We have 2 new coffees on sale this week.
A coffee from the Bwayi co-operative in Burundi, bought on the trial Cup of Excellence last year.

Flavour description:
Flavours of citrus, coffee flower and ripe cranberries.
Mineraly and slim mouthfeel.
Lively citric and slight lactic acidity.
Short refreshing finish.

The other coffee is a Barazilian  natural processed organic coffee from Fazenda Ambiental Fortaleza from our friends Marcos and Felipe in Mococa, Sao Paulo

Flavour description:
Flavours of berries, nuts and milk chocolate.
Hints of flowers on the nose.
Berry-like acidity with low intensity. Creamy mouthfeel.
Lingering sweet finish.

Both coffees are available on our Webshop.

It gives us great please to introduce the people of Copenhagen to Tim Wendelboe coffee, as we will now be supplying Europa 1989 with filter coffee. Europa 1989, an institution in Copenhagen, has historically been very close to speciality coffee; spawning 3 World Barista Champions and a World Aeropress Champion, and now they have decided to step up their coffee service.

Currently, Europa will be using El Puente of Caballero as their filter offering. They have refocused their efforts to provide their customers with this delicious coffee from Honduras – you can read more about Caballero here. They will also be offering their customers 250g bags for retail purchase and the coffee offering will change throughout the year.

We are very excited to be able to serve our coffee in our favourite cafe in Copenhagen. So, if you are in Copenhagen visit Europa – and have the best brunch Denmark has to offer.

We have changed a lot of coffees this week.

First of all it is a pleasure to be able to sell Mr. Fabio Caballero’s coffee from Finca Santa Isabel. We have decided that this is our Christmas special lot as we only have around 300kg of this coffee.

We have also changed the following coffees:

• New TW Espresso – now a new lot from the Caballeros from their farm Los Cipreses.

• A New El Puente lot from the Caballeros is replacing the old one. This new lot is not traditionally fermented to remove the mucilage but has been processed with an aqua pulper. The coffee is even cleaner and crisper than the previous one.

• A new lot with Bourbon coffee  from Nacimiento is replacing the previous Catuaì lot. The Bourbon is picked on the 7th of March and has a lot of juicy blueberry flavors.

We have changed the contents of  Tim Wendelboe Espresso once again as new coffees have arrived and old ones are selling out.

The new espresso is a single estate coffee from the Caballeros in Honduras.

For more info go here.

I just visited Sitio Canaa to see how Joao Hamilton is doing. He just finished his harvest and had done a lot of experiments that we tasted later in the afternoon. My good friend Felipe Croce is translating.

Felipe is now managing the quality control and experiments at Fazenda Ambiental Fortaleza that is also partners with Joao Hamilton among others.

In my opinion these guys are producing the very best coffees coming out of Brazil at the moment. I will for sure write a little bit more about that later, but for now you can enjoy the interview I did with Joao Hamilton on his farm.

Interview with Joao Hamilton at Sitio Canaa, Brazil from Tim Wendelboe on Vimeo.

We are now sold out of the first lot from Los Cipreses from the Caballero family.
The next lot is a 10 bag lot and is from one of their farms called El Puente.

It is more fruity and has a lot more concentration than the Los Cipreses. More info here.

We are so proud and very happy to have some new coffees for sale.

This time, the new crop from one of our all time favorites, Jobneel at Finca Nacimiento is finally in house and on the shelves.
We have bought 5 lots from him this year and the first release is a Bourbon picked on the 3rd of March. This coffee is so ripe and juicy that people think it is a Kenyan coffee. Loads of ripe cherry flavours. For more information on the coffee go here.

We are also thrilled to finally be able to sell some very special coffee from the Caballero family in Marcala, Honduras. They have several farms, so we decided to honor their name by calling the coffee “Caballero” as their family has been pioneering coffee in Honduras for over a century. We bought 7 different lots from the Caballeros this year, and first one for sale is the first picking from the farm Los Cipreses. For more info go here.

The third release this week is a coffee from one of the first farms we ever bought coffee from when we opened in 2007. Finca La Montañita is situated in the mountains of El Salvador. The Pacamara that we bought from Mr. Antonio René this year has a lot of crisp apple acidity and intense fruity flavors.
For more info go here.

We hope you will enjoy these coffees.

We have bought a very exciting coffee from El Salvador this year, from the farm Los Pirineos. Gilberto Baraona has competed with his coffees in the El Salvador Cup of Excellence for several years, and last year we bought a lot from his Las Palmas farm on the CoE auction. We are very proud to be able to sell his coffee this year as well. For more info on Gilberto and his coffee go here.

The coffee will be for sale from tomorrow (Thursday 14th of july) and will also be featured in our new espresso blend that we will start roasting tomorrow as well.

The TW espresso blend now consists of:
80 % Los Pirineos from El Salvador
20 % Tekangu from kenya.

New coffees from Kenya have arrived, and therefore we have made a new espresso blend to replace the current one.

As you all know by now, the prices of green coffee has increased a lot for the past year and therefore we have had to adjust the price for the espresso slightly. To read more about Raining prices, go here.

Here is the taste profile of our current blend:
Intense flavours of red berries and molasses.
Bright, winey acidity.
Juicy mouthfeel with sweet lingering finish.

The current blend consists of:
40 % Sitio Canaa, Sao Paulo, Brasil (Natural)
10 % Sumidouro, Bahia, Brasil (Washed)
50 % Tekangu, Nyeri, Kenya (Washed)

You can buy this coffee in our webshop.

Brewing:
Go here to see videos on how to brew espresso.

We strongly recommend to use the new VST filterbaskets. Both the 18g basket and the 22g basket is great for our coffee.
The VST filters makes it a lot easier to extract the espresso properly which gives a lot more sweetness in the cup. They are also more or less identical to eachother which makes it easy to be more consistent when brewing on several groups at the same time.
You can buy the filters here. Just make sure they fit your machine. (Fits all La Marzocco machines)

Just for the record, we do not have any commitments to VST. We just happen to use the filters and are extremely happy with them.

With the VST 18 gram filterbasket, we recommend the following brewing parameters:

• 18 – 19 grams freshly ground coffee
• 22 – 26 seconds brewing time
• 25 – 30 grams of final brew liquid in the cup
• 93°C – 94°C brew water temperature

A lot of you have probably allready noted that the coffee prices have been rising a lot during the last year. Only a week ago the C-market (based on future contracts on coffee where prices are set by speculation on supply and demand) went over USD 3 per lb (453 g) of green unexported coffee. This is a record high price and compared to last year where the price was more or less around USD 1,30 per lb, a great price for farmers around the world. But with high prices the farmers meet new challenges.

A lot of coffee was being stolen while I was in El Salvador and Honduras this year. Local pickers would raid farms at night and pick all the coffee on the trees and sell the coffee to middlemen. There were also an armed robbery at a cooperative in Santa Ana where 4 persons carrying guns stole a truck full of ready to export coffee. We are talking values at about USD 100.000,- being lost and for a farmer where his / her only income during the year is the one harvest of coffee, it can be devastating.
The solution to the problem is to hire security which will tare on the extra profit the farmers are making on the higher prices.

So as we can see, high prices can also be a headache for a farmer. But this is not what I initially wanted to write about.
One of the reasons for rising prices is not only a growing demand for coffee in countries like India and China (which traditionally are more tea drinkers) We are also seeing coffee producing countries like Brazil where there is a rapidly rising middle class who are consuming more coffee than before.
Add this to climatic changes that has lead to extremely poor growing conditions in Colombia three years in a row and also in several other producing countries such as Kenya where they have had a severe decrease in production for the last 2 years.

In fact during the 2009 /10 crop there was a terrible drought making a lot of the coffee mediocre in quality and the total volume of the crop in Kenya was low. You might have noticed that even though our Tekangu last year was good it was not the same quality as the 2008 / 09 crop.

In the recent crop in Kenya there was little rain during the flowering, which lead to an extremely low yield. However there was a lot of rain during the expansion / maturation stage of the coffee cherries producing extremely high quality.
The results of this was that during our visit in kenya in January there was not a lot of coffee to choose from but the quality was very high. Because of this the prices at the Kenyan Coffee Auction went sky high as there is a huge demand for what is considered some of the worlds best coffees.

To give you some numbers, in 2010 we payed USD 4,5 to 5 per lb. of unexported coffee, which was then a very high price compared to the Fair trade standard which was about USD 2,20 per lb.
This year we had to pay USD 7,50 per lb. This means the new crop coffees from Kenya that we will start selling this week will be a bit more pricey than last year. Regardless of this we have bought more Kenyan coffee this year as the quality was extremely high and it is our favourite coffees. We feel that if there is any coffee that is worth some extra money, it is the Kenyan coffees as they are extremely intense and characteristic in flavour. Besides, the price per cup is still not very high compared to the price of a beer or a bottle of water.

We have bought 3 lots this year. Two of the lots are from the Karogoto factory at the Tekangu Cooperative in Nyeri where we donated 8 steel drying beds in November.
The 2 lots we bought were actualy dried on the new tables and while visiting the cooperative again in January they expressed their gratitude once again and explained that it had made their production a lot easier this year.
The coffee is delicate and floral with a lot of rose hip flavour and crisp acidity.

The other lot is from the Ngaita facory at the Ndumberi cooperative in Kiambu. This is a big juicy coffee with a winey acidity and a lot of black currant and blackberry flavours.

Both the Tekangu and the Ndumberi coffees will be available from Friday the 20th of may and in addition we will soon start roasting one of them as espresso. We just need to do some trials first.

We hope you enjoy the coffees and also hope you will continue to support the Kenyan coffee farmers by continuing to purchase their coffees although the prices are higher this year.