Kauai Coffee Company Estate Peaberry – Mutation can be a good thing. E&E W/O
Written: Aug 07 '04
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Peaberries, awesome citrus and sweet flavor
Cons: Pricey
The Bottom Line: It's worth it. This is one of the best coffees around.
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| puckmugger's Full Review: Kauai Coffee Company Estate Reserve Peaberry - Gre... |
▪ Ack! Mutant Coffee?
Alrighty then, you might be wondering how I could rate a coffee with the full five stars and use the word mutation in the title. But in fact there are a couple of pretty cool mutations in Kauai Peaberry. Both make them a better coffee.
▪ What’s a Peaberry?
The first item is a normally occurring genetic anomaly in most varieties of coffee trees. Perhaps you were already pondering the significance of the word peaberry in the name of this bean. The normal, run of the mill coffee bean that you are likely used to seeing is flat on one side and domed on the other – essentially a half sphere. This is a normal coffee bean which is found inside each cherry, the fruits on coffee trees. In fact, you’d normally find a pair of them butted up against one another, flat sides together.
Sometimes there is only one bean inside the cherry. This is the small, almost perfectly round peaberry. Coffee connoisseurs prize a peaberry because it has a much different flavor than its non-mutated brothers. It is also exceedingly rare. Only about 3% of any given coffee harvest is peaberrys. Further, a peaberry is smaller than most normal beans dropping a typical harvest to less than 1.5% by weight.
▪ What’s the other Mutation
Flavor is the other mutation. In Hawaii, coffee was grown for a long time alongside crops of pineapple and sugar cane. As the leaves from the co-existing plants fell and fed the coffee trees they slowly changed the flavors of Hawaiian coffees making them among the sweetest, most citric coffees on the planet. They aren’t quite as fruity as my favorite Ethiopian Coffees are, but they are a little different type of coffee and every bit as good in their own right.
▪ Maybe Mutation isn’t all bad
Kauai is a great morning coffee when roasted lightly. We used a breakfast roast, just enough to bring out the taste of the coffee without adding any smokiness to it. I always use a French Press to bring out the full flavor and texture of a coffee that I am tasting.
The flavor of a coffee is obviously one of the top priorities in discussing it. Kauai Peaberry is, as mentioned a very sweet coffee. It has a touch of citrus flavor to it, but not nearly as pronounced as Ethiopian Yirgacheffe’s slap in the face orange. Instead it is a nearly unidentifiable hint of banana or pineapple residing just beneath a mild layer of sweet coffee.
At a breakfast roast, Kauai is rather light in body with a smooth and clean finish. The acidity is high in a good way. This is what gives Kauai its fruity, sweet flavor. In a bad coffee high acidity will make the coffee taste like burnt rubber, so don’t get this confused. High acidity in gourmet coffee is generally a prized attribute, not a problem.
▪ Price
Kauai is one of the more expensive coffees on the market. It will cost $20 to $30 a pound. If you see it cheaper than that it is almost always a blend with some inexpensive Columbian or Panamanian making up the majority of the mix. The question that comes to mind - Is it that good that it costs three times as much as normal coffee?
How good it is will be up to you. I can tell you that it is a darn good coffee and your tongue might take issue to that fact. Personally I think that it’s that good. However, it isn’t expensive because it’s that good. It’s expensive because of this thing called minimum wage. We pay our employees more to pick coffee in the U.S. than in any other country.
I don’t want to argue over whether minimum wage is a good or bad thing. All I will say is that it makes for expensive coffee.
▪ Shade Grown
Shade grown coffee has become a hot topic of late. Essentially all good coffee has to be shade grown. There are two types of coffee, the older (and better) Arabica, and the newer Robusta. No gourmet coffee is produced from Robusta plants which can grown at lower altitudes and in full sun. All Arabica needs to be grown under the canopy of larger trees or some other form of shade.
It’s funny how people get all riled up about whether their coffee is shade grown or not and don’t know what the major issue is. In many third world countries the larger shade trees that were supplying habitats for migrating birds have been removed and the cheaper Robusta coffee is grown instead or Arabica.
In Hawaii this isn’t really an issue for a couple reasons. I might be wrong on this as I’m no ornithologist, but I don’t think that birds really migrate to Hawaii. The other part of the equation is that coffee was never really shade grown in Hawaii. Apparently the weather patterns create enough daily cloud cover that there is no need for tall trees.
▪ Final Thoughts
Kauai Coffee Company Estate Peaberry is possibly the best coffee for early mornings. I cannot think of another cup that I would prefer to wake up to. The price will turn off more than one person to this great bean, but take my word and try it at least once. It’s worth it.
This is the Excellent half of my submission to the Excellent and Excruciating Write Off hosted by captaind and slarter
You can read the Excruciating half of the entry - Millstone Columbia Supremo
Recommended:
Yes
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