joe van gogh

my mom sent me some awesome coffees from my hometown of durham,nc.
the name of the roaster is joe van gogh. it's all fairtrade and mostly organic and i'll tell you, the coffee is incredible. she sent some guatemala and some costa rica and some sumatra that i did not try because i pretty much always hate indonesian coffees. the costa rica was sweet and had some maple syrup and some tangy citrus. very very tasty. and the guatemala was smooth and chocolatey and spicey at the finish. if you're ever in the triangle area, look up joe van gogh. i wish i had gone to the shop they have on duke campus, but as a rule i avoid duke campus like the plague. my mom went in there and started talking about how her daughter is a coffeegeek/barista and the owner got really excited and told her to tell me that i was invited to come to the roasting works when i'm in town next. which is typical NC fashion; invite the relative of a complete stranger into your home/workplace/bedroom.

on other topics of coffee news..... we did the african coffee cupping today. it was pretty cool. we "cupped" batdorf & bronson's kenya AA, ethiopia sidamo, ethiopia harrar, yemen, and kenya peaberry. i made french presses of each and had a "calibration table" that had a bunch of stuff that would get everyone's noses and palates ready for tasting the nuances in the coffees. strawberries, blueberries, currants, scotch, lapsong souchong, jasmine, molasses, lemon zest and butterscotch. yum. it was a great cupping, even though we didnt do the traditional sniff/sniff/break/taste/talk/sniff/taste cupping, it was good to facilitate discussion in another way. taking away the technical aspects of the cupping helped us talk mroe about the coffee than about the method of the cupping, which was way cool.

anyway. till next time.