We just received our first Liberica shipment for 2012. The season for the new crop in the Philippines usually begins around the first week of February, but continuous torrential rains have really delayed the crop and the drying of the beans this year. We have found also that if we are going to have enough supply of Liberica through the year, we need to reserve over a ton of green beans from the start. This is a lot of coffee... when you consider that we only purchased about 100 kilos our first year!
The new crop is fabulous. They've done a great job on the green beans... we also can't wait until we can get our new crop of Excelsa green beans so we can add the Liberica Blend back to the lineup. Liberica is a very unusual coffee, and while we have hundreds of people who as addicted to it as we are, many enjoy the blend with Excelsa as a well-rounded cup with the great tones of each.
The Liberica can be found here:
Liberica coffee from the Philippines
Excelsa: For years we have believed the coffee advisers who have told us that Excelsa is such a sharp and aggressive-tasting coffee that it does not play well as a single-source coffee. But when we tested the Excelsa green beans supplied to us from Vietnam by our friends at Indochine Estates, we fell in love with it as is. It looks like one more coffee myth will fall - that Excelsa is a mixing coffee only. As we have been testing it on focus groups everybody is saying "It's different and unusual, but this is really good!" They all said they would have considered it a great discover if it had popped up at their favorite coffee shop. So we will be offering Excelsa not only in blends this year but as a single-source coffee with two origins - Dalat (Vietnam) and the Philippines.
Shade-grown organic Robusta from the Philippines: We have been eagerly awaiting the new crop for three months! We have been told that a courier package with 25 kilos of green beans is on the way to us. We're hoping it will arrive this week (last week of March) and that we will have it back up on the site as roasted coffee by the end of the month.
