Weekly Newsletter: Jamaican Blue Mountain

Jamaican Blue Mountain

Good morning!  I’m writing this e-mail early today as I attempt to leave the store by noon so that I can head out of town for a Bruce Springsteen concert.  It is an incredibly tumultuous day outside: a warm, windy and wet storm that kept me awake a lot of the night.  I was peaceful and cozy snuggled under my down comforter listening to the conversation out the window.  There were whistles and thumps as the raindrops swirled in the wind like a dizzy child stumbling off a merry-go-round.  I love waking to those sounds.

The best part about a grey winter’s day is waking up to a cup of hot coffee.  Today we have a few coffee-related treats for you.  First of all, we’re giving away one of the mugs in the header picture (or maybe more than one–I haven’t decided).  Head on over to our blog, here, and leave a comment for your chance to win.  We’ll let the random number generator choose the winner on Monday, so check back to see if it’s you.

Picture from the RSW Estate website

Next we have our annual holiday offer for fresh-roasted Jamaican Blue Mountain.  Jamaican is our most expensive varietal.  It is absolutely an amazing coffee, and the care that goes into processing these beans makes it a special treat.  This coffee comes in on an airplane, instead of the usual sea freight travel that most beans go through.

You can find more information about how the coffee cherries are harvested and processed on the RSW Estate website here.  Seldom do you find a coffee that is both grown and processed  in the same place.  This allows for extreme care and control to be taken with these beans.  The process is well-described in this article from our coffee broker, Knutsen Coffees.

On our end, we receive these beans in a wooden barrel, not a burlap sack.  We roast the beans to a city plus, just after the first crack.  This allows you to taste all the characteristics of the bean in the cup.  It is a remarkable cup of coffee.  When we roasted the Jamaican earlier this week, we did a French Press for all of our morning staff to sample: yum!  It’s a very smooth coffee, balanced, so that no one note sounds louder than the others.  It has sweet floral tones and a long finish, so that the flavor lingers as you sip.