March 2009

  1. Rainforest Alliance cupping

    03/27/09 - cupping

    Just finished three days of cupping of Rainforest Alliance Coffees.

    85 coffees,
    five cups of each coffee
    three days
    a LOT of coffee. A lot of cupping.

    Some exceptional and very nice coffees. Guatemala stole the day for sure. Every Guatemala coffee was very good. One was our second favorite coffee of the whole event. A Santa Isabel Pachup in San Marcos. Awesome coffee!

    The Panama Esmerelda was superlative and sexy floral. We’re gonna have to get some of their coffee soon…

    The El Salvadors were pretty nice and solid. Los Mercedes was the best. (our friends)

    THere were also some pretty rank and disgusting coffees. Two that made me gag.

    Overall moderately OK coffees with a very tiny number of sweet sexy coffees.

    Great people, great times. Got to hang out with the Intelligentsia crew, hit the cafe, tour their roast works and drink wine and grass fed hot dogs at night.

    LA brought it together. Thanks gang.

  2. Punk Rock Thursday

    03/12/09 - CAFE

    Today is officially Punk Rock Thursday.

    Drink a punk rock.

    20 ounce French pres of the Guatemala Edlyna from Edwin Martinez made with 20 shots of the same Edlyna as espreso instead of water. brew. plunge. punk rock all day long.

    today only.

    bring out your inner rocker.

  3. SF Chronicle article

    03/12/09 - press

    San Francisco Chronicle front page article today doing a love affair with coffee. Some sweet and interesting history and a love tickle for many of teh kick ass Bay Area coffee peeps. Ritual, Four Barrel and Blue Bottle got some well deserved love.

    an excerpt: “New wave roasters

    Barefoot Coffee: Founder Andy Newbom and his staff travel “to origin” - the industry term for coffee-growing regions - several times a year to taste, order and discover new coffees. While most coffees designated “single origin” come from a particular region or a mill, Barefoot pays a premium to farmers to grow and handle the coffee in particular ways.

    The company has a new roasting and barista training facility in San Jose and a punk-rock Santa Clara cafe in an unlikely strip mall setting. There, coffee geeks in training can take free classes on brewing, tasting and grinding.

    Barefoot Coffee, 5237 Stevens Creek Blvd., Santa Clara; (408) 248-4500 or barefootcoffeeroasters.com. The coffee is also served at Epicenter Cafe and Aziza, both in San Francisco. The beans are sold at some Whole Foods.”

    Not sure what the hell a punk-rock cafe is but the coffee sure is sweet!

    Read the whole article here.

  4. Tablon 12-Aconcagua

    03/09/09 - COFFEE

    CoffeeReview reviewed Bay Area Coffee Roasters in March 2009 A few Barefoot coffees got some love.

    Barefoot Coffee Roasters ~ El Salvador Aconcagua Cup of Excellence Pacamara

    *Santa Clara, California
    Reviewed: March 2009*

    Overall Rating:

    91 points

    *Aroma: 7
    Acidity: 8
    Body: 8
    Flavor: 9
    Aftertaste: 8
    Roast (Agtron): Medium (55/66)*

    Origin: Ahuachapan Department, El Salvador.

    Notes: A prize winner in the 2008 El Salvador Cup of Excellence competition, where as a green (unroasted) coffee it placed twelfth out of hundreds of entries, attracting a score of 86.5 from an international jury. Grower Tom Hawk produced this coffee entirely from trees of the Pacamara variety. Pacamara, a cross between the giant-beaned Maragogipe variety and Pacas, a selection of the heirloom Bourbon, has proven to produce exceptional coffee on many El Salvador farms. Barefoot Coffee Roasters is an award-winning and widely recognized small-batch roasting company that describes itself as “a happy little cafe and roastery in the heart of Silicon Valley.” Visit www.barefootcoffeeroasters.com for more information.

    Blind Assessment: Improves as it moves along. The aroma is delicate, almost too delicate, with only slight hints of chocolate and flowers. Picks up energy in the cup: soft but vibrant acidity, silky mouthfeel. The dark chocolate and night flowers retain their delicacy but turn distinct and rich, carrying into a long, sweet-toned finish.

    Who should drink it: Patient lovers of subtlety.

    Read more..

  5. Dominion Vilones-Ethiopia, Scored a 92

    03/09/09 - COFFEE

    CoffeeReview.com reviewed Bay Area Coffee Roasters in March 2009

    Barefoot had a few coffees that got some love.

    Barefoot Coffee Roasters ~ Ethiopia Yirgacheffe Dominion Trading

    Santa Clara, California
    Reviewed: March 2009

    Overall Rating:

    92 points

    *Aroma: 9
    Acidity: 8
    Body: 8
    Flavor: 9 Aftertaste: 8
    Roast (Agtron): Medium-Light (57/77)*

    Origin: Yirgacheffe growing region, Sidama Province, southern Ethiopia.

    Notes: Yirgacheffe is a coffee region in southern Ethiopia that produces intensely floral- and fruit-toned coffees from traditional varieties of Arabica long grown in the region. Yirgacheffe coffees like this one, processed by the wet or washed method (fruit skin and pulp is removed before drying), express floral and citrus notes with particular intensity. Certified organically grown. Barefoot Coffee Roasters is an award-winning small-batch roasting company that describes itself as “a happy little cafe and roastery in the heart of Silicon Valley.” Visit www.barefootcoffeeroasters.com for more information.

    Blind Assessment: Sweet tangerine and jasmine aroma, balanced acidity and a soft, smooth mouthfeel. Tangerine and flowers carry into the cup along with notes of berries, apricot and mandarin. Finishes cleanly with soft fruit notes continuing in the long.

    Who should drink it: Those who like their citrus sweet.

    Read more..

  6. Bay Area Coffee Review

    03/09/09 -

    Kenneth Davids of CoffeeReview.com just finished a nice roundup of Bay Area coffee roasters.

    Read up on it here

    **March 2009 San Francisco Bay Area Coffees: Dark and Beyond by Kenneth Davids; reviews by Kenneth Davids and Ted Stachura**

    Sorry, Seattle and all of those other places, but the American specialty coffee movement started in the San Francisco Bay Area. Of course small artisan coffee roasting companies were long in business before Alfred Peet opened his famous Vine Street store in Berkeley in 1966. Small, roaster-in-the-back-of-the-store coffee companies surviving from the early part of the 20th century doubtless helped provide Alfred his model: Gillies Coffee in Brooklyn, Swing Coffee in Washington DC, and, above all, Freed, Teller & Freed in San Francisco, where Alfred apparently worked for a short period before starting his Vine Street shop. Nevertheless, the little antique Royal roaster behind the counter, the crooked pipe rising to the high ceiling, the glass-fronted bins and the dark-stained pine counters of Alfred Peet’s first store proved to be particularly inspiring to a generation of entrepreneurs who together took coffee back to the basics and recreated it as an artisan beverage.

    Since that first surge of innovation in Bay Area specialty coffee, however, the Bay Area has not exactly vegetated, but certainly the edge of innovation in specialty coffee has gone off to do its cutting elsewhere.

    The Dark Roasting Tradition

    Perhaps the reason for this uncharacteristically conservative history is the Bay Area’s loyalty to the very tradition pioneered by Peet’s Coffee. Amateur coffee historians sometimes debate whether Alfred Peet personally created the very dark, “deep” style of coffee roasting associated with his name (I certainly recall that he did), or whether the style was something the company crystallized later, but there is little doubt that the habit of dark roasting everything on the coffee menu from Brazil to Kenya started with Peet’s and expanded to the rest of the country via Starbucks and other imitators. And in the San Francisco area, the darker-roasting style completely triumphed, to the point that fifteen years ago it was almost impossible to buy a medium-roasted coffee in fresh, whole-bean form anywhere in the Bay Area.

    Hence arguably the most significant development in American specialty coffee over the past ten years, the rediscovery of the pleasures of medium roasting and its capacity to foreground the distinctive individuality of refined small lots of green coffee, largely happened elsewhere: in the Northeast, in the Middle West, in the Mountain States, in Portland, Oregon, even in the Los Angeles area.

    Fifty San Francisco Bay Area Coffees

    What’s happening now? Has the San Francisco Bay Area’s loyalty to its tradition of dark-roasted coffee held off the new wave of specialty and its taste for lighter-roasted micro-lots, or have the light-roasters significantly infiltrated the bastion of the oily bean?

    We cup-tested over fifty retail-roasted coffees from Bay Area roasters. We included a handful of the older companies that are institutions in the Bay Area, some newcomers that clearly represent the latest wave of specialty coffee, and other companies that fall somewhere between. However, we by no means sourced coffees from every specialty company in the Bay Area. Many companies declined or ignored our invitation to participate. In a couple of cases we felt that we had to have samples of a company’s coffees owing to that company’s visibility in the Bay Area community, so we simply went to the store and bought some coffee based on the recommendation of the counterperson (“What’s good today?”).

    The Record for the Medium-Roasters

    The highest rated coffees were produced by two categories of company.

    Predictably, perhaps, representatives of the new wave of medium-roasting, micro-lot-buying companies did well. They included Barefoot Coffee Roasters, founded in 2003 by a youthful Andy Newbom in Santa Clara south of San Francisco, and probably the first of the new-style roasters to establish roots in the Bay Area; Ritual Coffee, a lighter-roasting company that almost immediately attracted media attention after its opening in 2005 by Eileen Hassi and Jeremy Tooker; and Four-Barrel, another San Francisco cafe/roastery recently opened by Tooker in partnership with Duane Sorenson of Portland’s Stumptown Roasters, one of the country’s earlier and leading roasters in the new tradition. We rated all of the coffees submitted by Barefoot 90 or better; both Ritual’s and Four-Barrel’s ratings for three samples ranged from 87 to a high of 92.

    There is no mystery in regard to why the best of these coffees excelled. They represented exceptionally distinguished, farm-specific lots of coffees whose distinctive character was developed by a sensitive medium-roast that foregrounded the character of the green coffee rather than the impact of the roast.

    Surprises from Two Espresso-First Roasters

    Read More…