee?  Suffice it to say that Old coffee has some similarity to Wine.  New crops are stored and aged under certain desirable conditions for several years, some several ten-years and others several years.  Green beans gain mellow or matured flavors and aroma with this aging process as well as lose sharp acidity of fresh crops.

Here are Cocktail-do specialties single beans and blend beans: Old 5 blend, Columbia, Brazil, (from Left to right)

If there is a chance, I would like to try fresh beans and aged beans at the same time to compare their flavor.  Unlike CAFE DE L'MBRE’s decades aging, Cocktail do’s beans are aged shorter periods of time, assuming several years.  However, still amazing to find that acidity of single beans actually softened and gain mellow flavor in a cup.

It is often said that aging process is betting: not every harvest is well matured or developed to survive through over years of aging process.  The owner of CAFE DE L'MBRE said that it has been getting more and more difficult to find “Good Quality” green beans for aging.  It is easily come to my mind that aging length at CAFE DE L'MBRE might be much longer, by decades, their requirements and expectations must be much higher than other aged coffee roasters.  Widely commercialized coffee business changed style of farming.  Conversion to mass farming seems to have some relations to berries qualities and, hopefully, recent specialty coffee boom will push farming styles back to small, non-machineries farming.