The Insane Coffee Project

Hello fellow coffee lovers!

Another year is almost done and dusted, can you believe it? Where does the time go?

I didn’t do a coffee advent calendar (coffee or other) this past December. I’m usually too busy roasting and sipping my way around the world with whatever green beans are left over in our cellar, along with whatever nifty surprises I managed to get my hands on through the course of the year.

(I am a product of my time: I had my a-ha! moment with a delicious cup of coffee in the early 2000s. At the time single origin beans were apparently all the rage in specialty coffee circles. That in any case is how I got into it. And for better or worse, that’s still the lens I mostly approach it through.)

Like the end of last year, I made a running bar chart showing where all the delicious coffees I enjoyed this year were grown.

And I’d like to share some of the highlights with you.

Mozambique was a strong showing (top dog even, for the first week of December). I was very chuffed to get a Gorongosa and a Chimanimani lot through RoastLov, a roaster from the Lavanttal in southern Austria. Delicious!

Danke, Bernhard!

China finished the year a nose (12 g) ahead of Mozambique. The quality of coffee coming out of Yunnan province has been steadily improving over the last few years, and some of them have achieved specialty grade status. A great success and lovely in the cup. I purchased 3kg of such green beans through Hani Coffee in the Netherlands.

Dank je wel, Maarten!

South Africa this year came in dead last, but that doesn’t mean a thing. It’s one of my home countries, it’s where I was raised, and the coffee that I scored from there was a special one, something that’s only to be had in small quantities. To me it was a whole new species of coffee. It’s called Coffea racemosa. I was nothing short of awed to get my hands on a little 50 g tin of it (for almost as many euros), from Stow Coffee Roasters in Slovenia.

Hvala, Peter!

The taste of racemosa is one that you’d have to acquire. Which is not saying anything bad about it. After all, the tastes of canephora and even arabica are also ones that we have to acquire. In any event, 50 g of racemosa was not enough for me to do so. I got flavours of mint and cannabis seeds, and I had a lot of fun using most of the 50 g in blends with one or two arabicas.

Thailand came in at 6th position. I scored this tasty coffee all the way back in 2019, from Hasbean in Stafford, England (which officially became Ozone Coffee in March of this year). So those green beans are now over 5 years old and to me they still taste wonderful freshly roasted. (The question of how long you can store green beans does pop up from time to time.) And I still have two small samples left, maybe enough for two or three roasts on my HotTop next year.

Thanks, Steve-from-2019!

Speaking of the legendary Mr. Stephen Leighton, I got a baggie of Nicaraguan coffee from him this year that certainly deserves a mention. Nicaragua is one of the major origins in my collection, making up almost 4% of the total since 2004. It’s far from a newbie to me. But this coffee was.

You see, Mr. Leighton started Hasbean, which was my first and for a few years only online retailer of specialty-grade single origin beans, either roasted or green. They introduced me to too many stellar coffees to even mention. And Stephen’s was the face of third-wave coffee to me, of travelling to origin and developing years-long partnerships with producers.

Sometime between when I bought my Thai beans in 2019 and now, Stephen left Hasbean and became a part of Drop Coffee in Stockholm, Sweden. Through one of his long-term partnerships with producers, he also acquired a small piece of land in Nicaragua, named Finca Sunderland, after a football club (soccer to North American readers) that he’s supported for as long as he has been breathing.

And so, now, Mr. Leighton is also a coffee producer. And this year, I scored a 250 g bag of his first Robby Burr lot, a natural processed H1 Centroamericana. (There was another lot called Dennis Toot. So far they’re named after old Sunderland players.) Like every coffee that has gone through Stephen’s hands, it was just lovely.

Thanks, Steve! Tack, Joanna! Gracias, Dr. Miresh!

I also landed my first ever bag of coffee from Nigeria. And it was an arabica to boot! A canephora from West Africa would not have surprised me, but this did. Thank you to the kind and patient folks at May Shayi Coffee Roasters. I can’t say much to the taste of it, but that’s OK. I don’t need every cup to taste amazing. I really was as pleased as you can be at the opportunity of trying a coffee from this unexpected origin.

Through Bernhard from RoastLov I also got my hands on Angolan coffee, yes, a canephora, but it was alright, and great in a blend, and more to the point, it was from Angola! He also hooked me up with a two lots from Cameroon, one arabica and the other a rum barrel-aged canephora. Yummy!

And then there was New Zealand. This year’s winner, slowly drunk and savoured from the same 2.16 kg of green beans I bought in August of 2023.

This stuff is beyond a highlight. After all this time, it still blows my mind to be roasting and drinking a crop of commercially grown coffee from that place.

A million thanks to Rob and Marie from Ikarus Coffee in the Pekerau Hills in the far north of New Zealand’s North Island!

Thank you for reading. Here’s wishing you a contented, healthy and fun new year ahead.

With kind regards,

Chris