Catalyst Foundation

As many of our customers know, we support an organization that works to provide real guidance and career opportunities for at-risk children in Vietnam to help combat human trafficking. If this is an issue that is near and dear to your heart, you might want to support their new drive for funds at this URL. You can donate any amount, even $1.

They are partnering with OneVietnam, a new fundraising group that works to help a number of Vietnamese causes.

We will also be offering some branded merchandise and coffee packages for sale through the Holiday Season which have a built-in donation to this good cause. Thank you!

Organic Philippine Robusta

One of our favorite coffees over the last few years is the humble yet elegant Bantai Robusta.

Julia Campbell Park

With a fascinating story that spans several years of effort by Forest Blends and friends to help establish a Memorial Park for Julia Campbell (former Peace Corps worker), a civet preserve, and many working acres of cultivated, organic high-altitude, shade-grown Philippine Robusta, this is a coffee that is so superb that when we first handled some of the green, unripe beans, they looked to me like a Hollywood prop. They were just too perfect and sweet-smelling to be real!

This coffee is the darling of our Fall/Winter Brewology Seminars, in which we feature the Kopi Luwak (Civet) version of the coffee as not only a superb example of Kopi Luwak but a prime example of just how wonderful Robusta can be when it is grown under the same prime conditions usually reserved for Arabicas like Kona and Blue Mountain.

Grown on the volcanic soil of Asipulo, and meticulously dried and handled by indigenous residents of the area, the coffee provides a livelihood for hundreds of people who have been completely "underserved" by the Philippine government and who would otherwise lack much opportunity to provide for their families.

We also serve the original (non-civet) Bantai Robusta as our example of perfect Robusta coffee in the Summer Iced Coffee seminar. In our final seminar of the season, it was not surprising to us that 100% of attendees chose the Bantai Robusta as their take-home coffee.

Robusta appeals to the back of the palate, and is low in acid and high in body and crema. It has compelling recall and persistence. It is a huge surprise to people who have been vaguely dissatisfied with all coffee recently and discover that they, like half of the people in the world, actually have a "Robusta" palate and might never really be happy with an Arabica, particularly if that Arabica is from the Typica side and not the Bourbon side, which strays to the middle of the palate more.

If you love Vietnamese coffee, chances are you are not a front-palate Arabica Typica person. And you just might discover your new favorite coffee by trying the Bantai organic, high-altitude, shade-grown Robusta. And every purchase really does put sandals on a child's feet or a book in a fledgling library for hungry young readers. It's a gourmet cheap thrill with the power to do a lot of good!.

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.

Current coffee crop status

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.

Monsanto wants to own our future food supply

Here is a disturbing story about how Monsanto is trying to intimidate family farmers and organic farmers in the USA which involves, oddly enough, the company suing these farmers if and when seed that blows from Monsanto-seeded farms contaminates the organic farmer's planting beds and these plants grow up and are harvested.

One of the biggest problems we face in our challenge to help preserve the heirloom coffee genome around the world is agribusiness pushing GMO and hybrid coffees onto farmers, while buyers essentially blackmail farmers that they will not buy if the farmers don't convert to higher-yield but poorer-tasting coffees.

http://www.nationofchange.org/300000-organic-farmers-sue-monsanto-federal-court-decision-march-31st-go-trial-1329059467

It does not help the cause of organic and heritage farming when the current government administrations signs agreements allowing the free spread of GMO seed stock. It does always amaze us here at Heirloom Coffee when a supposed Democratic administration sides with big business over small farmers and the safety of the food supply...

Like invasive fish species in our rivers and boa constrictors invading the Everglades, new species of plants can overtake the old ones unintentionally and cause contamination in the continuous passing-down of critical food genes, effectively removing them from our future food supply forever. In a recession as bad as the current one, we need to look at anything that might create jobs and increase yields of exports, etc., but not at the risk of creating a monolithic gene structure of our food supply that could be at risk for very specific parasites or diseases down the line, wherein we could see something like the great coffee blight of 1870, which wiped out 90% of the world supply of coffee.

Losing 90% of the world supply of coffee to a new blight could ruin a lot of people's whole day!

It's been a busy Fall

Things are finally settling down after the holidays... we hope all our customers had a great holiday season!

Here is an update on new coffees and specials:

In 2012 we will be launching our new Home Roaster page... we will have fabulous green, unroasted beans from some of our best sources in Sumatra, Vietnam and the Philippines.

Watch for Kopi Luwak specials this week to celebrate the New Year.

We are working to bring in some new brands from Vietnam, new coffees and brands that are making waves.

We will be expanding our selection of Philippine coffees and blends. We continue to be impressed with the quality of our Philippine coffees and have asked our suppliers to bring us more. We will have a new Excelsa that we will be blending, and some other high-altitude coffees to share with you during the next three months. The harvest for the 2012 crop happens in January, so by February we hope to have some exciting new coffees.

Happy New Year!

Update October 2011

We are settled in to our new digs at 9 Jerome Street and have resumed our Brewology Seminar events.Our seminars are being successfully promoted on Groupon, Google, and other coupon companies!

The Sumatra Lintong and our own blend of Philippine Liberica and Lintong (Lenberica- ouch!) have exceeded expectations on how quickly people have been adopting these coffees. The Lintong has an amazing aroma that brings exclamations of "I want you to bottle that aroma!" We don't know if the Lintong itself is totally responsible or the really fine roasting job Mystic Coffee Roaster is doing for us on this coffee. We are running down on our initial supply of this coffee but we have reserved 10 60-kilo sacks of green from the new harvest that should be arriving in November.

Lately you may have noticed we have been out of many coffees. During the move we did not make any large orders, and we assumed that the usual summer slowdown would kick in. Instead, August and September kicked up gangbusters and orders were running 200% of the same time last year, quickly depleting our supplies of some coffees. Some people, when they see these shortages, make large orders to avoid the expected next shortage, but we want to advise everybody that we do have a lot of these coffees on order, and we also expect that in December there will be some price reductions on favorite items due to much lower shipping costs. Apparently there is a dearth of international shipping right now and rates are at almost a record low, so since high shipping costs have been driving our recent price increases, we will see improvements. So don't feel the need to stock up, the trends are improving.

We are excited to be receiving new week our first shipment of Indochine Estates prized Dalat Bourbon Arabica in green unroasted beans. We will be experimenting with special fresh roasts using these high-body, low-acid, rich-tasting Bourbon Arabica beans, so watch for some new blends and announcements.