Our coffee is fresh. REAAALLLY FRESH. Sometimes too fresh to pull a shot of espresso. It’s fresh from the harvest, expedited from origin to the roaster, and then roasted to order each week. At 21st Street we try to represent these beautiful coffees on the retail side. We can’t make it taste any better than what our roaster found on the cupping table. We focus our expertise on the craft of brewing. We like to surround ourselves with other experts that compliment what we do well. That’s why we like Intelligentsia.
Our roaster has recently made a commitment not to sell coffee beyond 10 months from the harvest date. Once you pick the coffee cherry from the tree it’s a race against time to get these beans to market while they still have all the flavors that made them worth the high price to begin with. Having said that, not all coffees are in season year-round, so there are times when our menu is full and times when it is lean. The lean times are almost over…
Here’s Intelligentsia’s “In Season” initiative in a nutshell…
Specialty Coffee has it all figured out, right? Direct relationships with growers, careful roasting, Baristas pulling perfect shots… we’ve squared the circle. Not exactly, as there is a final missing piece: seasonality.
Coffee is just like great fruit and vegetables. Most coffee-producing countries have only one specific harvest season each year, and once the coffee is picked from the tree, it begins the inevitable process of slow decline, losing quality with the passage of time. The result is that no matter how great a coffee tastes while in its prime, the day will always come when it loses the very things that made it so tasty in the first place.
What then does Intelligentsia In Season™ mean? It means that our coffees are offered only while they are fresh and retain the vibrancy that both nature and the fastidious coffee farmer intended. It means that the coffee offers the same kind of compelling traits it did when we first selected it and brought it to our Roasting Works
The coffee industry has long perpetuated the idea that coffee is a year-round crop without recognizing publicly that the harvest cycles do not allow for this. So you really need to know when a coffee was actually harvested. Selecting your coffees in this way ensures that you are getting them while they are their most delicious. The Intelligentsia In Season™ initiative is our commitment that every coffee encompassed by this effort has no more than 10 calendar months between its sale and the completion of harvest.
Ok that sounds awesome… but what does this mean for the menu? Wait… for… it….
Zirikana- Rwanda is out of season but we’ll have a little at the Frick building this week. Finca Matalapa- El Salvador and Anjilanaka- Bolivia are just about out of season, but we’ll have them this week and that will probably be it.
The first new coffee to arrive will be the new Direct Trade offering from Panama- El Machete. I know I’m excited because I haven’t had Intelli’s Panama before. This will soon be joined by new crops of Tanzania (another new one for me), Colombia (the Huila crop of Tres Santos) and the always popular Kenya. Next month we’ll have our choice from the latest crops of Costa Rica, Honduras, Nicaragua and Guatemala. We’ll have our hands full trying to decide what to put on the menu- that’s a nice problem to have. Whatever we have, you know it’ll be F-F-FRESSHHHH. Respect.
Harvest dates are rarely known at the cafe level and it would be a logistical feat for companies that have year round branded blends to keep in that margin. I mean, realistically, most coffees arrive 3+ months off harvest, often much more. You are lucky to get a coffee 3 months from milling but even if you did, there is no easy way to account for that or verify harvest dates. There is no way to hold this claim of seasonality to accountability.
What I do know is that doing nothing to protect the coffees and therefore slow degradation leaves you at the mercy of the shipping routes and ambient temp/humidity fluctuations in storage. Aroma will begin fading in the first few months, followed by acidity and finally sweetness. If you are lucky, it won’t begin to pick up jute flavors or pale with woody tones until the very end. Naturals are the worst because they just get so nasty unruly, sourdough bread, all kinds of spit bucket smells whereas the washed coffees just become empty dull.
I don’t see a strong difference between a coffee 8 months off harvest and one 10 off. Some coffees turn jute on the boat ride, much less lasting a good 10 months. A bag liner, vac sealing, or other methods can slow the process buying time but I don’t like the idea that fresh is a 10 month period after harvest. Then again, 10 months is an amazing feat for a huge company with year round blends.
I would love to get coffees that taste like that first 3 month window. Vac seal at origin, bag liners, expedited air freight. If the coffee really is that good, an extra 25-50cents/lb to slow degradation is worth it. Recycle the extra packaging and there will be little excuse to not invest in it. A large company could arrange this effectively without breaking a sweat. For a little guy like us, it takes tremendous energy and cost to arrange something like vac sealing and a hell of a lot of luck.
Not trying to bring you down, love the site, just felt like this topic needed some debate.
Hey Jaime- thanks for the feedback. Your site is great and tell Ben thanks for the Vac Pot primer. It was a lot to digest but I really appreciate the detail he and Simon provided.
Just a couple of thoughts on your post…
We don’t purchase blends from Intelligentsia, other than for espresso and our house coffee. The composition of these blends change throughout the year based on what is currently fresh and tasty. For example our espresso blend contained a little Rwanda for a short time, and now it’s a blend of three different Brazils. They’re doing single origin espresso now and so far we’ve had SO Bolivia and El Salvador shots to offer our customers but only for a limited time (a couple weeks each) as the coffees sell out quickly.
Our single origin coffees are typically available for a couple months once released, and then they are out of season. I guess another nice thing about working with Intelligentsia is that their coffees are very popular and they run through those lots quick. For example this week we got a brand new crop of Direct Trade Panama (Santa Clara). The harvest was completed in February. It’s looking like it will only be available for another month. WHAT? I like this coffee and am just getting used to it and it’ll be gone already? That’s awesome because something else will be ready to jump in and take it’s place on our menu. The Panama is shaping up to be consumed within 5-6 months of harvest completion. Not too shabby and the coffee tastes really delicious right now.
Of course as a small retailer I cannot follow Geoff Watts around the world and verify everything they are doing firsthand, so there is a little trust involved. Just like customers trust that we’re doing everything we can to keep our inventory fresh. We put roast dates on all our coffee bags, rotate the freshed coffee to the front of the store, and pull them once a week so we can quickly use them up while the flavors are at their best. I’ve been satisfied with the answers they’ve given when I’ve posed similar questions to what you have asked here- but the cool thing is that they seem to be working really hard to push that freshness envelope. I hope they are doing some of the things you mentioned with packaging and I’ll be sure to ask next time I chat with them. I definitely agree that if the coffee is that good it’s worth the extra $$ to preserve its flavor. We have at least half a dozen local roasters within walking distance of our shop (one of the better ones is across the street), but we’ve been so blown away by the flavors we get from Intelli’s coffees that we gladly pay more than DOUBLE the wholesale price to get it. Our pound prices are sometimes four times what the guy down the street is selling his coffee for, but ours doesn’t taste like cardboard.
Anyway- thanks for reading and I really appreciate your thoughts. We’ve been doing this for over two years and try to learn something more each day.