Burundi

Have I mentioned recently that we have the best employees in the world?  Well my opinion might be slightly biased, but they’re sure amazing!  Last night seven of them voluntarily came after the store closed so that we could reset our racks.  I had a goal of removing a middle rack from each set of the gourmet food shelves so that we could surround our gift baskets with the product that is included in each one.

Finishing up Gift Baskets After Hours

It was a larger project than I expected (that’s a lot of product to remove and replace!), but I have such a great team that they kept working without complaining: even those who had already worked a full shift.  I am so grateful for each of you who kept a smile on your face even when there were no customers in sight.  I truly love my employees!  Last week they also came, voluntarily and after hours, and helped me de-clutter our storage area.  What a team.

This week we’ve got an entirely new coffee for you: one that we’ve never carried before in our thirty years of being in business.  Actually, we tried so many coffees today that I had to pause and remember which one I was writing about.  You’ll hear about them all in the next several weeks, but today I started with Monsooned Malabar at home, moved on to the Burundi when I arrived at work, then was treated to a cup of fragrant Jamaican Blue Mountain and finished later with a taste of Aged Sumatra.  Whew!  I think I better go fill my mug with water to balance all that coffee.

Emptying Product off the Shelves

This week’s coffee of the week is the Burundi.  When we first roasted this on Tuesday, I was amazed by the flavor.  I was expecting it to be much more acidic, with strong floral and citrus tones, like our Kenya or our Tanzanian Peaberry.  Instead it is a very earthy coffee, much more full-bodied than our other African beans, and it even has chocolate-y tones, more often associated with a Central American bean.

I don’t know much about the country of Burundi.  Honestly, I had to look it up on Wikipedia to learn that it is one of the world’s most impoverished countries, that it contains the headwaters of the Nile, and that it is surrounded by Rwanda, the Congo, and Tanzania.  I do know that this is a wet milled coffee, from the Kayanza Province in the northeast of the country, and that it is a bourbon varietal.  One reason that we have not carried a Burundi coffee in the past is that they were sold as mixed lots: it is only recently that specialty coffees have become available from Burundi.

You can try the Burundi this week and enjoy the deep flavors as I did by  mentioning the code highlighted above (it’s best employees–go ahead, tell them I said so).  Look for other unusual coffees to be offered in the weeks to come: we’ve been sampling some great ones!

–Holly Fike