Daniel of Arabica
brew, drink, repeat
Posts Tagged ‘Sumatra’
The land of Gayo
I’d never had the opportunity to taste anything from De La Paz before I picked up their Sumatra Gayo land ”med. roast”. I’d heard of them through other blogs but I had never seen their beans for sale anywhere until I decided to check out The Mission neighborhood’s newest café addition: Haus. Haus is one of the newer quality-focused cafés that seem to be appearing in more and more locations. In lieu of establishing their very own roasting operation – and all that entails – these cafés instead carry beans from one, two or a few highly respected roasters. Ideally, just as in the case of the roast-our-own bunch, the skill level is high and the end products are both delicious and beautiful to behold. Haus, as of this writing, carries beans from both Ritual and De La Paz. I picked up a bag of and headed to “the lab”.
The beans and the grounds
I’ve talked about Sumatra’s appealing aroma in whole bean form before: roasted chiles and tobacco. To that description, In the case of De la Paz’s Sumatra Gayo land, add a hit of berry and a hint of sweet toasted bread. The grounds were another matter entirely. In ground form the Gayo land’s whole bean fragrance blossomed into a complex – and for me, highly evocative – fruity tobacco symphony.
In the press pot
“Lab” time was short on this one and so my notes are limited to a press-pot preparation. This is one of the more simple and direct “Tasting notes” you’ll find here at Daniel of Arabica. To that end, the cup was relatively lively for a Sumatra and managed to retain some of the aroma found in its ground state. Full bodied, the cup also had a sweetness about it that lingered and increased its presence as the cup became cooler and cooler. Nice.
Mysterious
Funny but I can’t find any reference to this coffee on the De La Paz website. I put an email in to the folks at DLP. We’ll see what comes of that. In the mean time, the best place to look for a bag would be to go Haus. Its worth a trip anyway.
Small luxuries
During most of the time that I knew him Duffy, my step-grandfather, was a desert-dwelling, pipe-smoking, gold rush-era style cowboy nomad. Residing either in the desert or on the road in his van, we saw him around two times a year and it was usually because there was a gun show in town1.
The smells I associate with him are predominantly of a, shall we say, unpleasant nature. Big fan of the road, this man. Not as big a fan of the shower. On occasion, during one of his visits, my mother was able to convince him that it was in his best interest to scrub off the grime and odor but for the most part he remains, in my mind, a kind and quiet but soiled and sourly aromatic character. Except for the smell of his pipe tobacco.
Now, I never got into smoking. Lucky I didn’t, too – I’m not good at quitting bad habits – but to this day I love the smell of tobacco. It all started, I believe, with Duffy and his store of pipe tobacco. Maybe I remember the deep, rich, slightly musty but fruity aroma of of his chosen brand because, while the aroma of it matched his own personal one in it’s – dare I say – richness and fecundity, the expeience was the polar opposite in terms of pleasure and aesthetics. It was a small bit of luxury in an otherwise grossly unkempt lifestyle.
It’s said a single smell can bring back a flood of emotions and memories of people, places or events. Recently I had an Indonesian coffee – De La Paz’s Sumatra Gayo land [sic]2 – in “the lab”. The first time I went to brew it, and with the grounds sitting in my grinders’ catch bin I was struck by just how much they smelled like Duffy’s pipe tobacco. It brought me back to when I was a kid, my brother and I surreptitiously peeling the lid off of the can of tobacco so that we could fully take in its intoxicating fragrance. It was such a wonderful sensory experience – I couldn’t wait to share it with my brother – and it reminded me why I love tasting, and therefore smelling, quality coffee and why, for that matter, I find such enjoyment from any other quality food experience. Weather I am swooning over the latest coffee that ends up in “the lab”, reveling in a beautifully crafted pizza at any one of my favorite pizza places3, or enjoying the justly earned rewards of well cooked meal, I love making those connections, firing and building those synapses in the brain that are so intimately connected with memory. I can’t always identify the exact referent for what I am smelling but the richness of the ambiguous flood of memories and emotions that come rolling in makes for an amazingly evocative sensory experience. The elation I feel when I am, indeed, able to make those connections is worth far more than the money I spent on the bag of beans.
Its a small luxury. I’m all about the small luxuries.
Footnotes
- Later in his life, he landed his dream job – and settled down in his own way – as the Sheriff of Calico Ghost Town [↩]
- sic |sik| adverb
used in brackets after a copied or quoted word that appears odd or erroneous to show that the word is quoted exactly as it stands in the original, as in a story must hold a child’s interest and “enrich his [ sic ] life.”
In this case, I’m indicating that this is the exact way that “Gayo land” was printed on the bag. [↩]
- those favorites being Pizzaria Delfina in San Francisco and Pizzaria Picco across the bridge in Larkspur [↩]
First Impressions: Haus
It’s another day in The Mission. There must be another café opening. To the long list of “coffee v3.0″ (aka CV3) cafés in the Mission neighborhood of San Francisco, you can add one more: Haus.
Haus opened just last month and, as far as San Francisco café concepts go, it’s definitely on the novel side. Most cafés that have opened up recently here in San Francisco, it seems, have a roaster attached to them – they roast in-house and sell their own beans – but there’s another model for the CV3 café that hasn’t been put into practice as much here as it has on our other coast’s nascent coffee mecca, New York City. That model presents the same care and respect for the bean as the in-house roasting group but features coffee from either respected local roasters or from roasters with a solid reputation from all over the country. Haus veers more toward the former by featuring coffees from two highly respected local roasters: Ritual and De La Paz. Haus offers espresso and press-pot coffee. When I came in, they were offering Ritual’s Hopscotch on the espresso machine and De La Paz (a Costa Rica…whose name escapes me and which I can’t find any reference to on their website) from the press. I’m not sure weather that lineup will change – I’d love it if there was some variety – and I’m also unsure weather Ritual will exclusively preside over the espresso side while De La Paz takes the press-pot. I’ll need to look into this a bit more.
This scrap is a preliminary look – I’ll have a more detailed exploration after I’ve given Haus a few good tries – so I won’t go into excruciating details at this point. But, a few points:
What I liked:
- I found the decor to be quite pleasant. All “bare” unfinished wood cool and stark. I found the vibe (if you will) to be relaxed.
- They have a back patio and bench seating out front. Hopefully The Mission will serve up some of it’s trademark weather so both can be put to good use.
- Wi-fi. I like it. Yeah, I’m one of those people.
- The multi-roaster concept is a good one and I think could stand better representation within the raft of cafés popping up in SF. A small selection of De La Paz and Ritual beans are available for sale. I bought a bag of the Sumatra Gayoland from De La Paz – which is also curiously absent from the De la Paz site) and will review it shortly.
What I didn’t care for as much:
- The shot of Ritual’s “Hopscotch” espresso that was pulled for me could have used a little more TLC. The crema was thin and broke apart at the first slosh of the cup. It was thin tasting as well. To Ritual’s credit, it wasn’t horrible, but greater attention could have been paid, I think. Maybe it’s a training issue, maybe it’s just inconsistency. Time will tell.
- This isn’t necessarily a knock on Haus but the Costa Rica from De La Paz was nothing extraordinary. It was the classic C.R.: lemony acidity, light body. Good, solid but not great. Maybe I’m just spoiled now, though.
Like I said, preliminary. Gotta give a café a chance, after all. In the meantime, check out Man Seeking Coffee’s take on Haus. I’ll be back.
Second chances with Ritual’s Sumatra Sidikalang
I was given a bag of Ritual’s Sumatra Sidikalang a few months ago. It was bran-spankin’-new. Not even a label on the bag, just a scrawl in ball point. “I have something you should try”, he said. “It’s a Sumatra but it’s a little different. Let me know what you think.” And so I did. I brewed it up two ways, wrote down what my palette said to me and sent it off to him as soon as I had the opportunity. But it never ended up here. The rest of my life got in the way. Time passed and soon it seemed pointless to put something up on this blog that would be of no benefit to anyone but myself and my own nostalgia. Enough time had passed, I thought, that Ritual was probably out of the Sidikalang or at least very close to it.
A funny thing happened on my way to a cupping
Fast-forward a few months. It was a friday. M’lady and myself were reveling in a new-found freedom that finally allowed us the opportunity to take part in Ritual’s weekly – and open to the public – cupping (and if you are at all confused about what a cupping is, I have a couple posts for you to read). There were six coffees lined up on the table: a Colombian, an African, three different coffees from Brazil and a Sumatran. But not just any Sumatran. The very same Sumatra Sidikalang I failed to write about a couple months earlier. Not only was there still more to be had, it was being given the honor of being a representative coffee in a cupping hosted by the lead roaster himself. “Well I’ll be damned”, I thought. “There’s still time after all”.
A different kind of Sumatra, indeed
Sumatra is an earthy coffee. If there is nothing else Indonesian coffees are known for, it is for that quality. Much of it is in the processing. That earthiness comes from…well…earth: beans dried on the ground, an errant stick or leaf in contact with the beans during the process. From what I understand, it’s a unique region marked, partially, by difficulty in getting coffee from the source i.e. at the level of the farmers themselves. Beans from all over a given area are brought together into large batches for processing. Quality control is difficult. Apparently, this Sumatra has a different story, one that is notable for better quality control, more specific sourcing and a somewhat cleaner processing method. And that has made all the difference.
I have always enjoyed the aroma of Sumatra more than the flavor. Chile peppers. That’s what has always been, for me, the most alluring quality of whole bean or ground Sumatra. But there has never been much in the way of follow-through in the cup. Wine-y, sometimes, earthy, full-bodied and smooth to be sure but always a bit of a disconnect between what I smelled and what I tasted. It was, at once, both a unique and disappointing experience. Not the case with this Sumatra, though. This one was surprising.
First, there was the aroma of the whole beans which were true to my experience of the origin in that signature chili-pepper aroma. The grinds had a sweet melon fragrance which carried over nicely into the brewed cup and the aftertaste of the batch I made in the french press. Additional notes on the french press preparation were a hint of vanilla and a bit of toasted bread with some sweet tobacco in the aftertaste. This was bright for a Sumatra and wonderfully so. In fact this, finally, is where this Sumatra became not just a surprisingly complex Indonesian but, in fact, fulfilled the enigmatically aromatic promise of every whole bean Sumatran whose aroma has ever wafted up into my nasal passages. Chilies. Roasted chilies. Ahhhhhh, what a sweet, sweet fragrance. And there it was in the cup in the form of a fine and balanced acidity. A first. A fine cup of press-pot coffee but what about other preparations?
I also use a Chemex and I have become a fan, of late, of how miraculously different a coffee can taste when funneled through its dense paper filter. Instead of the dulling of flavors I ordinarily associate with the pour-over paper cone method, the Chemex possesses the ability to magnify certain flavors or even uncover some unavailable in other preparations. The Chemex also has the wonderful habit of giving off an intense aroma from the very first pour over the grinds (which is not the case with the press-pot) and so chilies were present from the first drop of water in the filter cone. The Chemex seemed to bring out a nutty, earthy aroma that was not present in the cup when I used the press-pot. It was full-bodied and sweet with less of the chilies and more melon in the acidity.
A few more things
Notable in both preparations was the tenacity of the acidity. The Sidikalang’s acidity, in its tenacity, reminds me of the Costa Ricas I have had. Here, it is more pleasent, though and I enjoyed it’s presence all the way through the cup. Sweetness, as well. The sweetness is very rich and fairly concentrated.
One of the more surprising aspects of both cups is the absence of the aspect that I, and I am sure many people, expect out of a Sumatra — or for that matter almost any indonesion — that of a pronounced and overriding earthy character. In the Sidikalang the earthiness of the cup was more than balanced out by the other aspects of the coffee and it was interesting to see what a Sumatra could taste like when it was subjected to a different processing method. It goes to show you how much of what I have come to expect out of many coffees has as much to do with the processing method as with any inherent quality of the bean itself.
Where to get it…
There are three places I know of to get Ritual’s coffees, two of which are sure to net you some of the Sumatra Sidikalang. The best place to pick some up is at any one of their retail locations (hmmmm…I sound like and ad). The fresher the better and, especially in the case of Ritual who roasts in-house in their Mission neighborhood café, that is where you are going to get it the freshest. Second, Ritual has an online store. Both of those are probably your best way to be sure to get a bag of the Sidikalang. There have also been sightings of Ritual’s beans in my local Whole Foods here in Oakland.
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