Brazil De Terra Santa Columba

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Found within Brazil’s Cerrado region which makes up nearly 23% of the entire country, Daterra are the world’s first grade A rainforest certified farm of any business. Over 60% of the land they own is given over to nature reserves. The farm itself it split into many lots, each with a designated agronomist to care for the particular varietal and aspect each lot can define. With over 100 different varietals on their farms, development is tracked and planting paired with appropriate varietal. The area has a combination of high altitude with stable temperatures and climate which makes it perfect for growing Arabica coffee.

 

Picking occurs typically with 40-60% ripe coffee on the tree, with 5% green, 10% underripe, and the rest tree dried. Each brings its own unique characteristics to a coffee, so a sample is picked, processed and roasted to check taste is as expected before the order is given to pick the specific lot. Sorting is done on a specially adapted wet mill, first with density sorting that removes the over ripe, then with the drier and natural beans being sorted from the ripe, under ripe and greens.

This is a full bodied coffee with citrus acidity. There is a long aftertaste of pleasant, sweet nuttiness with hints of ripe fruits and caramelized sugars. The body is medium and the finish is smooth and clean.

Burundi Rubanda Gomvyi

Burundi is a landlocked African country in the Great Rift Valley at the meeting point of the African Great Lakes region and East Africa. This coffee is grown on terraces on small farms.

The Gomvyi Farmers group consist of around 650 members, from the surrounding hillside delivering coffee in their groups to be processed, wet-milled, fermented and conditioned prior to dry milling. There are up to 10,000 farmers in the region in total delivering coffee from their smallholdings (typically less than 1 hectare in size, with around 200 active producing trees on each one).

After being picked the coffee cherries are soaked and trodden in a similar way to grapes in wine production. This means that the sweetness of the fruit enters the bean. The beans are then dried, soaked with spring water and then dried again. This produces an earthly, chocolate sweetness. There’s almost caramel there too with a creamy texture.

 

Guatemala Nueva Granada Monte Flor

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The Nueva Granada Estate occupies 500 hectares within the San Marcos region which is the warmest and rainiest coffee region in Guatemala.

This coffee is produced by a wet process. In the wet process, the fruit of the coffee cherry is removed from the bean before drying. The cherries are immersed in water. The rotten cherries will float whilst the ‘good’ cherries sink and can be collected. By pressing the cherries against a screen most of the pulp is moved. The rest is removed either by fermentation or scrubbing.

It has what’s called a clean mouthfeel. Coffee beans have oils and carbohydrates inside them as well as proteins and sugars which are all extracted by the water and contribute to the mouthfeel. A clean mouthfeel means there aren’t many oils in the coffee. The less contact time between the coffee beans and water (say a pour over rather than a French press) the fewer oils will be in the resulting drink.

Typical for coffees from Central America there’s a healthy amount of acidity. Whilst over roasting can cause too much acidity some is needed to give a coffee some ‘punch’. This is the difference between Central American coffees and their milder Brazilian counterparts.

The amount of microscopic insoluble fibres and oils in the coffee also results in its body or texture. The body of this coffee is good, there’s clearly some bulk to it although it feels clean in the mouth. There’s not much extra to it, just some nice natural sweetness. There’s hints of vanilla and fruit.

 

Rwanda Koakaka

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For my first coffee review I wanted to pick a bean I hadn’t tried before and in my ignorance Rwanda was not a country which sprang to mind when I thought about coffee producers.

This is a red bourbon bean. Bourbon coffee was first grown by the French on Réunion Island, called  Île Bourbon until 1791 after the French Royal House. Along with Typica coffee it is one of the base cultivars of Arabica; both produce a similar quality but yields of Bourbon tend to be 20-30% bigger.

Bourbon grows best at heights of 1,100 to 2,000 metres above sea level and has large, wide leaves with wavy edges. It tends to have more secondary branches in comparison with other coffee trees. The berries are rather small and very thick, and can be red, yellow or pink depending on the sub-variety. Red, yellow and pink (sometimes known as orange) Bourbon are varieties with natural mutation of one recessive gene

Bourbon is valued for its complex acidity and wonderful balance. It often has a sweet, caramel quality and nice and crisp acidity but can present quite distinct flavours depending on where it is planted. El Salvador Bourbons tend to display butter, toffee, and fresh pastry; Rwandan types tend to have a punchier, fruity quality.

 

Koakaka is a co-operative founded in 1999 with 875 coffee farmers, and has since grown to 1,316 cooperative members with 297 women and 1,019 men. Its coffee is grown on the slopes of the Virunga volcanos in the district of Karaba, Rwanda, about two and a half hours from Kigal, the capital. In 2014, they began to segment their women's coffee and in 2016, Koakaka coffee was recognized by RWASHOSCCO as the best coffee in the country with a score of 90.3. In 2018, Koakaka placed in the Rwanda Cup of Excellence. Koakaka has been a member of the African Fine Coffee Association (AFCA) and the International Women Coffee Alliance (IWCA) since 2016.

Drinking this coffee on your first sip there’s a sweetness, almost a fruitiness, which hits the tip of your tongue and washes over it. This comes from malic acid which is formed in the coffee cherries as they grow. Malic acid is destroyed during the roasting process so this coffee needs a medium roast so as not to lose all the fruitiness. This gives you a rich, pear like flavour. A lovely, naturally sweet coffee. If you are looking for a coffee where you don’t need sugar or syrup this is the one for you!