Introducing Our New Single Origin Coffees

Introducing Our New Single Origin Coffees

April 17, 2018

ASMUCAFE

Our newest single origin coffee comes from ASMUCAFE (Asociación de Mujeres Agropecuarias de Uribe), an association of women farmers and landowners in the Cauca region of Colombia.

It’s an approachable - I’d even say friendly - coffee, but it also has some complexity, especially in the aftertaste, and that makes it really fun overall.

We got the ASMUCAFE from our friends at Cafe Imports and, much like the AMACA some of you will remember from last year, it’s part of their Women Producers program, which they developed as “a program empowering women along the global coffee supply chain by creating equity, visibility, and access to a wider market.”

This coffee is really nicely balanced, with flavors you might expect to come out of our pastry case, like graham cracker and cinnamon. It also has a really interesting lemon acidity that made it stand out the moment we first tasted it. It’s totally delicious and we’re excited to serve it to you throughout the spring. 

MAFINGA HILLS

Mafinga Hills is our new coffee from the country of Zambia, which is definitely on the way up as a producer of specialty coffee. The country itself has only been producing coffee since the 80s, and the Kateshi and Isanya estates, on which this coffee was grown, started in 1986 as part of the Zambia Coffee Company before being privatized as Northern Coffee in the 90s.

overhead coffee cup

This coffee is honey processed (aka pulped-natural processed), meaning that the seed of the coffee cherry is set out to dry without having all its sticky mucilage removed beforehand. This tends to impart a slightly heavier body and slightly wilder flavors onto the coffee.

The Mafinga Hills has a heavy body and is supremely balanced. There’s really cool dark fruit sweetness, like blackberries. The acidity is gentle, more like super fresh plums than citrus fruit or anything, and there’s a huge sweetness, nutty and caramelized, which made us think of candied walnuts.Coffee from anywhere in Africa is an incredibly new and unique thing, so we’re excited to have the opportunity to share this one with you.

 KAREHE

Great Burundi coffees have lots of fruit character and acidity but they can also have really huge, sugary sweetness, and they balance all of that in very special way that make Burundi one of our favorite origins.

coffee filtering into mug

Our friends at InterAmerican Coffee brought some delicious coffees over this year from a Burundi-based company called JNP Coffee. This was exciting for us because a) they really were delicious and b) we had met Janine, who runs JNP, several times in previous years while tasting equally delicious coffees from her cousin Jean-Clement. The coffee we decided to purchase was from the Karehe washing station, a member of the International Women’s Coffee Alliance, which exists to empower women in the supply chain in the face of “the gender inequality that often manifests itself into being excluded from training, education, and financing opportunities.”

I’ve never seen our head roaster as proud of a roast of coffee as the first time we tasted our final roast of Karehe. It leads with a green grape acidity and has a fun berry flavor that reminds us of strawberry - not an overripe syrupy berry flavor, but rather something really fresh. That’s rounded out by a big toffee sweetness; as I mentioned earlier, that kind of balance is what we really love about coffees from Burundi. Finally, the body on this coffee is really soft and pleasant. It’s not a huge, thick coffee, but it still feels really nice to drink. It’s delicious and we can’t wait for you to drink it up.


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