Alberta Grizzly

It's rare to find a coffee that delivers on taste in different aspects and without noticeable imperfections. So imagine my delight when I happened on this beauty. A full bodied flavor that is not dark and acidic. Hints of cinnamon and caramel color the front end, followed by a deep nutty finish. It's not aggressive enough to stand out against a piece of Saskatoon pie but you'll be quite content sliding this across your palate in mid afternoon. This is coffee could easily weasel its way into becoming a staple in your cupboard. No need for a gustatory workout here but there is just enough complexity to keep you interested every time. The Planet Coffee Roasters is another micro-roaster with a number of great products and an extensive repertoire. Check out the toll free phone order line with most roasts around the ten dollar mark. Nothing to grizzly about Alberta Grizzly.

Mexican Custapec

This is like your basic "get to work" coffee - only there is nothing basic about it. There is little that is nuanced, subtle or complicated about this dark roast. It is full and ready. It is the kind of coffee that if it catches you in the mall says, "What the heck are you doing here?"It's not busy but not frantic. It sits down in your mouth like a full meal deal. It's veteran chocolate taste with slightest paunch in the dark department. You can blend this coffee with almost any other coffee and count on it to provide that stable deep sweet taste. It won't hide - it won't run - except maybe for office. I mean it may have collected E.I. once or twice in the mid-eighties but these days it pays its own mortgage on the house at the end of Splendid Coffee Lane. It's all business - and its business is pleasure!

In the Press

Costa Rican La Minta Tarrazu
Every coffee exacts its surgery on the soul – the healer. Luckily the soul always is desperately in need of repair. This coffee touches the soul in the place that it walks – the everyday – the one foot in front of the other – everyday. It’s about as regular a coffee as should be consumed with touches of spiced chocolate – just enough to pull off the mundane day you walk into. It’s the coffee that reminds you that the comfort of the familiar is an oft forgotten bliss. You can gulp this coffee and it will only comply to your palate. Tread on it and you will still not be disappointed. Like a trusty staff in your hand on the mountain trail. Like the way you have to drag yourself out of bed each day with that touch of familiar dread and then collapse beside your lover each night – spent. It is a good life – and full of crap at the same time. You drink it as if you need to invite it in but then you realize that it has been there all along.

In the Press...

French Press that is.
Ethiopian Harrar Longberry - find it here in a medium light roast.
This is about as delicate a coffee as I have tasted. Very complex with fruity overtones. And dancing around the edges like the ever ellusive gazelle, native to the region in which it is grown, are the teasings of spice. This is the perfect afternoon coffee. All by itself. In order to appreciate this coffee you have to take the time to adventure through your palate as you explore its intoxicating allure.
The aptly nicknamed, "Wine-in-a-bottle" aroma springs to your nose. Its the stuff to build a midlife crisis around...

In the Press...

is becoming a regular feature on this blog site where I will sample and review coffee. Feel free to send small batches (minimum 1/2 cup whole bean) of coffee for me to sample and review.

tasty and pretty at the same time...

something to aspire to...

Women and coffee...

This morning before dancing off to church to sit in on Edgar’s Senior High Sunday School Class on morality, I happened to catch a segment on CTV’s Good Morning Canada. The show ran a feature on a special coffee being roasted by Cuppers Coffee & Tea (Lethbridge) called Café Femenino. I happened to have a cup brewed from a recently roasted batch while I was restocking my coffee shelf for Christmas yesterday.
The coffee is wonderful. Big chocolaty tones and some wonderful upfront caramels right away – no hunting and pecking through your taste buds to find it. And of course the coffee is smooth – Al is so gentle with this roasts making sure they do not wander across the forbidden boundaries of the Starbucks burn zone. But then the coffee is also outstanding because it bears a mighty redemption behind it. Oh yes as you will have already seen if you went to the site. This coffee fights for women – those who are being taken advantage of, abused, used, and reduced to property. A dollar from every pound sold roasted goes to support the various agencies that this cooperative has selected for global affect. Not only that the coffee is grown and processed by Peruvian women and sold to companies who meet strict standards (Al said he even had to have a woman sign for delivery of the product when it arrived to prove that he had women working for him.) So anyone interested in a pound?

Fincas de Chiapas

Usually, Starbucks meets with a lot of scepticism in my books. I find that they tend to over roast their coffees. It's a technique that can hind alot blemishes in the quality of the coffee. Even their lighter coffees are would typically be more like a dark roast. But I would say that Starbucks is a pretty big step up from Tim Ho's and miles away from what 7-eleven brews. Yikes. Anyhow, I tasted this coffee a week ago and loved it. It is full bodied and complex and seems to bring out all the best parts of the latin american bean. And it's fairly traded. See what you think...

Discriminating Coffee Taste

Now, I would say that my tongue, the beautiful instrument that it is, knows good coffee from better coffee. That it dances with pure delight when it samples the delectable flavors of a robust Kenya AA or even better yet the rare Cubita. And yes I scoff at idiots who choose to fornicate their coffee with lurid cream flavors made from edible oil products (EOP) and pretend that that fetid concoction tastes good – or worse insist that this beverage still bears the moniker ‘coffee’. I of course have the right, the freedom, and I might add substantial published credentials to back up my overbearing analysis of other's coffee blunders.
Arrogance you say? Me?
Well, it is definitely not arrogance. My knowledge and more importantly my exquisitely sensitive palate is keenly honed in the classic barista tradition. There may also be some accounting in the fact that instead of being breast fed I was given the berries’ nectar as an infant.
Now as one might assume because of my gorgeously accurate taster, there are strict considerations before any coffee receives even token analysis by my unprotected and unprepared tongue. Considerations of method: temperature of the water 208F, 2mil. course grind of coffee ideal for, French press steeping and, plunging after precisely 4 minutes. Then of course there is the coffee’s origin and appropriate roasting considerations. And there is the reputation of the firm whose skills extract the bountiful flavor under submission to the flames of the roaster.
Now you can imagine my dismay the woman who shall remain nameless save to mention that her personal label begins with “R” and ends with “uth” co-conspired to decieve me. This woman, who every morning offers a sub-grade liquid (She calls coffee) which I shock treat my mouth with each morning in the office, decides to ‘brew’ and I use that term loosely a pot of NABOB poo. Her co-workers challenged her to do this believing that I would not be able to tell the difference.
And in honesty I could not tell the difference much in the same way one cannot tell the difference between male and female or white and black or vegetables and socks.
Many of you will not realize the time and energy it took to rehabilitate my entire mouth after but one sip of that putrid filth. But suffice to say that I am currently on a waiting list for an entire transplant of the lining of my mouth.
Usually, when I attend someone else’s home or drink what other establishments call coffee, I prepare myself not just for the disappointment in flavor but for the assault, engendered by a careless approach to the bean, on the common sensibilities in rational tasting expectations . Thus prepared I am actually able to swallow this liquid and over years I’ve learned to smile and nod and even (gulp) ask for another cup.
But when ambushed as was the case in this instance…
Why the fury and rage that welled up in my breast was unbearable! (and my breasts are larger than most men's)
Yes friends I trust you can see how precious coffee is to me. How the pursuit of the perfect cup is ever on my mind. I trust that you will recognize my deep abhorrence for behavior as I have described above and not insult both your own reputation in my eyes or my sensibilities to not open a can of whoop a… on you.
In other words try that and you will reap the full measure of my unrestrained wrath.
May good coffee come your way today!
out