The Art and Craft of Coffee Read Online Free PDF Page B

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    Tanzania
    Tanzanian coffee, which grows on Mounts Kilimanjaro and Meru, tastes much like a good Kenyan, with the same African wine-like footprint. Some Tanzanian coffees taste like Ethiopian coffee.
    Uganda
    Uganda has created some great coffee on mountains near Kenya, but the country does not produce large quantities. That it does produce gets lost in the mainstream specialty business. If roasting, don’t roast too far.
    Zimbabwe
    Zimbabwean coffee has little name recognition, though it offers a rich body and nice balance. It has the same winey acidity as a Kenyan, without the blackberry note. Even so, more than one commercial coffee roasting company has labeled Zimbabwean coffee Kenyan to sell it at a higher price. Some of the best Zimbabwean coffee comes from the town of Chipinge under a Salimba label.
    Additional Coffee-Buying Considerations
    The coffee world is changing. Even the most careful listing of regions and coffees won’t offer you an exact roadmap. Thanks to direct trade, the World Wide Web, and small family farms, we now have much greater access to high-quality coffees that defy categorization.
    When choosing a variety, ask yourself these questions:
1. How does it smell? If it’s green and for roasting, how fresh is it?
2. What genus of bean is it?
3. Is it from a small farm? Does my coffee buyer know anything about the farm’s methods?
    Pay less attention to whether it’s organic, bird-friendly/shade grown, or fair-traded (unless it’s commodity coffee).
    The rubber meets the road in the coffee seller’s shop. Use varieties as a starting point. But before simply deciding based on geography, ask questions. It’s better to buy a great coffee from an unknown or underappreciated region (e.g., Nicaragua) than a mediocre coffee from a well-known one (e.g., Sumatra). Most regional differences are wider ranging than even coffee buyers assume. I have tasted great coffee from almost every world region and country. If I haven’t, I assume it’s because I have not run into it yet. I never rule out new varieties. Neither should you.
Taste Comes First
I know I may get flak for downplaying environmental sustainability and labor issues. I agree with these goals in spirit, but I sincerely believe that any product sold primarily for taste must taste good first. With coffee, aroma comes in a close second. In fact, you almost can’t separate coffee’s taste and aroma. Fortunately, most environmental, sustainability, and labor issues lead to good-flavored coffee.
Also, geography isn’t everything. It is important to understand geographic coffee-growing regions because so much of flavor depends on terroir. But the increase of micro-lots farmed and processed by individuals complicates the equation. For example, a farm in Honduras recently began selling coffee from plant cuttings brought from Ethiopia. Startlingly, this coffee tastes more Ethiopian than other Honduran coffees. Is the earth less important than previously assumed?
Where the bean originated still carries authority when predicting taste. The most important decision when taking a photograph is choosing a worthy subject. In the case of coffee beans, the first step is finding beans worth turning into coffee.

2 SELECTING COFFEE BEANS
    IN CHAPTER 1 we learned that although most commercial coffee sells as branded blends from the beans of many countries, upscale coffee tends to have a single country of origin (such as Guatemala or Ethiopia). The higher the price and the more unique the taste, the greater the likelihood of regions within a country (such as Sumatra’s Mandheling) or individual estates or farms (such as Costa Rica’s La Manita) selling their own coffee.
    Thanks to Internet commerce and global shipping, it is conceivable that someone in the United States could purchase online a single-origin coffee grown on a plot in the Guatemalan mountains. Just a short time ago, such point-to-point individuality and identity tracking could only be