While in Cambridge, I went to Peet’s Coffee, and purchased 3 offerings:
Aged Sumatra
A very rich coffee with a slight hint of a tropical wood flavor, a concentrated dried fruit sweetness, herbal notes, and ample body.
Good aged coffees are very hard to find, due to the lengthy aging process and the fact that coffee exporters usually want to convert their coffee to cash as soon as possible. But there are a few who are willing to wait, knowing that the fine aged coffee can be worth quite a bit more. The challenge is to find the coffee that was good enough in the first place to become the aged coffee worthy of Peet’s customers.
Aging must take place in a tropical environment, where beans take on moisture at the height of the monsoon season, and give it back during the drier season, without ever drying completely. This process deepens the flavor and makes it mellower, while accentuating certain taste components over others.
Sulawesi-Kalosi
A rare coffee with unusual depth and complexity. Rich, full body with a hint of nutty earthiness.
Sulawesi is another island in the Indonesian archipelago. The best quality coffees from Sulawesi are grown and processed in the area called Torajaland, near the upcountry town of Rantepao. The Toraja people have an interesting cultural history that carries over to their methods of producing coffee in very traditional ways. The coffee trees are grown on small plots around the villagers’ houses, and the entire family takes part in the picking and processing. We’ve even seen coffee trees growing on the edges of the rice paddies that provide the diet staple. Coffee is a cash crop that supplements the family income.
There is something about these age-old traditional methods that give Sulawesi Kalosi coffee its unique flavor. It exhibits a rich, full body; moderate, well-balanced acidity; and a multidimensional aromatic character with prominent herbal, nutty, and pleasantly sweet woody notes. This is a rare coffee and somewhat expensive, but it is one of the finest in the world.
Arabian Mocha Sanani
Distinctive, pungent, winy flavor; full-bodied and exceedingly complex aromatic character.
Grown in Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula, these small, rounded beans are irregular in form, size, and color. Despite this abnormality (or perhaps because of it), they yield one of the finest cups of coffee on Earth. Arabian Mocha Sanani has a distinctive, pungent, winy flavor that is very full-bodied and that is accompanied by an exceedingly complex aromatic character. This coffee is excellent either straight or blended, as in the classic blend with Java. Its singular flavor can complement nearly any other coffee.
The mocha variety of coffee grows on barely cultivated land on low bushes that develop under very dry conditions. When the majority of coffee cherries are ripe, the farmers pick all the cherries at once and spread them out to dry on hardened earth patios. The dried cherries are passed through millstones to remove the hulls and to release the two coffee beans inside.
This rather primitive method of producing coffee goes back centuries and accounts for the classic flavor that this wonderful coffee displays. It’s worth noting that this coffee is grown organically. It is not something the farmers set out to do, but there is probably no more primitive coffee-growing area on Earth. The region is very remote, and the dried coffee must be carried out of the steep valleys by donkeys.
