Brazil Brazil Brazil Brazil

It's the country with so much coffee we had to name it four times! Actually, we did that because we have taken in a new crop of coffees to complement our fan favorite, the Brazil Adrano.

These new 2015 crops are artfully selected from the best of the best. Certified as one of the world’s best volcanic terroirs, and home to rich mineral springs reputed to have healing abilities, Poços de Caldas is a quintessential volcanic growing region.

The primary Arabica variety in these origins is Mundo Novo, a quintessential Latin American variety that forms the base of the world's most popular brands of coffee used in cafés, donut shops and restaurants. Here are a few tips on how to pick your favorite Brazilian:

Adrano
Our favorite in the Deep Forest Roast, this is an intensely buttery coffee with so much rich caramel tone that we call it the coffee that is perfect for having with dessert... and you don't even need the dessert! Pleasantly acidic but smoother than polished glass, this is one of our staff favorites.

St. Domingos
Another registered profile of the Volcano Origin Coffee Co., St. Domingos is the coffee of choice for those who want to drink a naturally sweet coffee without the need for sugar. Perfect for icing and suitable for any time of day, St. Domingos is high in body and milk chocolate tones. What's not to love?

Santa Izabel
A true Microlot from D'Alva Family Farm, an oft-awarded, highly renowned producer who has nailed the quintessential high-mineral, super-rich volcanic terroir of the Poços de Caldas with their new Santa Izabel offering. You have never tasted a coffee like this before! This is not a coffee to be trifled with, sit down and savor every sip.

Veneza
The "sleeper" coffee produced as a base coffee for coffee shop house blends and espressos, the favorable climate last season created an out-sized performance for what was intended to be a modest coffee. Veneza is an affordable trip to volcano coffee country, with a balanced profile that works hot or cold.

We hope you enjoy our Brazil Tour of four of the best coffees produced in Brazil this year. We will be featuring 4-ounce sample giveaways in our monthly emails (go to the Contact Page to sign up to receive these mailings for Preferred Customers), and running special prices on these roasted and green coffees all summer. Enjoy!

NEW - Guatemalan Antigua blend

While visiting a coffee expo in New York we made the acquaintance of people from a wonderful organization working in Guatemala to provide a market for indigenous items, including coffee, jewelry, clothes and crafts.

Antigua Highlands

They have created a select blend of coffee from three different regions, primarily Antigua, with a Bourbon Arabica base (they had us at "Bourbon"!). This coffee has all the plusses - it's certified organic, super-high-altitude, shade-grown, sun-dried, direct trade, charitable... and has amazingly rich taste. It's another Latin American coffee we have found that is so smooth and delicious that we are drinking it black or with cream because it just doesn't need to be sweetened (but it plays well with sugar if you want!).

We are roasting this coffee a little lighter than our standard Full City, it's a bona fide Medium Roast. It's also available green (unroasted) and is a great coffee for a beginning home roaster because it is very forgiving and has several optimal roast points. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do! Read more here.

Bach Coffee - new from Vietnam

We are excited to bring new brands from Vietnam to our offerings. While nobody can argue that Trung Nguyen corners the market with their wonderful Creative Coffee series of coffees, they specialize in vacuum-packed, nitrogen-flushed ground coffees that stay super fresh in their packages, but they refuse to export whole bean to us directly. They simply don't believe whole bean is "necessary", and there is no consumer market for it in Asia. So we have to buy our whole bean from them through our agent in the coffee shop distribution channel in Vietnam. That is not working out very well for us, and there is a cost differential because of the extra transactions involved.

Enter a new generation of fresh coffee companies from Vietnam. The first we will be featuring is Bach Coffee. (No, it's not named after the composer, but a region in Vietnam). They are proud to offer whole bean coffees and are very cooperative to work with. To distinguish themselves, they have adopted a more Western-style air roasting, solving two of the problems we have with the Trung Nguyen whole bean.

Trung Nguyen whole bean is "wet-roasted", meaning they apply what they call "butter oil" and a little sugar to the roasting pans, because it is needed to make the beans roll properly as they tumble and roast. It also creates the distinctive Vietnamese buttery taste. Oddly enough, they often use lecithin or oil that is not butter-based, but it is still referred to as butter roast. Now, that causes two issues. Vegans can't drink this coffee because it might have butter in it, and the beans wind up being stickier in most grinders and can cause clogging issues. We do get a number of calls on that.

Bach beans are drier and will work in any grinder and are suitable for vegans.

But we drink coffee for taste. How good are the Bach coffees? When you pour out the beans from a Bach bag, the first thing you notice is how 100% sound and ripe that are. While a certain percentage of less-than-ripe beans do not ruin the taste of a cup (contrary to a highly publicized myth), 100% ripe beans does make a difference. In general, people have been amazed at how good the Bach coffees are. My personal favorite is the Moc 1, their 100% high-altitude Robusta. This is Vietnamese Robusta at its best, the type of Robusta Italian coffee companies have been secretly sourcing for their top espressos for decades.

Arabica fans will enjoy the multi-source Arabica (Moc 2) that has Bourbon Arabica sourced from Buon Me Thuot and high-altitude Laotian farms.

We invite you to try the new Bach coffees and we have obtained a limited number of small 100-gram "trial-size" bags so you can sample more of them without breaking the bank. Bach coffees are numbered 1, 2 and 3, but we call them simply Robusta (100%), Arabica (100%), and Arabica/Robusta Blend (50/50). Amazingly delicious!

Coffee from... Myanmar?

Yes, there is an awful lot of coffee in Brazil... and in Myanmar (Burma) too!

In anticipation of sanctions being lifted on exports from Myanmar, we have been sampling a new source of coffee from a company that is trying to work with promising producers who need a hand up to upgrade their equipment and find new markets for their coffee.

This Myanmar blend of Bourbon and Typica Arabicas is dry-process and sun ripened. The green beans came in looking beautiful... very clean and few defects. It roasted evenly, puffed to an impressive roasted bean size, and has its own unique flavor profile that is a nice cross bewteen Indonesia-style Arabicas and Vietnamese Bourbon style of Arabica.

We've been loving it as a single-source blended Arabica (grown on one farm cooperative) or pairing it with some Dalat peaberry Robusta for a very broad flavor profile that seems to appeal to everybody. It's been my go-to coffee or blend (I like to play with beans) for the last couple of weeks but I have decided to lay off it for a bit so that we can have enough of the 25-kilo test run to go around for such time until Hillary decides to let Myanmar residents begin to create their own wealth by exporting. Right now the State Department is allowing US businesses to go in and rip-off (I mean purchase) Myanmar assets and land but we won't allow the individuals or small businesses there to generate income from exporting to the USA. Politics is so wonderful....

I spoke today with SE Asia clothing importers who have a wonderful shop in Rockport MA who tell me that they could "see the progress day by day" when they were in Myanmar recently, the effect of the lifting of sanctions by European and other countries. This most disadvantaged country has great prospects for an improved standard of living soon. Hopefully we will resolve the issues with the ruling military government for the benefit of all, including those of us who want to drink some delicious Myanmar coffee.

As always, we buy direct from the producers, and we pay the asking price. This form of direct trade is far better than buying through the commodities market or Fair Trade, which only assists certain producers to get a somewhat higher market price. Direct trade often puts 200% as much money directly into the hands of the coffee farmers, and we are proud to be Direct Trade buyers.

We have made 4-ounce packages available of this limited 25-kilo trial at Myanmar Coffee (we've limited sales to one per customer for the time being). We would very much appreciate YOUR comments on this Myanmar coffee, and it will help us know what volume to bring in when exports are enabled again.

Sumatra Lintong is in!

We have just received three 60-kilo bags of Sumatra Lintong from the same supplier as our Sumatra Kopi Luwak. This is an incredible coffee, with all the characteristics we search for and love: Heirloom stock, long history, unique regional practices, and rich, full-bodied taste. We have been disappointed by some Sumatra coffees we have sampled over the years, but we fell in love with the Lintong immediately. We put it on the July email circular and had to roast it three times to meet the orders! We hope everybody loves it as much as we do.

We will have it up on the main site soon, after the initial rush is over.