Cuba TL

Beans: Cuba TL
Roaster: Kimameya Hompo
Roasting degree: Medium
Area: N/A, Cuba
Altitude: N/A
Varieties: N/A
Grade: TL
Screen: SC17
Processing: Fully Washed


【Flavor scale】
Bitterness: 2
Richness: 2
Aroma: 3
Acidity: 3
Sweetness: 4
※Grade 1 to 5

【Impression】

Light body, airy texture, lime like citrus and flowery aroma.  Sweet almond flavor, light acidity, a tint bitterness, sweet jasmine like aroma to finish with clear aftertaste.  Sweetness as core flavor with light lemony aroma, with gradually growing acidity to throat.  Americano like light cup, body & flavor,  fits any occasions.

【Note】

The Cuban grading system evaluates beans by size and # of defects as follows:Crystal Mountain Screen 19, ETL 18, and TL up to 19.  This beans has typical Caribbean light and soft touch, which fits for who likes a mild flavor coffee. 

Cuba has never been known as a volume producer of the coffee beans, but there are concrete coffee culture developed especially after Italian Espresso machines is introduced.  Introduced by Spaniard Don Jose Gelabert in 1748, the very first variety planted was Typica.  Cuban coffee culture was refined at the end of the 18th century by French emigrants at the time of the social revolution in Haiti, who also brought the humid pulping method.  As a result, Cuban coffee became and has been one of the highest quality coffee in Europe.  Cuban coffee market has limited its expansion by The U.S. embargo, European and Japanese has been blessed to enjoy their wonderful Cuban coffee beans.

Colombia Andes Condor

Beans: Columbia Andean Condor
Roaster: Akai-mi Coffee
Roasting Degree: Medium
Area: Takengon Boyanaca, Colombia
Varieties: 100% Typica
Altitude: 1700m
Processing: Washed, 100% Sun-dried
                      Traditional Columbian fermentation process




【Impression】
Medium dark body, silky texture, thick layer of flavors, light fresh citrus aroma..
Clear but well balanced moderate flavor.   Dark chocolaty Cacao sweetness and bitterness as core flavor.  Light mild acidity of orange and juicy concord grapes,  bitterer caramel like heavy sweetness with reduced cane juice as bottom flavor, nutty sweetness and cacao bitterness as finish.  Short aftertaste with acidity left.  No outstanding character or uniqueness in flavor and aroma, but well matured and balanced in total.

【Note】
Andes Condor is very rare coffee beans to enjoy as single origin.  In recent years, Columbian traditional coffee trees have been overtaken, or replaced, by Variedad Colombia to combat blights.   Variedad Colombia is a hybrid of the Canephora (Robusta) and Arabica species developed by the Colombian Coffee Growers’ Federation with a federal support, which has disease resistance, precocious and high -yielding.

Against federal project, some farmers have chosen Typica, low-yielding with poor resistance to blights and requires a lot of labor: Andean Condor is one of them.  It has low-yielding, but entertain us with its unique and fascinating flavor.  
Andes Condor upholds Traditional Columbian fermentation process, using "fluid" remain in coffee cherries.  This method carries original rich flavor of cherries and add richness, sweetness and depth to coffee beans but requires high technique to control/to maintain fermentation process.

Panama Peaberry

Beans: La Berlina Estate Peaberry
Roaster: Akai-mi Coffee
Roast: Full City
Origin/Area: Boquete, Chirqui, Panama
Altitude: 1,450~1,600m
Variety: Typica､Peaberry
Grade: SHB
Screen: 11-13
Process: Fully washed, 100% sun-dry







【Impression】
Medium body, honey like sweetness, but light in texture. A tip of bitterness remained as aftertaste with mild sourness.  Since Peberry, in general, tastes lighter and soft to me, this beans feels same but leaves strong impression with its sweetness and clearness in taste.
Black is recommended to enjoy this soothing and refreshing cup.

OLD Colombia

Beans: Old Columbia
Roaster:  Cocktail-Do

Area: Columbia
Varieties: 100% Arabica
Altitude:  1,100～1,800m
Amount of rainfall: 2,000～3,000mm
Average Temperature: 7～18℃

【Roaster's Comment】
Columbia often refer as synonymous with mild coffee.  Columbia is desirable beans for aging because of their full body flavor and aged Columbia enables to give variety of richness and sweetness in wide range of roasting degrees, from cinammon to dark roast.  Coktail-do often creates our blend coffee with Columbia as core flavor, sometimes using 2 different aging degree beans.

【Impression】

Medium body, mild texture, rather silky, citrus lemony aroma.  

Nutty flavor and delicate bitterness Flavor has less acidity.  Old Coffee, often refered as aged coffee, has less acidity than fresh beans as well as deeper in flavor.  Layer of bitterness gives depth in flavor and well matured aroma.

Talking about Aged or Old coffee, time and temperature do have strong impact on coffee flavor.  It is widely known fact so it has no need to be mentioned, but aging green beans is just like maturing wine.  Sourness literary changes, is sublimed to merged into rich flavor to harmonize bitterness/sweetness. 

Aged beans hide their capabilities, characteristics, potentials and so on until they came out of roasting machine.  Aged Beans sometimes ended up just like charcoal flavor if aging temperature is not appropriate.  There are a few coffee roaster can offer more than 10yrs wonderful aged coffee beans.
This roaster is not the one, but good enough to experience what aged coffees are.and to float the basis of an entrance for deeper coffee world.  

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.