Citizens of Coffee Nation, Unite!
How did it get to be July already. While much of the rest of the nation is baking in heat, we’re staying cool in Minnesota (until next week anyway). BUT, even next week you can stay cool with one of our summer specials. I recommend that you have these on ice, but even if your preference is hot, the dude can abide.
We also are featuring a couple of single origins in July, namely Tanzania Peaberry and Guatemala.
With its relatively close proximity to Ethiopia, and its shared border with Kenya, some of Tanzania’s population has had a long history and culture relationship with coffee, namely the Haya people, for whom the plant was not used so much as a beverage as a chewed fruit. Coffee (probably Robusta) was grown for this domestic purpose until German colonists essentially mandated that farmers grow Arabica coffee as a cash crop, spreading the plants’ reach within the country and developing the industry around Mount Kilimanjaro.
The Tanzania Peaberries are a naturally occurring mutation of the coffee seed that forms a single, small, rounder unit than the two “flat beans” that typically sit face-to-face inside a coffee cherry. While somewhere between 5–12 percent of any yield can be expected to naturally develop peaberries, some coffee varieties and origins tend to see higher occurrence of them, while in others they are uniformly sorted out of each lot in order to maintain screen-size uniformity.
The Mexico comes from the Sierra Azul cooperative, which is a certified-organic and Fair Trade organization located in the buffer zone of the El Triunfo Biosphere in Chiapas, Mexico. The smallholder members are dedicated to environmental protection as well as producing high-quality coffees organically.
Chiapas is the southernmost region of Mexico. The mountains of this region span into bordering Guatemala and much of this tropical forest is the protected Triunfo Biosphere Reserve. This area is humid and tropical, inhabited by small communities of producers who have formed cooperatives to gain stronger representation in the coffee market. These producers take pride in their land, growing coffee organically through methods passed down from generation to generation.
