Dan Markham

What I’m Drinking Now: The Four Barrel Memory Test Edition

Four Barrel’s né Stumptown’s Panama Duncan (on flickr)

I have three bags of beans awaiting review. Backed up, their flavors and aromas slowly fading from my palette, they await their turn in the spotlight here at danmarkham.net. in this post, I intend to take care of them all at one fell swoop. My other life has been calling, lately, so It’s been some time since I bought, let alone sampled, any of these coffees (I have since moved on to others and I hope to give my current store of beans their due sooner rather than later). You, dear reader, are going to have to have some faith in my taste memory — and, to be honest, so am I — especially for the first bag, less so for the other two. But let’s see what we can do.

It’s a bit of a Four Barrel love affair here, I admit, but it’s also a love of Stumptown Coffee Roasters, in Portland, OR and an appreciation of the fact that Four Barrel’s carrying Stumptown’s beans, for the time being, affords anyone, with access to the new kid on the Mission café block, an outstanding oppurtunity to sample an incrediblly wide variety of Stumptown’s coffee, sans shipping charges or the cost of a plane ticket with the destination PDX. I look forward to the day I am able to sample something that comes directly from the back of the house at Four Barrel but, until then, easy access to the products of a seminal west coast roaster is no bad thing.

So, here we go, in descending chronological order …

Guatamela, Finca El Inherto, Bourbon Varietal

Like I said above, this coffee is going to take a bit more heavy lifting, on my brain’s part, to remember anything specific — especially since I see no reference to it on Stumptown’s site any longer — but the general gist of it is this: this is a nice, solid coffee. It has a bit of the dusty spiciness that I remember getting in other Guatamalans with good sweetness and a mellow dose of acidity. It’s not a coffee that is going to hit you over the head with any type of unusually bold flavor but it’s not going to throw you any curve balls either so I suppose it’s all in the way you look at it.

Panama Duncan

Our next contestant hails from the home of the great Panama Canal, a country known as … well … Panama. I’ve reviewed a Panama before — Ritual’s Panama Boquete, Finca Berlina – and, whatta ya know, there is a bit of the same savory character found in that coffee, right here. This time, though, it was not as pronounced. The acidity was, let’s see, if memory serves, more bright than the guatemala mentioned above, with a more medium bodied feel.

Ethiopia Mordecafe

I intended to pick up a bag of Colombian. I wanted to compare and contrast it with the Guatamala, the memory of which, at the time, was definitely fresher. No luck, though, as it’s shelf was bare on the day I entered. Instead, I was drawn to this particular African coffee for the lack, in it’s description, of any overarching berry flavors. I love a nice, berry sweet Ethiopian as much as the next brown-blooded coffee drinker but it seems, these days, that is all you get: a dry-processed Ethiopian bursting with berries. Wonderful, but I thought it was time to try something different (ironic, that an Ethiopian without berry flavors is what could be considered different, these days).

There was a lot of talk, on the description, of sugar and candied lemon peel that made it sound as if there was going to be a veritable symphony of sweet and citrus but I thought it was all a bit more subdued than that. The flavor that was put forth on the description that did, in fact, reveal itself to me, was that of Oolong tea. This was, probably, the most unique aspect of this coffee, quite possibly making it the most unique of the three in this review and elevating it to something quite unusual with respect to the entire portfolio of beans that I’ve tried. Very nice and, as stated above, a welcome change of pace from the surfeit of Ethiopian berry-bombs out there today.

Dat’s Dat

So, there you go. Three coffees in one post. It’s a precedent setting event here. There are, of course, many more offerings to be had. At some point I hope to have given them all a little bit of my time.

Is Four Barrel going to begin roasting soon?

I was in Four Barrel Coffee today and witnessed what, I believe, may be the last piece of the roasting operation puzzle for them. There was a monolithic oriented strand board box sitting smack dab in the middle of the front of the house as I walked in. Not long after, a fork-lift (yes, a fork-lift) came rumbling through the (already open, of course) front doors. The owner of the joint was climbing on and around both the forklift and mystery box like Spider Man making sure nothing mussed up his new café’s decor as the box was pulled out the front door. It was the tightest of fits.

When asked about the contents of the, now absent mystery monolith, I was told it was the “after burner” for the roaster. The after burner incinerates all the fine particulate matter thrown off during the roasting process so that it doesn’t make a surprise, sudden toasty mess of one’s roasting operation at a later date.

The missing piece? I’m not sure but, the practice of repackaging all of those (admittedly tasty) Stumptown beans I witnessed a couple employees partaking in today? I’ll bet you it’s days are numbered. Here’s hoping 4B adds another tasty coffee roaster choice to the mix.

Niyarita (on flickr)

Honestly. Before I picked up this bag, I truly meant to go somewhere else. After all, it seems all anyone ever reads here - at least where it concerns coffee - is “Blue Bottle, Blue Bottle, Blue Bottle“. Broken record. So Sorry.

Actually, I intended to make my way over to the new kid in town The Mission - Four Barrel, just recently out of their alley spot - if, for no other reason, than to take advantage of the opportunity to pick up a bag of beans selected and roasted by those native sons of the Northwest - Stumptown - without having to pay shipping costs (cheap bastard, I know and, yeah, for the moment, Four Barrel is, indeed, using Stumptown beans).

But, here we are again, looking at a picture of a bag from Blue Bottle and, as is usual, they are unique and incredibly tasty. Nayarita is from Mexico is a dry processed bean (unusual for a South/Central American) and so keeps a wonderful berry flavor and aroma that is usually only found in African beans. At the same time there is the same earthiness that I have found in the only other Mexican I’ve tasted - Taylor Made’s Zaragoza - as well as the same mellow acidity. So, a smooth, subtly earthy cup accented by the delicate berry flavor brought on by the dry processing.

This is, after all, one of the things I love about Blue Bottle: you are not likely to find this on their site. You have to go into the store where — ta-da! — you are presented with a wonderful surprise. Something you have never had before and might not ever have again. Another stellar cup of coffee from BB.

But, I promise, I will pick another roaster next time … really.

Wallenford Estate JBM (on flickr)

What I’m Drinking Now: Blue Bottle’s Wallenford Estate, Jamaica Blue Mountain.

How can a coffee be so carmelly sweet and rich, so smooth, so mellow with one of the most pleasurably lingering finishes I have yet experienced? Could it be because it cost me $21 for a half pound?

Not that price correlates with flavor as a rule. Sometimes things are expensive simply as a reult of limited supply. Both Jamaica Blue Mountain and Kona are excellent examples of this. Both can only be authentically procured from extremely limited geographical confines so supplies are low and prices are high.

This does not mean that everything with the name Kona or Jamaica Blue Mountain should be considered exemplary in terms of quality. As price and flavor lack correlation so does location and quality. Coffee is an agricultural product and one should not make the mistake of failing to factor in the skill of the farmer and/or the quality of the land on which an agricultural product is grown in considering it’s quality.

Blue Bottle coffee in San Francisco offered up a batch of Jamaica Blue Mountain. It’s the largest single amount of money I have ever spent on a bag of coffee beans and I felt, ever so slightly, like an elitist chump throwing down that kind of money for a half pound. But I put my faith in the talents and skills of whomever it is that is in charge of bean selection at Blue Bottle and I was not let down. The rumpled, rapidly emptying bag tells the story. This is good coffee.

Panama Boquete, Finca Berlina from Ritual

What I’m drinking now: What I was drinking then (yes, this baby is long gone now, french pressed into oblivion): Panama Boquete, Finca Berlina

I have a friend who nailed it: “savory”. That’s opposed to sweet. I say “brothy”. Does this sound like the description of a coffee you might want to drink? Well, If it doesn’t, it should. This was a fascinating coffee. Lively, spicy, rich plus all of the above. I really have never tasted anything like it.

Bella Donovan

What I’m drinking now: Bella Donovan.

From Blue Bottle, natch. “A classic moka-java blend”, indeed: smooth like one, floral/earthy like one. A classic.

Blue Bottle’s Purosa PNG

What I’m drinking now. This is one of my favorite coffees. Ever.

Of all the elegant, intensly flavorful beans Blue Bottle offers, I find the Purosa PNG to be the most elegant, most flavorful of them all. Sweet, earthy, full bodied, so well balanced it could pass as a master blender’s crowning achievement. But this is no blend; just single origin perfection.

McDonalds is now Starbucks’ main competitor and Starbucks has nobody to blame but themselves. By opening up so many stores and introducing so many “frou-frou” drinks that they commodified the coffee buying experience, Starbucks gutted the value proposition of buying an espresso drink at their stores and, in so doing, created a monster in their own competitive space by inviting the king of commodified food service operaters - McDonalds - into the business of selling coffee. Starbucks has gone for the big middle ground and given McDonalds a new lease on life in becoming the scrappy underdog in the battle for the palettes of middle-america. Good job, Starbucks.

The wonderful thing about all of this is that Starbucks has made plenty of room for the so called “third wave” of coffee to gain a foothold in the marketplace. The commodification process Starbucks has undergone has allowed other shops to compete on the quality of their product. While Starbucks’ focus in making you an espresso drink is to get it in your hands as fast as they can, others are focussing on making sure that the beverage you are holding in your hand is of a certain quality: that the money you just shelled out is reflected in the integrity of the drink. They are bringing the craft back to the  espresso bar. Good job, Starbucks.

In honor of the announcement that Starbucks will be closing 600 stores nationwide, a list of posts on Starbucks here at Dan Markham dot net.