The big trip to Italy and the WBC is closing in. I am currently reading the Lonely Planet guide to Italy, trying to brush up on italian history and to understand more about the culture. I've been to Italy twice before, but both times I was accompanied by my family and as much as it was cosy to be there together with them, I remember wanting to spend more time on my own exploring. Now I get a chance to do that, and not the least going to Italy as a coffee enthusiast. I have already marked some coffee places on my city map of Rome :). Among them Caffe Greco, Caffe Tazza d'Oro and St.Eustachio.
Been drinking a lot of drip lately. The cupping session at Stockfleth's really got me hooked on the El Salvadorian "Kilimanjaro" coffee. Beautiful fruity, candy like stuff that can be drunk in vast quantities without tiring of it. I am impressed by the roasting as well. The guys who roast at SH really knows how to roast for drip. Sometimes they roast drip too light for my taste, but this one is spot on. The cupping session was a sort of eye opener for me in the sense that I realized that my popper roasts can never rival the slow roast of SH and other commercial roasters. I will of course continue to roast at home because it is fun and because the superfresh roast is a virtual explosion of aroma and flavour.
I picked up some Mocca Yirgacheffe today as well as a bag of the Stockfleths espresso blend. Yirgacheffe is a classic with characterstic winey notes. A favourite among many coffee connoisseurs.
"In the wet-processed coffees of the Yirgacheffe region, a lush, deep-soiled region of high rolling hills in southwestern Ethiopia, this profile reaches a sort of extravagant, almost perfumed apotheosis. Ethiopia Yirgacheffe, high-toned and alive with shimmering citrus and flower notes, may be the world's most distinctive coffee."
Some links to more information about Ethiopia as a coffee producing nation:
