Along with penicillin (and we’re told, Champagne) our new Dark Dark Brazil is, truth to tell, an Accident which immediately morphed into a Discovery. And hence has us and our customers embarking on a path, maybe even a journey, of many dimensions, as so much about coffee so often is.

This Double or Dark Dark materialized after goofing up letting a batch go to 490 and me thinking it’s burnt but dumping it it wasn’t really ‘black’ and certainly not on fire?! Pat was almost immediately enthusiastic about it and tried some the next a.m. and both her and D thought it ‘fantastic’.

So now the discussion/debate is around what that could mean for sales? I’m just tasting it cooled down but at the 480 we did last night, and there’s definitely char to it but not totally, so it seems the extra time brings along some of the nuttiness into more depth that as with others goes toward a bitter chocolate so you get those 2, which is an interesting experience. More next time!

“If this drying is done on patios, it is a bit slower than “raised bed” or screen-drying, and the result is a much more rustic cup.
The coffee is then collected and transported to the dry mill to be hulled out of parchment and graded.
With a traditional Indonesia, this happens before the coffee has been fully dried down to 11% moisture.
And they don’t let the coffee “rest” in parchment that long … it happens largely in the shipping container on the way over to the US!
Hence the coffee has a dark, opal-jade color. Okay, all that backstory is fine, but what about the cup?

You know right away from the dry fragrance this is an earthy, full-body, intense cup. There are woody notes in the aroma too,
wet forest bark, cocoa-chocolate. In the cup there is a syrupy, heavy body, low acidity; a thick, tenor-to-bass range flavor profile.
There’s a dark cocoa powder flavor from start to finish. It’s not that complex, and might strike those who like bright, clean coffee as “wrong.”
But for some this is the bullseye for deep, thick, intense flavor profiles.”

A cousin of Timor,

this is one of the most complex coffees we’ve run into so far! More detail next time!

This spring and summer our Timor had a good run, but we’re down to the last of the last bag, with no more at our importer’s warehouse until the next harvest! We sampled two new coffees, one from India and one from Indonesia. They’re both spectacular and since we’re financially limited to one for now, the Flores Bajawa Ngura prevailed over the India Monsoon Malabar.

The Flores is arriving tomorrow: it’s organic and grown by coops on one of the larger Indonesian islands, and has a complex chocolate smoothness.  More on it next time, and a note too on the interesting techniques applied to the Monsoon Malabar!