As followers of this blog know, we participated in our first coffee auction last year with Jake's Java, splitting a 300 lb shipment of Lot 5 of the esteemed Hacienda La Esmeralda (although our purchase was, as Tom at Sweet Maria's put it, "the cheap lot".)
Cheap was and is relative. It's still a stellar coffee and one that's twice as expensive as anything else we sell.
It arrived in late June. After originally trying to sell it as whole bean, getting a few bites early on from curious coffee fans, then not much else, we thought about what else we could do with it. After all, we owned 100 lbs of it and had managed to sell only about 10 lbs of retail whole bean and another 30 lbs in drip/single cup. The leaves were turning. This was not what we expected.
The challenge was that we were interested in lighter roasts that showed off the coffee's uniqueness. But that was a roast profile that didn't thrill much of our customer base. At $23 for a 12 ounce bag, they didn't want something that tasted like Earl Grey tea and lemon. They wanted a premium coffee that tasted more like coffee. Roasting darker muted the characteristics that warranted the high price in the first place. It just didn't make sense to us.
But we still had a lot of coffee to sell.
We experimented with Carl at Jake's on different roasts to see how it worked as a single origin espresso. It was just too bright and citrusy to do much with - a nice "novelty" espresso for something different, but useless in milk drinks. While some of the more expensive lots (namely Lot 8) were capable of nice shots with a semblance of balance, our Lot 5 was a one-note wonder.
Which brought us to consider blending. We went out and bought small bags of "bass note" green coffee - a few different Sumatrans and Uganda Bugisu which we roasted on our store's Behmor and then blended with the bar stock Esmeralda that Carl was delivering weekly. The thought process was to try to keep the blend simple - 2 or 3 coffees at most so we could repeat the process ad infinitum.
Keep in mind, even though we've tasted a great number of fabulous espressos and coffees, we did not get into this business to be roasters. It's a fun hobby, but it takes a certain temperament to do well, along with a level of patience that we don't have.
We were hacks at this and had to face that fact.
As anyone with a modicum of roasting experience could have told us, a heavier brutish coffee matched with the flower-like Esmeralda didn't work well. There wasn't much nuance . The flavors didn't enhance each other - some batches tasted like lemon-flavored leather. As this was our first try at designing an espresso blend, we were making a lot of mistakes trying to reinvent the wheel.
Getting frustrated our our inefficiency and rookie mistakes, we went over to Home-Barista to look at what some of the HBs were using for their home-grown blends. A lot of these were complicated and immediately crossed off the list. But we saw repeated mentioned of Brazils used to "soften", "complete" and "bring together" various combinations of beans.
We asked Carl to find us some Brazils with potential to do what we wanted to do - bridge the Esmeralda and Bugisu into a mellower, more nuanced cup. He had just acquired some Brazil Cerrado and agreed to bring some of the green over so we could experiment.
From Thanksgiving through New Year's Johnny C. and I tried numerous roast levels and blending ratios of the Esmeralda/Cerrado/Bugisu, coming up with some decent blends, but nothing that knocked our socks off.
Not sure which of us first had the idea to just bag the Bugisu, but the first time threw equal amounts of Esmeralda and a flat-line roasted Cerrado together on their own, we knew we had something. The citrus was less overpowering but still tasty and right up front where we wanted it. The chocolate and rich mouthfeel from the Cerrado gave the cup character that enticed you to drink until the final drop. The aftertaste was pleasant and rounded.
Beginner's luck.
Brimming with overconfidence, I felt with a few tweaks, this blend could be competition ready.
Then batch two of the Cerrado turned out different. And almost started a fire.
The upcoming MARBC/NERBC in early February created a sense of urgency to get the blend done. If I could pull this off, I'd go in myself. I wanted to see what professional tasters thought.
But first we still needed to execute a roast we could repeat reliably.
The answer was not obvious and was actually discovered by just throwing stuff against the wall. There are five profile settings on the Behmor, each setting corresponding to a different type of bean hardness, with high-grown Arabicas on the "hard" side (Profile 1) and island coffees like Kona or Jamaica Blue Mountain on the soft side (Profile 5). P5 was a long, slow, roast with several stepped changes in temperature. It is not designed for a Brazilian coffee.
That didn't stop us from trying.
Turns out the longer. slower roast held the chocolate, held the mouthfeel, increased the sweetness and did something else we weren't expecting - brought out more of the underlying red fruit flavors from the Esmeralda. That sounds a bit crazy, but we don't have another way to explain how some flavors suddenly appeared.
We found we could do this over and over on the Behmor. We next experimented with aging the coffees separately and found using Cerrado that was three days younger than the Esmeralda gave us the most consistently reliable results.
Now it was competition-ready. So I went in at the last minute as an out-of-region competitor. And say what you will about the rest of the performance (messy, insane, etc.), those first espresso shots scored 4s - as good or better than our competitors using our tried-and-true Black Cat espresso.
Vindication. Or more beginner's luck.
We named the blend "Esmeraldo" for two obvious reasons - one, it's a combination of Esmeralda and Cerrado; two, it's got our shop name in it. We started offering Esmeraldo at the shop on bar shortly thereafter. Customers who know a thing or two about espresso liked it. It was different than the usual chocolate/caramel of Black Cat and many other popular espressos, yet still smooth and balanced. And very drinkable.
But we weren't done. Now we had to figure out how what we did on our Behmor would translate to the roaster that Carl uses so we could roast larger batches of the stuff. Carl's son, Kevin, who is the taster/cupper for Jake's also has a Behmor.
Almost six months to the day when we first started playing with the idea of an Esmeralda blend espresso, we have our first production batch of Esmeraldo, roasted by Jake's Java.
We will be tweaking it a bit more in the weeks to come as it's not exactly the same as what we brought to competition. But it's pretty close. Some of that is because we're tasting it one day off roast and we know it'll only get better over the next few days.
We will have a couple of retail 8-ounce bags available each week for the next 6-8 weeks, or whenver we run out. It's $11.00 for an 8-ounce bag. Esmeraldo will also be the "guest" espresso in our Gloria Jean grinder for the foreseeable future.
As of right now, we don't plan on participating in this year's Esmeralda auction, which will be held on May 19th. However, we are looking at other CoE auctions to see what our next espresso project might be.
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