Fratello Coffee is going to be holding a public cupping of the top 10 Cup of Excellence coffees from the Brazilian 2009 competition.  If you are interested in tasting these coffees, please come to Fratello Coffee on January 12^th @ 1:30. 

The auction for these coffees will be on January 19^th.   26 lots of coffee were awarded the prestigious Cup of Excellence award this year; however, Fratello Coffee will only be focusing on the top 10 coffees. 

What we’ll be cupping is:

Lot #1  Fazenda Ouro Verde

• Pupled Natural Catua
• Region: Chapada Diamantina
• Cupping Score: 91.08

Lot #2  Fazenda Sant’Ana

• Pulped Natural Yellow Bourbon/Acaia
• Region: Sul de Minas
• Cupping Score: 90.83

Lot #3  Fazenda Recreio

• Pulped Natural Yellow Bourbon
• Region: Mogiana – Vale da Grama
• Cupping Score: 89.42

Lot #4  Fazenda Monte Verde

• Pulped Natural Yellow Bourbon
• Region: Sul de Minas
• Cupping Score: 89.15 (Read the rest of this post)

Fratello just won another Cup of Excellence coffee Lot.  The auction just finished and was one of the longest bidding wars I can remember.  After it was all said and done, the #1 lot was sold for $35.05/lb (green) which is a new record for Bolivian Specialty Coffees.

This stretched on for almost 7 hours!  Fratello chose to puchase Lot # 6 which was also given a Presidental Award.  A Presidental Award is given to any coffee which scores over a 90.00 in the Cup of Excellence compitition.

Lot#: 6 Luis Huayhua Chiji – Café Central – Jury Score 90.71

Below is information on the coffee that we will be sharing with all of our friends/clients in the new year.

Luis Huayhua is father of three children. He is married to Zenobia Charca, a coffee producer for over 20 years and winner of the Cup of Excellence 2008. He arrived in Alto Beni from Achacachi in the Bolivian high plains (the altiplano) with her parents when he was 10 years old. Luis learned about coffee production as a child, while working alongside his parents, but he had never processed coffee. For this reason, de-pulping, fermenting, washing and drying there coffee to participate in the competition presented a challenge for him. (Read the rest of this post)

Fratello Coffee is introducing 6 new coffee next week.  These seasonal coffees are Fresh Green Arrivals.   We did not buy a lot of these coffees and expect them to move very quickly.  Each of these will be excellent selections to have over Christmas holidays, especially the very rare (just over 300 lbs of each available) Award Winning:

• Costa Rican Calle de Copy COE #3
• Colombian Villarrica COE #4 

Also available:

• Nicaraguan Finca Limoncillo, Direct Trade, Single Estate
• Panama Esmeralda Diamond Mountain, Rainforest Alliance, Single Estate
• Bolivian Caranavi, Organic Fairtrade
• Ethiopian Sidamo, Organic Fairtrade

**Order these on line now**

  (Read the rest of this post)

Fratello Coffee just won the # 3 Lot of Costa Rican Celle de Copey – Cup of Excellence today.  This was a HUGE achievement and the highest ranking coffee Fratello has every won.  Jason was part of the jury down in Costa Rica this year and helped approving this coffee as being one of the top 5 that Costa Rica has to offer this year. 

You can read more about this coffee here:

Look for this coffee to be available late this summer/early Spring.  Some incredible coffees are available now and coming soon to Fratello…..a few of these are:

• Brazilian Daterra Sweet Blue

Available now (and selling fast): READ more.

• Ethiopian Idido Misty Valley – Organic

Available now: READ more.

• Guatemalan Montecristol – Rainforest Alliance, Direct Trade, MicroLot

Available July: READ more.

• Colombian Villarrica – Cup of Excellence #4

Available July/August: READ more.

• Costa Rican Celle de Copey – Cup of Excellence #3

Available August/September: READ more.

These coffees are all limited quantities, so enjoy them while you can.  There are a few other origins we are working on, each as exciting as the ones above.  Looks like its going to be a tasty summer.  

Russ

I have just returned from Pereira Colombia after judging the 2009 Cup of Excellence competition.   Although tired, I’m thrilled about this experience.  It is so exciting going through the cupping process and seeing the award ceremony’s on the final day. 

 The Cup of Excellence competition is the most thorough and competitive screening process a coffee farm will put their coffee through.  The goal of COE is to bring out the best coffee a current region has to offer in the current crop year.  After the competition is over, the COE award is given to the top farmers who represent the best coffees that this region has to offer.  These coffees are then put in front of the world on an on-line auction which rewards these farmers for their focused attention to improving quality coffee, and puts a spot light on this region show-casing their excellence.

Stage one Involves the submission from the farmers current crop of coffee.  Of the 512,000 families growing coffee in Colombia, only 374 submissions were sent in this year, which was relatively low do to the fact that Colombia’s crop forecast is 30-40% lower than the year before. 

All of these coffees are cupped and analyzed in Colombia by local cuppers.  All coffee scoring an 84 or higher (out of 100) move on to the second National Cupping jury.  The National Cupping Jury is chosen from the pool of local cuppers.  They are chosen for their cupping skills in the first stage. 

(Read the rest of this post)

Yesterday was the online auction for the 2008 Honduras Cup of Excellence competition, and Fratello Coffee is happy to say, that we have won another Lot of coffee, and are the ONLY Canadian company to win one.   This is always an exciting process, and is particularly long, when you are also one of the 26 judges from around the world to actually participate in the competition at origin.

 The judging process is a 4 day cupping extravaganza that allows you to taste the best coffees that country has to offer.  It starts out with the national cupping jury to taste all the entries and separate all the coffees that score an 84 or higher. 

The next event bring the international jury into to rank all of these coffee to pick the final farms that qualify as a Cup of Excellence coffee (again anything over 84).  Every coffee gets tasted by each judge from 4 – 12 times and will be scored, and described each time.  Very tiring, but very rewarding.

When you walk away from the competition, you have experienced the best of this country as well as had the opprotunity to discover many different micro regions that had never been descovered until this time.  (Read the rest of this post)

Green coffee is packaged at origin in 132-152 lb jute (burlap) sacks.  The smell and taste of this jute can be transfered to the green coffee, resulting in a cup referred to as “baggy” with an unpleasant musty or straw-like flavor.   As coffee sits in warehouses it becomes old and stale within as little as 6 months.  These conditions are worsened in humid conditions.

We invest in quality green coffee and protect it in the following ways:

1. We’re lucky that Calgary is as dry as a desert (literally).

2. We receive shipments from origin constantly and our goal is to not have green coffee in our warehouse longer than 3 months.

3. Within weeks of receiving the green coffee, we remove it from the jute sacks and transfer the coffee into independent silos.

4. With our finest and most exotic coffees, we immediately vacuum package all of the green coffee in 15-20 lb bags with the objective of preserving the original sweetness and fruit-like flavors

5. Our Cup of Excellence coffee will never touch jute bags again!  We pay the farmers and additional premium to have the coffee packaged at origin in 10 lb vacuum packaged foil bags.

Although it is rare for coffee to become baggy when you are not “warehousing” coffee, Fratello is taking these extra steps to ensure our clients only receive the best.

Fratello Coffee won its 3rd auction with the Cup of Excellence program on November 15th. This was a fast paced auction with many different roasting and retail companies bidding on the 26 award winning lots. As far as we could see, this auction will result in the highest average prices over all. I congratulate the Cup of Excellence program for their marketing efforts, and for successfully organizing another amazing event.

Fratello Coffee was awarded the 13th placing winning coffee.  I remember this product well and found the characteristics in this coffee to show tastes of a Smokey Earth, a sparkling citrus and lingering acidity, with a clean body showing hints of Raisin.  I scored this with an 87.5, however the average score at the competition gave this a 86.21.  Overall this coffee is very balanced. 

For more information on this coffee and the farm it was produced on, please read (Read the rest of this post)

Gallery Series, refers to those one-of-a-kind coffees with extremely special or exciting flavor qualities, that when we cup them, we recognize as extraordinary. Like other organic food products, the flavor qualities of Gallery Series coffee reflect not just a particular geography, altitude, farm or varietal–they also reflect less fixed factors like weather and terroir–which is never exactly the same anywhere in the world from year to year. Because of this, Gallery Series coffees are limited edition coffees, so make sure to enjoy them when they are available…

Well it was the final day of the 2007 Bolivian Cup of Excellence competition. There was no better way to end off my journey than by seeing all of the hard working farmers and their families cheering each other on in hopes of being one of the 26 finalists.

It was incredible to see their faces filled with joy when their names were called one by one and recognized in front of all the media and their peers for the efforts to improve quality and consistency on their farms. It sure makes it easy for me to want to continue supporting the COE Competition when you get to hear stories of how this motivates them to improve what they do, and hear them tell us how their lives change through the exportation of their coffee to our roasting facilities.  

(Read the rest of this post)