The first, and most unusual, of the three beans that we will explore will be the Guatemala Huehuetenango Finca San Vicente SHB.

Huehuetenango (way-way-ten-AN-go) is the only coffee in the world at present that has been singled out for preservation by Slow Food’s Ark of Taste program, which seeks to maintain biodiversity in the face of globalization, environmental damage, and the homogenization of taste.

In this case, the indigenous population of the Huehuetenango region, descended from various Maya tribes, have historically been isolated from the larger Guatemalan population; this fact, and the recent crisis in coffee prices, have made them among the poorest people in Central America.

Finca San Vicente

The Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity is working with the Presidium for Huehuetenango Highlands coffee in Guatemala to preserve coffee production in this area by developing high-end niche-market coffees.  The ultimate goal is to ensure the sustainability of coffee production in the region.

Finca San Vicente is situated at an altitude of 1300 to 1600 meters in the Cuchumatanes mountain range of Huehuetenango.  It is unusually humid, and its terrain is steep, with soil that has a high clay content.

While San Vicente has a few different cultivars, this lot of beans comes exclusively from their Bourbon varietal, from some of the higher trees in the farm.  Because those trees mature more slowly, the beans tend to be more dense, and therefore more flavorful.  These exhibit very nice milk chocolate overtones with a slight toasted-nut finish.

The second bean will be a classic coffee-lover’s coffee: an Ethiopia Yirgacheffe from the town of Idido, the Ethiopia Organic Idido Misty Valley.

This Yirgacheffe is produced by the Bagersh family, who have traded coffee in Ethiopia for generations.  Abdullah Bagersh has adopted his grandparents’ technique of dry-processing coffee by sun-drying it in its fruit, and then separating the dried fruit from the green coffee bean, rather than separating the undried fruit from the bean by agitating them in water—a technique adopted throughout the region in the 1960s.  For that reason, dry-processing is unusual for a Yirgacheffe, though it is still the dominant method of producing Harars.

Women sun-drying coffee at the

Bagersh Idido plantation

The problem is that sun-drying coffee is labor-intensive:  the fruit must be turned constantly for the first 48 hours of drying or it will spoil.  But the payoff is a more flavorful cup, redolent of the concentrated fruit that surrounded the bean while it dried.

Ethiopian dry-processed coffees can vary in terms of quality, because not enough effort is usually taken to ensure that only ripe coffee cherries are used, and the sun-drying process is, as often as not, less than systematic.  Abdullah Bagersh has worked hard to ensure that neither of these problems plagues the Idido Misty Valley, and the result is a truly exemplary Yirgacheffe.  When roasted properly -- quickly at first, to preserve the brightness and acidity, then more slowly to a medium roast to bring out the varietal notes -- the flavor of ripe fruit explodes on the tongue in a way I’ve never before experienced.  Really a remarkable taste sensation.

The final bean will be a favorite, but an unusually difficult one to pin down: a Sumatra Classic Mandheling.

The big problem with Sumatras is that they don’t follow the rules that most other coffees follow.  You typically can’t track a lot back to a single producer or estate, because most Sumatras are cultivated by small producers and brought to cooperatives where they are aggregated and sold.  Because soil and climate vary throughout Sumatra, and quality control standards don’t exist vary as well, consistency is difficult to ensure over time.

Moreover, some of the more prized characteristics of Sumatra coffee—its earthiness and richness—are actually a result, to a small degree, of exactly that same lack of quality control. 

Coffee producer in Sumatra

drying coffee cherries on a

plastic sheet in her back yard

The coffee cherries are often improperly and incompletely dried, and the resulting mold and insect damage, when substantial, results in a swampy, unpleasant taste typical of the low-grade Sumatras that pervade the market.  Many of these go unnoticed because Sumatras tend to be so heavily roasted.  In very small quantities, however, they lend an earthy depth to the cup that is prized by coffee drinkers.

Why bother with such a quarrelsome and mercurial bean?  Because, to me anyway, a superb Sumatra is the essence of what good coffee should be.  I tried four different Sumatras and finally settled on this one, a very nice Lake Toba Mandheling from Sumatra Typica trees that has good earthiness and peppery overtones, without even a hint of acidity.

More details about these coffees—along with many of these details—can be found at the Sweet Maria’s website.