price paid to the producers
 |
AIPEP, Bolivia | $2.57/pound |
Enthusiasm for Bolivias
Based on this month's sampling, however,
Bolivia definitely appears to be the current favorite southern Andean
origin among specialty roasters. An impressive thirty-four Bolivia
coffees from seventeen North American roasters turned up. Some roasters
were so enthusiastic about this reviving origin that they sent two, even
three, Bolivia selections. Olympia Coffee Roasting, for example, sent
three, including the top-rated Bolivia Mauricio Diez Medina Peaberry
(93). Cafe Valverde submitted three (highest rated 91); Fratello Coffee
Roasters of Calgary, Canada three (two rated 90 and 91); and 49th
Parallel from the Vancouver area of Canada three (two rated at 90).
Why the impressive revival of interest in
this always promising but heretofore largely overlooked origin? The most
important reason is the work of USAID, which has supported a variety of
general improvements in fruit removal, drying and transportation
procedures, netting cleaner and more consistent coffees. USAID also has
funded various marketing initiatives, including supporting a succession
of Cup of Excellence competitions for Bolivia green coffees. Cup of
Excellence events, the most prestigious of green coffee competitions,
not only draw industry attention to an origin, but also attract judges
(and prospective coffee buyers) from all over the world to visit,
appreciate, and learn more about the origin and its coffees.
I have to diffidently report, however, that
we were very mildly disappointed by this past year's Bolivia Cup of
Excellence winners. Not that they didn't attract impressive ratings: The
six Cup of Excellence prize winners we cupped averaged just short of
89, with the deep, sweetly complex Fratello Coffee Bolivian Caf- Central
COE topping the list at 91. Nevertheless, we often landed a point lower
in our ratings than the international jury did. Typically when we cup
winners from green coffee competitions it's the other way around: Our
ratings for competition-winning coffees production-roasted by the best
companies usually exceed the competition scores for those same coffees,
which are arrived at by cupping sample roasts. Perhaps my cupping
partner Ted Stachura and I were slightly out of calibration with the
tastes of the jury, or perhaps some transport delays or warehousing
issues this year took just a tiny bit of the aromatics out of these fine
prize-winning coffees.
The World's Highest-Grown Coffee?
For us the most interesting of the Bolivias
was traded outside the competition. The very high-grown Mauricio Diez
Medina Peaberry from Olympia Coffee Roasters showed the deep sweetness
characteristic of the best Bolivias with great range of aromatics,
syrupy mouthfeel and an impressively long, flavor-saturated finish. This
coffee may be the highest-grown coffee in the world, which makes it a
sort of poster-coffee for this country of massive 11,000-foot-high
plains and towering mountains. Peaberries, of course, are single,
oval-shaped beans separated during grading from normal beans. The
Fratello Coffee Roasters Bolivia Agrotakesi (92) is another peaberry, a
tiny, precious lot consisting only of peaberries screened out of the
larger lot of normally-shaped beans that won the first prize in the 2009
Bolivia Cup of Excellence with a soaring score of 93. This rare
selection showed a surprising brandy-toned chocolate aromatic
complicating a finely balanced, softly acidy profile.
Differentiation at the Producing End
At the producing end of the supply chain the
answer turns out to be the same old litany: The best samples appeared
to have been produced from ripe, selectively harvested fruit carefully
processed and sun-dried using traditional rather than short-cut methods.
And we tested no coffees whose character was owing to a deliberate
application of non-traditional processing methods. In other words, there
were no honey processed coffees or dried-in-the-fruit naturals among
the twenty-nine coffees we cupped. All appeared to be wet-processed,
“washed” coffees in the traditional Latin-American style, although a few
variations turned up: drying on raised beds rather than on patios, for
example, and in one case, a Kenya-style 24-hour soaking in clean water
after fruit removal and before drying.
Botanical variety did not seem to constitute
much of a differentiating factor among these twenty-nine coffees. Most
high-rated samples were produced from trees of good- but not
distinctive-tasting traditional Latin-American varieties, mainly Typica
and Caturra, with an occasional appearance of Bourbon. Generally the
high-rated samples achieved their excellence first and foremost through
their purity, meaning a transparent reflection of the beauty of ripe
fruit transposed with nuance but without distraction into the cup.
An oft-noted characteristic of Peru and
Bolivia coffees is their balanced structure and smooth, integrated
acidity. This tendency has always been a bit of a mystery for me, since
Peru and Bolivia coffees usually are high-grown, suggesting they should
display a relatively intense acidity, yet their acidity typically is
softer than is usually the case with high-grown coffees from other
origins. At any rate, the combination of purity of traditional
preparation and balanced structure tended to be the starting points for
the achievement of the fourteen 90-plus coffees we tested, including the
ten reviewed here.
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