I started drinking wine in what now feels like an antediluvian era... so many decades ago! And wine, like coffee, is an endless rabbit warren of choices. Countries, regions, growers, makers, fermentation processes, oak choice, at the start it felt completely overwhelming...
... so I worked on finding a guide. Professional wine tasters have so many more opportunities to taste wine than I do and I figured that finding a wine taster who shared similar preferences to my own would be useful! In the end one Australian and one British wine taster seemed to most closely match my own preferences. These two reviewers were my short cut into the world of wine and proved to be an invaluable resource!
I see coffee roasters providing the same service to coffee drinkers. Assuming that a coffee roaster uses high quality green beans, diligently reproduces certain roasting profiles, and manages to deliver very fresh coffee to their customers then a customer can find roasters that match their flavour preferences. The roaster has an opportunity to cup many different coffees... origins, farmers, processing stations, fermentation and processing methodologies, and then roasting those beans to their own specifications. The coffee roaster ends up being a useful filter to an enormous world of coffee choice.
This filtering process is incredibly important in the domain of co-fermented coffee. Co-fermentation is somewhat controversial in the coffee world. Some see it as a process which compromises coffee purity. We view it differently!
I received a message this morning from a most discerning customer:
"The Prototypers Cherry Bomb from last month was delicious. REALLY delicious. Is it a co-ferment?"
Cherry Madness is a cherry co-ferment combined with other processing techniques such as yeast mossto, carbonic maceration and black honey process... and it really is delicious. I sample roast and cup a heap of coffee... and I don't choose to purchase 95% of the coffees that I sample. This is the same whether the coffees are process in traditional ways or whether they are co-fermented. Whether the end product tastes good is the only determinant as to whether the coffee makes it onto the coffee menu at Garage Roasters.
I've found that there are a heap of poor co-ferments. In my experience they tend to taste like a chemistry experiment gone wrong (I'm really conscious that this last sentence doesn't read well and perhaps doesn't make too much sense, but I'm guessing that you get the idea!). And then there a small number of co-ferments which taste wonderful and add something special to a coffee. That element is what we're on the lookout for.
TLDR - we're not philosophically opposed to co-fermentation in coffee... we are, however, focused on discovering co-fermented coffees which display balance and harmonious flavour profiles which we can then share with a coffee audience whose taste preferences overlap with our own!
A heads up that we're almost out of the El Salvador Carlos Pola Anaerobic Honey Pacamara... here's a recent review:
"I very rarely repeat a bag as there's so much variety in the coffee world, but after trying these beans in one of the prototyper offerings, I knew I had to get them again. They are equally good as a pourover despite being roasted for espresso. A beautiful and complex anaerobic-- one of my favourite beans I've tried this year!"
To join the band of Coffee Prototypers customers click here.
To try Cherry Madness click here.
To access the last of our Carlos Pola Anaerobic Honey Pacamara from El Salvador please click here!
To learn about coffee roaster burners click here
To read about the roaster cooling tray click here