Texas Coffee Features:__________

The purpose of Texas Coffee is to build a community within our state.

One sure-fire way to do that is to let people know your business exists. It makes it easier to build a relationship when your customer niche actually knows who you are, or that you even exist.

TXCP is currently a non-profit venture. That having been said, if you would like to feature your business on TXCP, shoot us an email telling us who you are, what you do, and where you are located. The more information, the better.

This is a chance to get some free advertising for the business, and a chance for Coffee lovers in TX to find out where to go to get what they need.

New Texas Coffee People forum

Look to the right on the side-bar, and you will see the category for the TXCP Forum, with the words “Community Communication” linked to our externally hosted proboards forum.

The hardest part about building a community in TX is the severe lack of communication we all have with each other.

I think communication is a vital part of learning from each other, communicating with each other, and acting as a sort of support group for frustrations, problems, and dilemmas that others in our region may have already experienced.

All that having been said, It, like this blog, is a constant work in progress. Even still, it is fully functional and a useful tool to help grow the relationships within the specialty coffee industry in Texas.

So please take the time to register, and post a quick introduction to who you are, how you got into coffee, or whatever you see fit to represent who you are to the rest of us.

The SCRBC is coming soon… only 5 months away! This is the first one for our region, so I hope to see a good turnout.

Hope to see you on the boards.

The blog is still the primary feature, but communication definitely helps.

huehue to go

so in just another day i’ll be off to guatemala and the highlands of huehuetenango for two weeks to visit edwin martinez’ finca vista hermosa. not to brag or anything, but it is going to be one slammin’ trip. some of you may remember edwin from our november barista jam at ruta maya here in san antonio. edwin has become more than a professional colleague. i feel privileged to call him a friend and i have immense respect for the things he and his family are doing with coffee of course, but also in being an amazing part of their community. edwin says that while it’s not uncommon for many coffee plantations in their area to have to search for labor during the critical harvest season (going on now in guatemala), at fvh they have workers lining up to help. why? basically, because they care.

now, you can talk all you want about fair trade this and certified that; but when you’re doing the stuff–really doing good and right by your workers as they are at fvh–then you don’t need some third party bureacracy to stamp a label on your coffee just so americans can feel good about themselves. edwin, his family and all the workers who are associated with fvh have had a great thing going down there for three generations and i cannot wait to experience it firsthand and to pay my respects and say thank you to the people who surely spend blood, sweat and tears to care for the coffee they produce. our trip will be all about learning as much as we, the last people in the coffee chain, can about the first people in the coffee chain.

i will be doing my best to blog regularly about the trip here and/or at my other coffee blog.

when i return there will definitely be plenty of things to share with you about some projects and experiments we began and conducted there. very, very cool stuff that’s out there on the bleeding edge of the specialty super-premium coffee movement. won’t get into it all here and now, but some of the stuff the projects include are: freezers, g.p.s. equipment, tons of hiking, tons of note taking, at least one article (hopefully two) in one or another of our beloved trade zines and tons and tons of pictures.

i’m humbled and honored to have such a great opportunity, and i’m hyper proud to plant the proverbial texas flag in the midst of all this hoopla. i don’t consider myself to be anything special in all of this. i’m just glad to have the chance to be there and i hope this will be another small stone in the coffee edifice we’re building here in the lone star state.

and oh yeah, i want to put out there before i go that i’ve really been thinking long and often about the next texas barista jam. something magnanimous. something difficult and challenging and inspiring. something never before seen in texas. i’m thinking late march or early april. who’s down?

catch y’all soon.

Coffee Offerings

I am under the impression that MOST brewed coffee offered in TX establishments is served from an airpot or coffee vat.

I have seen a couple of exceptions, but those are far from the norm.   I have never seen a French Press offered aside from Starbucks.

Rarely do I ever seen single origins with coops, farms, etc.. in plain sight.  I do find that I see a LOT of flavored coffee.  I hate flavored coffee.  Not because of what it is so much as customer education becomes nearly impossible when all they are interested in is the day’s flavored coffee offering.

As of two months ago, there wasn’t a Clover in the state.  I doubt that there is one now, but does anyone have plans to incorporate the Clover system into their coffee program?

Do you sell more blends or single origins?  Do you offer flavored coffee?  If so, why?

How does the popularity of Americanos rate to brewed coffee?  Is there a price difference between them?

Is your coffee by the cup, bottomless, or something in between?  Why?

Lots of questions.  Consider this a very VERY informal servey for the “state of the coffee culture” in Texas.

If you are a roaster, what do you find your clients buying more of?

Honduras

I’m not the only roaster in Texas to be offering a Honduras coffee. But maybe I’m one of the most excited. I just got a small supply of Honduras Finca Las Canas in this week and yesterday I was sample roasting for cupping and production roasts. This morning I cupped them out together: the light “sample” roast (just after first pop); the midling level roast, where the marbling on the beans is still very much evident; and what I would term the “full city” roast, where the marbling is almost all smoothed out and we’re awaiting the onset of second crack. It’s rare that I’ll roast anything too much into second crack, though if I feel the coffee calls for it I will certainly get myself into a rolling second before dropping the beans. I’m no chemist, but the long and short of it, as I understand it, is that all that coffee “goodness” is rolled up inside the bean and when you hit pyrolisis all of that great flavor, those sugar compounds and protein chains, break down and simplify as they carbonize. (Yes, carbon, as in charcoal.) And, though it lends an attractive, oily sheen on the outside of the beans, it loses its nuance, bright pop and fruitiness and you begin to taste the roast and not the bean, the fruit of the coffee tree.

Anyways, my point was that one has to be careful in roasting so as not to overwhelm the delicate characteristics of a particular bean from a particular geography. As a roaster I don’t want to impose my will on the bean so much as I want to the bean to tell me its own story. And that is why when I receive a shipment of new coffee I roast it to those three different levels. I want that coffee’s story to unfold to me so I can retell it over and again to my customers.

Oh yes, what did I find? Well, honestly I think the coffee needs to rest and mature for another day or so before I can get a good reading. Sometimes 24 hours is fine for cupping. Sometimes, as in this case, the coffee still feels a bit unfinished, which is a sign that it needs to hang out a bit more and degass.

But I will say that the initial signs are definitely promising. When I first sampled this coffee a couple months ago I was pleasantly surprised by its overwhelming sweet tartness. It was almost over the top with those bready fruits: bananas, dried papaya, tamarind. The beans I just roasted kept much of that intact; but this time I’m getting a definite lemon zing streak and bright acidity (that I think will abate and mellow by tomorrow into more of the earlier sample roasts from a couple months ago).

I should point out here that this coffee has an interesting back story. It is represented in the U.S. by Edwin Martinez of Guatemala’s Finca Vista Hermosa, whose story is briefly outlined in the July/August issue of Roast Magazine.

More later on this interesting coffee.