In My Mug

Due to the complications within the Bolivian coffee industry, many of the smaller Bolivian farms we have worked with in the past are no longer producing coffee. Whilst this has created some challenges for us, it has had a much more significant impact on our exporting partners AgriCafe, who have been working with these growers for many years. As a result AgriCafe have decided to begin farming for themselves, in an effort to demonstrate what can be achieved with the application of more modern techniques and a scientific farming approach.

The farm is named in honour of Don Carlos, the oldest and most unconditionally awesome employee of AgriCafe. He was there at the start of the specialty coffee trend and, together with Pedro, helped to build the wet mill in Caranavi. To show their gratitude for all his good work, the company decided to give him partnership of the farm.

Finca Don Carlos is a very unique farm planted with all the care and dedication of Don Carlos himself. The farm sits at an altitude of 1,450–1,650 metres above sea level, and it is located in Caranavi, which is the capital of the Caranavi province in the Yungas region of Bolivia.

In the cup you'll find the same sweet, silky milk chocolate and hazelnut as in the Caturra lot, but here the volume is turned down just a little. My favourite part of this coffee is the rhubarb: it's like nibbling on a stick of rhubarb dipped in white sugar. It really slices through the milk chocolate.

• Country: Bolivia

This is a coffee grown by the amazing Gillio Francesa Ferraro, a mature guy whom I met on my trip to Costa Rica a couple of years ago. We have a rule at Has Bean that if you're over 40 you can be a character (under 40 and a character just makes you weird). Well, Gillio is the perfect example of a character. The first thing he said to me was that my belly looked as if I ate too much, and that I should lose some weight. I was in the midst of exercising and dieting; his brutal honesty was refreshing, if not a little quirky.

The thing that made me smile was that he was driving an old Jeep that was falling apart (he told me it was from the '60s). The best part was that the engine was a Dorman engine built in Stafford, UK. My father-in-law and two brothers-in-law all work at the factory, and it was amazing to be in a foreign location and see something so linked to home.

You might have looked at the name of this coffee and thought, "oof! Steve that's a bit of a long one!" but I actually cut it down a little from what it could have been, there's only so much space! Costa Rica I'm sure you can guess is the country and then Zarcero is the micro-region/canton of Costa Rica that the coffee comes from. There could then have been Finca La Casa which is the name of the farm and Gillio Francesca Ferraro is, as we've already discussed, the amazing fella that grows the coffee. Yellow honey is the processing method which is a variant of the pulped natural process, then finally Caturra is the varietal of the coffee. Take a deep breath and say it with me now...Costa Rica Finca La Casa Zarcero Gillio Francesca Ferraro Yellow Honey Caturra!

This is not your typical Costa Rican coffee. Forget all that has come before; this is a unique cup. It's a Caturra coffee, and is grown at an altitude of 1,700 metres above sea level. Gillio has 2 farms in Costa Rica, this one is called Finca La Casa (which just means 'farm at home') and can be found in the Western Valley area of Zarcero. The land around his house is rugged and difficult to farm. Gillio manages to get the very best out of it by working the land every day, even at the age of 83. I hope I'm half as active as he is when I get to that age!

In the cup this is very sweet and very fruity, think raspberries coated in gooey caramel. There’s a delicate satsuma acidity throughout the cup, and it finishes with with a hint of black tea.

• Country: Costa Rica

We're super happy to be celebrating 6 years of working with Finca Argentina, and, once again, Ale's coffees are tasting amazing!

Two years ago Finca Argentina had a massive leaf rust issue, but it's great to report that the farm has bounced back and, although it's still not perfect as a whole, the farm is on the road to recovery.

The first time we came across Finca Argentina was via a very well presented sample that just landed on my doorstep. It came from someone who had visited the farm and offered to try to help find a buyer for them in the UK. We get lots of these, and we normally give them a try on the cupping table but find they are just not good enough for us to stock. This one was quite different: the quality was amazing. So initially we stocked it, although we knew very little about it.

Since that day, I've been to see Alejandro many times in El Salvador. During the last two visits I stopped at his house with his family and enjoying a day at the beach. Alejandro has also been to see us in Stafford twice. We have worked with him on projects (some projects were successful, others we will brush over); we have also told him what we would like to see from the farm (some ideas he took on board, others he didn't – he's the farmer, after all).

Most importantly, he has become a very very good friend, and he is someone whose coffee I love and company I enjoy. Alejandro took over running the farm from his father a few years ago, having returned to El Salvador after travelling around the world as an investment banker. A very intelligent guy and a very good businessman, he understood the farm needed to step up in work if it was to flourish: lots of work has gone into making this cup the quality one it has become. Part of this work last year was to separate the farm into tablons (the Spanish word for 'plot'). It was separated into eight plots, with seven of them growing coffee.

The coffee is 100% Bourbon, as 70% of plant stock in El Salvador is. This heirloom varietal is one of the reasons why coffee from this country is right up amongst some of the best in the world. They have the perfect climate and conditions for this low yielding, high maintenance strain.

The farm is based in the Apaneca-Ilamtepec mountain range, and it's near the town of Turin in the Ahuachapán department. Sixteen people work on the farm during the non-picking season, maintaining and tending to the plants. This number of workers goes up to 50 people during the picking period. The altitude of the farm is 1,350 metres above sea level.

In the cup this is very much a liquid Terry’s dark chocolate orange. Plenty of dark chocolate and sweet orange with a great mouthfeel and good melty body. There’s cinder toffee and a little funky sultana on the finish.

• Country: El Salvador 

Well hello there, children. Uncle Steve has a story to tell you! So sit back, relax and enjoy the story of the Kiriga coffee estate in Kenya. :)

The first coffee bush at Kiriga estate was planted in approximately 1954 by colonial settlers. At about the same time, less than ten kilometres away along the same Kigio road, a young boy (Aloysius Gakunga, son of the chief for the larger Murang'a county) helped his father – Senior Chief Ndungíu Kagori – plant the first coffee seedling in the area. The area was known as Gaitegi village, Muranga Location 1 (Loco One). A love affair with coffee had been born!

Several years went by and the young boy grew up. He was riding his bicycle along Kigio road and, as he rode past the vast – by now well-established – coffee estates, he promised himself that he would one day own one of them.

He realised this dream in 1976.

Sadly the boy, or Mr. A. N. Gakunga, passed away in July 2014. By the time of his death, Mr. Gakunga had passed on the love of coffee, and the mantle of Kiriga coffee estate, to Dr. Brian Ndungíu Gakunga. Brian was his second child, and the eldest son out of his six children. According to Kikuyu cultural naming systems, Brian is named after Mr. Gakungaís' father, who was both his grandfather and a pioneer coffee farmer.

• Dr. Brian Gakunga is a coffee farmer who is well known in Kenyan coffee circles. He is a founding member and a former long-serving Honorary Secretary of the Kenya Coffee Producers Association, which is a national farmer's organization that works to promote the economic and social interests of the coffee farmers through active participation in the national and international arena.

The Kiriga coffee estate sits between 1,550 and 1,650 metres above sea level. It is approximately five kilometres from Thika town, which is an industrial town in the central province of Kenya. It's four kilometres from Blue Posts hotel, which has the famous Chania and Thika falls. Thika lies 50 kilometres northeast of Nairobi.

Administratively, Kiriga coffee estate is in the Gatanga constituency of Murang'a county, and it's separated from Kiambu county by the Chania river.

Kiriga coffee is Arabica of predominantly SL28 variety (notable for its world-renowned cup quality). The farm has an estimated two hectares of Ruiru 11 variety (which has improved resistance to coffee berry disease and leaf rust); some K7 variety (similar characteristics as SL28, but with better resistance to leaf rust compared to SL28); and a field of the newest Batian variety.

All coffee activities at Kiriga are carried out from the coffee nursery to all the farm operations (pruning, weed control, nutrition, irrigation, basin digging, disease control, infilling, mulching, and planting). Wet mill operations are also carried out on the factory level. Kiriga delivers both parchment coffee and Mbuni (naturals) to the commercial dry mill for milling and grading, in preparation for sale at the coffee auction and for direct sale.

In addition to growing coffee the estate also has, I was told, shoats (sheep and goats), a dairy, and the potential to keep fish. It's all about diversity, and what's more diverse than a 'shoat'?! The estate is also occasionally visited by two hippos, in addition to some bird-life, while also being the home of a family of monkeys.

Kiriga irrigated all its coffee trees – despite the crippling electricity costs involved – during the dry season that happened earlier this year, in order to ensure their high standards were maintained despite the weather.

By the end of last year (2015) the estate changed the cycle of its coffee trees by removing the old heads and growing new heads, which in return gave a higher yield of bold beans with the characteristic 'Kiriga coffee characteristics'. Over 40% of the 'old heads' had to go! This is way above the recommended 25%, and as a result we expect to have decreased yield but increased quality.

At Kiriga they talk about having a 'Kiriga Family'; 30% of the total workforce is made up of resident families who live on the estate, and 50% of those know no other home. The remaining percentage consists of smallholder farmers who commute daily and depend on the estate for survival. There are smallholder farmers who have been part of the family since 1976 and have no desire to work anywhere else, commuting a whopping 10 KM (or more!) daily, past other estates, just to work at Kiriga.

Something really amazing I wanted to tell you about is the Kiriga Welfare Fund. In the past the estate saw its workers get turned away from banks when they tried to acquire loans for dealing with family issues or emergencies. To help his 'Kiriga Family', over the past year Brian has encouraged the workers to set up a welfare group with him as its patron, and Brian has provided money for loaning out to staff according to their most pressing needs.

Brian has also approached a banking institution to see whether they can fund workers to acquire dairy animals on loan and repay from the milk proceeds. Under such an arrangement, 50% of the proceeds would go towards paying for the loan. A market would be readily available and the remaining 50% would be extra income to the workers. This is ongoing and, if successful, it would have the effect of supplementing the workers' wages and greatly improving their quality of life.

During my visit to Kenya last year I was fortunate enough to spend some time chatting with Brian. I even managed to record some of it, too! Make sure to have a listen. :)

Has Blog: An Interview with Brian and Peter from Kiriga (Part 1)

In the cup expect a lovely, lush and creamy mouthfeel, with a summer fruit kick of peach and apricot.

• Country: Kenya

OK so this coffee has a big long name but it's all important information, we should break it down...

Costa Rica (I'm guessing you worked this bit out!) is the country it's from.  Don Mayo is the name of the micro mill where the coffee is milled and processed.  Finca Bella Vista is the farm that the coffee was grown on.  Yellow Honey is the processing method (if you want to learn a little more about processing be sure to check out our processing videos) and Caturra is the varietal of coffee bean (more information about Caturra available in our varietal archive) See I told you it was all important stuff!

Finca Bella Vista is located at an altitude of 1,900 metres above sea level in the Tarrazú region of Costa Rica and I first came across this coffee on my visit to the country in February 2011, I knew it was a coffee for people like me. The farm is very close to the Don Mayo mill and is owned by Hector Bonilla and his family.

This coffee is a coffee with a pedigree, winning the 2009 Costa Rica Cup of Excellence competition, and is one of the most highly regarded coffees in the Tarrazú region. There was a time when coffees from the Tarrazú region would fetch a high price on just the name alone. It's a super interesting coffee, but the quality over the past ten years or so has seen the coffee plummet whilst other regions (I'm thinking Naranjo and Central as ones that stand out) have raised their game. This particular coffee from Tarrazú is of a small minority that seems to be bucking the general trend and working hard to make the coffee as good as it can be. This coffee gives me huge hope for the future of Tarrazú.

The farm is an amazing example of how professional a farm and mill should be. Everything at the mill is impeccably clean, tidy and organised to the point of obsession. I think when it comes to running a good farm and mill it's okay to be obsessive about what you're doing. It's little things like hats for the staff working in the mill, labels on the lots that are clear and readable; they're all very small and tiny things, yet things that make the difference in quality.

This is the fifth (!) year that we've had this coffee after I originally found it while cupping around 250 blind samples in three days from a whole heap of farms. Some were just different days' pickings, some were different varietals and processes.

In the cup this is (for me) a glass of orange juice! It has both the texture and sweetness of orange juice alongside a really nice mouthfeel. That sweetness turns into a golden sugar sweetness as each sip progresses, finishing with just the gentlest touch of apple.

• Country: Costa Rica

I love a family link in coffee and this coffee has an awesome one, you know Teodocio Mamani from Canton Uyunense? Well this coffee comes from his son-in-law Cori Gill!

18 de mayo is a municipality of Caranavi (and part of Canton Uyunense), and lots of farms can be called a variation on these names because the land tends not to have a name.

In the cup it’s a buttery affair in both mouthfeel and taste. Sure there’s loads of delicious milk chocolate as we see in our other Bolivians, but here there’s buttermilk and a wonderful creamy mouthfeel with chocolate bitterness on the finish.

• Country: Bolivia

In 2014 I took my first trip to Kenya. My aim was not to meet producers but rather to get an insight into how the market works, and into how we can improve the quality of what we buy from Kenya. This is one project that emerged from the visit.

Much of Kenyan coffee comes from cooperatives, which means it's tough to go to visit a person or build a long-term relationship. That said, it is possible to get something interesting going and to work on projects together by speaking with the leaders of the co-ops and washing stations.

The Chinga mill is located near to the town of Othaya just east of the Chinga Dam. It's approximately 5 KM southwest of the town, and is in the Nyeri county part of Kenya.

The mill has some 783 members (587 male and 195 female), and each member only owns a small piece of land of an average 0.3 acres. They harvest the coffee themselves and then sell it to the mill, where it is processed and sent to the government auction.

The 'project' part of this coffee was that we asked the growers if they would naturally process a batch for us. They kindly agreed to do so, as long as we promised to buy it regardless of the final cup.

So it's a small lot in order to make sure that we didn't mess up. We also spread the risk with two coffee lots of different qualities; this is a NH that we have here, being screen 15 or above. They thought I was crazy because only the poor quality coffee in Kenya gets naturally processed, and they couldn't understand why I wanted only the best-quality coffee processed in this way. But they did it, and luckily for us it worked out better than we could have hoped.

In the cup expect the unexpected. There's a thread of blackcurrants all the way through, like you would expect from a Kenyan, but with a lovely big body and a liquorice flavour that reminds me of Pontefract cakes, whilst remaining incredibly clean throughout.

• Country: Kenya

The first time we came across Finca Argentina was via a very well presented sample that just landed on my doorstep. It came from someone who had visited the farm and offered to try to help find a buyer for them in the UK. We get lots of these and normally give them a try on the cupping table, but find they are just not tasty or delicious enough for us to stock. This one was quite different: the quality was amazing. So initially we stocked it, although we knew very little about it. Since that day, I've been to see Alejandro many times in El Salvador, the last two times stopping at his house with his family and enjoying a day at the beach. Alejandro has also been to see us in Stafford twice. We have worked with him on projects (some successful, others we will brush over); we have also told him what we would like to see from the farm (some he took on board, others he didn't he's the farmer after all).

Most importantly, Ale has become a very very good friend, and someone whose coffee I love and company I enjoy. He took over running the farm from his father a few years ago, having returned to El Salvador after travelling around the world as an investment banker. A very intelligent guy and a very good businessman, he understood the farm needed to step up in work if it was to flourish: lots of work has gone into making this cup the quality one it has become. Part of this work last year was to separate the farm into tablons (the Spanish word for plot). It was separated into 8 plots, with 7 of them growing coffee.

This coffee comes from the highest part of the farm called San Jorge, which is about 3 manzanas in size and ranges from 1,300 to 1,350 metres above sea level, it's a very hilly part of the farm so is difficult to pick.

Historically, the Owner's Selection coffee came from San Jorge and Alejandro told me his grandfather used to reserve some coffee for his personal enjoyment, I find it interesting as from all the farms his grandfather used to own (over 250 manzanas of farm!) he picked San Jorge for the coffee he wanted to drink himself.

The coffee is 100% Bourbon, as 70% of plant stock in El Salvador is. This heirloom varietal is one of the reasons why coffee from this country is right up amongst some of the best in the world. They have the perfect climate and conditions for this low yielding, high maintenance strain.

The farm is based in the Apaneca-Ilamtepec mountain range near to the town of Turin in the Ahuachapan dept. During the non-picking season 16 people work on the farm, maintaining and tending to the plants. During the picking period this goes up to 50 people. The altitude of the farm is 1350m. The coffee is a washed process coffee, and is sun dried on patios.

In the cup expect huge milk chocolate, mixed with sweet caramel, and a delicate acidity of white grape and orange that lingers in a delicious aftertaste. A very easy drinking coffee any time of the day.

• Country: El Salvador 

This coffee comes from a farm that's actually 2 farms, but the 2 farms exist as 1, but do produce coffee independently, exciting huh?

Overall the farm is called Finca "Sumava de Lourdes" Lourdes de Naranjo and is located between 1,670 and 1,790 metres above sea level in Lourdes de Naranjo of the Western Valley of Costa Rica. The farm is made up of 2 farms called Finca "Monte Llano Bonito" which has 9 plots of land, and Finca "Monte Lourdes" which has 6 plots of land.

On the farm there are 10 permanent workers who live on the farm in a custom built workers camp, all receive accommodation as part of their employment.

Finca "Sumava de Lourdes" Lourdes de Naranjo adheres to strict agronomical practices and ensure the minimum use of herbicides and pesticides. They use MM's (Mountain Microorganisms) and minerals from natural origins as much as they can for their farming.

It's a farm that enjoys growing many different varietals, if you wandered around the farm you'd see Pacamara, Mokka, SL 28, Geisha, Caturra and Villa Sarchi.

In the cup this starts out as dark chocolate and caramel, with a creamy body, but finishes on a crispwhite grape acidity with a deliciously refreshing apple aftertaste.

• Country: Costa Rica

This washed Yirgacheffe shows the diversity of this amazing region which holds some of the oldest plant stock in the world.

Buying from Ethiopia continues to be a challenge for us, but the cupping table continues to show us some amazing coffees. However, buying through the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange continues to be difficult if you require some traceability or back story with the coffees, you have to become a detective...good job I'm becoming quite good at spotting the clues!

This coffee comes from around 600 smallholders who have approximately 2 hectares of land each and hand pick the cherries, and is grown at around 1,850 - 1,950 metres above sea level. These small holders then sell the freshly picked cherries to the Chelelektu mill where they are graded, sorted, depulped and then fermented underwater for between 36 - 48 hours, depending on temperature, humidity and other factors. Ethiopian fermentation times are generally longer than other African countries, as temperatures are generally cooler in the highlands of Ethiopia, due to Ethiopia’s more northerly latitudes.

Parchment is then sorted in washing channels, and placed onto raised African drying tables. The drying period generally lasts for up to 2 weeks, although standard drying is 7-10 days, until moisture level reaches 12% or lower.

In the cup this is very similar to last year; lemon with black tea and a wonderful floral edge, a super classic Yirgacheffe.

• Country: Ethiopia