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Coffee Review: |
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Site Directory General
Information COFFEE |
Before 1865, getting your hands on a decent cup of coffee was basically a do-it-yourself process. Woodstoves and open fires were how your beans got roasted, with varied and often horrific-tasting results. But shortly after the end of the U.S. civil war, John and Charles Arbuckle created a consistent, reliable product with their Arbuckles' Ariosa Coffee. Thanks to this innovation, chuckwagon cooks and homesteading wives could stock up on one-pound bags of pre-roasted beans that had been coated with an egg and sugar glaze to help maintain freshness. It didn't take long for the country to embrace the convenience of commercially roasted and ground coffees, and the art of home-roasting began to fall by the wayside. Happily, the art of home roasting has been revived by coffee enthusiasts, just as home brewers and vintners have made the creation of specialty beers and wines popular once again. But it may be that over a century of drinking commercially prepared, dark-roasted coffee beans has trained our tastebuds to expect that a bean needs to be roasted to within an inch of its life to surrender its flavor. Are you ready to teach your tastebuds some new tricks? Then meet H.T. Brown Coffee, where coffee is roasted to what the bean requires, not what history dictates. Two home-roasting hobbyists have recently banded together to form H.T. Brown Coffee. They take a different approach to roasting their beans by only roasting each type of coffee just enough to release the bean's full flavor. No more, no less. I recently sampled two of their favorite beans - an Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, and a Mexican Pluma. Here are my impressions of these two roasts.
My coffee
samples arrived in thick black, sealed and ziplocked plastic bags,
with a control valve on the side. I really love these bags because
they make using
and storing
the beans a breeze. I opened the bag of Yirgacheffe first as my curiousity
about these historic beans was overwhelming me. After all, these
are beans from the land
that invented coffee! Unlike most commercial beans, these
were lightly roasted, the color of a mild milk chocolate.
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Ethiopian
Yirgacheffe 
Mexican
Pluma