Kens Espresso Fueled Ramblings

From the very start, I have always loved the more pungent, strange and exotic coffee beans.

Brasil based blends? Blehh, boring.

Monsooned Malabar.

Monsooned coffees are dried in the moist monsoon wind for up to 5 months in large barns with the walls removed to let the air in. The monsoon process was created to closely mimic the way coffee tasted in the days before airplanes and much faster ships. The coffee would be at sea for up to 6 months before reaching its destination. In that time it sucked up the moist sea air and humidity, swelled up and became very pale.

Monsooned coffees like the malabar has a pungent, musky aroma. The beans have swelled up to the size of a roasted bean and become pale. Dried Monsooned coffee has a strange acidic hay like smell. The taste is very chocolate and nutty. One particular good crop had this amazing peanut butter hazel kinda thing going on.

I roast monsooned malabar to the start of second crack, that brings out the nuts and chocolate in them, but if you want it real musky and earthy you can try stopped sometime in the middle after second crack. These beans are LOUD, you will have no trouble hearing 1st and 2nd crack with these.

Monsooned Malabar is a crema producer like you wouldn’t believe. I often use it as a base in blends, 80% crema is normal, sod Robusta, if you want crema without the taste of burnt rubber try some MM instead.

Malabar is my absolute favorite coffee, some think I’m crazy but I do shots of this coffee as single origin, yum!  (Smacks lips)

Mandheling

If it’s spicy, caramel chokolate with a bit of musky fruitiness you’r after, you want some mandheling in your blends. Not as pungent as a Monsooned Malabar but still enough to easily make it in a blend with malabar. It’s also the perfect choice if you want something that punches through milk based drinks. For the most punch roast it to a rolling second crack and it will add lots of body to Lattes and Cappas.

Mandhelings are ugly as hell. Even grade 1 looks like a grade 3 of any other coffee, that’s just they way they are. Mandhelings also roasts unevenly and lighter than other coffees, so be carefull not to roast them to hard as the color can be deceiving.

As mandhelings are almost always dry processed they produce lots of crema  but bevare… there will be sticks stones and other assorted stuff in there waiting to fuck up your grinder so always go through the beans after you roast them and pick out anything that doesn’t look like a bean.

Yemen coffees

Strange, dark,  bitter, pungent, that’s the yemen coffees.

As other dry processed coffees Yemens will produce lots of crema, roasted to second crack they will also lend a reddish dark mottled color to the crema that looks absolutely gorgeus.  As with the Mandheling, look out for sticks and stones. If you are looking for something like Yemens but with more fruit to balance a blend try some Ethiopian Harrar. Ethiopian coffee is normally always wet processed, with the Harrar being the exception. Harrars have ton’s of fruit, a blueberry taste can often be had from the realy good Harrars.

If you noticed, I prefer to use Dry Processed (DP) coffee beans whenever I can.  Dry Processed coffees are crema bombs and are always more complex and musky in a good way. You can also try doing melange blends using these beans. A melange is simply beans that have been roasted to different levels on thier own and the blended after the fact. You can create some absolutely gorgeous SO blends this way. Roast the same bean to different levels and blend them. Roast level can totally change a coffee, at light roasts you can get floral and fruit notes, darker and you get spice, nuts, and chocolate.