Coffee Introduction Day 01-07 | 100 Days of Coffee
Welcome to the first day in our 100 Days of Coffee blog!
I’m excited to go on this journey with you to brew some of the worlds greatest coffee, and foster a spark of creativity. We will be brewing a new coffee every week, using a completely different or modified recipe every day, meaning no two cups will be the same. There will be no brew recipes or in-depth gear reviews here. I want to purely talk about how flavors change in coffee and how to control them. Leaving room for your own creativity and discovering what works for you and your setup, because no two are ever the same.
Day 01-07 | Coffee Introduction
For the next 7 days we will be brewing with a very interesting coffee. It is a coffee from Brazil.
Brazil typically gets a bad rap in specialty coffee. It is the world largest coffee producer, and produces a lot of non-specialty grade coffee. It’s lower altitudes make the coffee plants mature very fast, and produce a higher yield. The opposite of a high altitude coffee, where the plants mature slowly and produce much more flavor. I’m sure the ease of exporting here has a lot to do with cheaper coffees, too.
There are still many specialty coffees stemming from this region. In fact, a Brazilian coffee won the Brewers Cup in 2018. It was a rare varietal called Laurina, which came from an island close to Madagascar. It was then taken to Brazil to produce an incredibly sweet, fruity coffee containing more sugars and less bitter compounds. The varietal produces about 30-50% of the caffeine of other Arabica varieties. Though this also makes it difficult to grow, since caffeine is a natural insecticide, the low caffeine levels help play a role in its flavor profile.
Although we won’t be using the Laurina varietal this week, we will be using something along those lines. Our coffee for the week contains different varietals from Yirgacheffe, Ethiopia. Yirgacheffe is one of the most common areas producing specialty coffee and is favored by many in the industry for its dynamic flavor profile full of bright acidity, fruity and floral notes.
Like Laurina, these varietals were brought to Brazil in hopes to make a more acidic cup than you would normally find in Brazil. Full of tropical, citrus flavors actually resembling Ethiopia! What’s funny is it still tastes approachable, and not overly acidic like some Ethiopians can be to people used to smooth, tamed flavors from Brazil. You get a heavier body from this coffee too. It has been fermented using the anaerobic natural method, which also intensifies these fruity flavors.
This farm is in the higher elevations of Brazil, which helped express the flavors they were wanting to achieve, but these experiments are the future for farmers in generally commodity-grade lower elevation areas. They can produce incredible coffees and charge more for them.
If you would like to know more about this roaster, visit our page about Black & White.