#monogram coffee

We believe that coffee is an important part of story. People use coffee as a tool to connect with one another, to be alone, to cope with late nights, and survive early mornings.  Coffee is a tool often used to build community and tell story, and we’ve been privileged to see this and be a part of it first hand.

We’re launching a new online brew guide, featuring our friends and community brewing coffee in their own spaces! Celebrating our city and community is important to us, and we feel like this is a great way to use coffee to connect with and tell our friends’ stories.

A couple of weeks ago we had the chance to visit Caine Chow of Kokedama at his pop-up shop, Atelier Secret Kokedama in Stuff (102 - 709 11 Ave SW) to brew some coffee (recipe below!) and chat.

We’ve known Caine for a few years now, after he mysteriously dropped off a beautiful Kokedama at our Altadore shop on opening weekend. Since then we’ve collaborated on an exclusive Arabica coffee Kokedama, hosted Kokedama workshops in Fifth Ave, and had a lot of coffee talk.

Before we get into things, if you haven’t heard of Caine or Kokedama, you may still have noticed his signature planting style throughout small businesses in Calgary. “Kokedama is a planting style from Japan. In Japanese “koke” means moss, and “dama” means an egg-like shape, it's a very literal meaning of the planting style,” says Caine, “I take the plant, and I make a ball of soil around the roots, wrap that in moss, and then bind it together with thread...And it grows just like that.” This style showcases a Japanese minimalistic approach, putting the emphasis on the simplicity and beauty of the plant.

Along with being a kokedama and aesthetic genius, Caine is a very sufficient home brewer!

“The control [of brewing coffee] can be intimidating, but I don't think it has to be. And I think that if you have fun with it, and view it as an experiment.”

Currently he is brewing with an aeropress at home, so we thought we’d show him our recipe for this guide. Our method is ultra simple, great for lazy half-asleep mornings, camping trips, or brewing in kokedama work shops. We met Caine at the atelier, where he creates and houses so many incredibly beautiful Kokedamas.

“To me, coffee is a drink made out of a bean...it's super simple. But there's all this complexity to it. Where the beans are grown makes a difference...even though it's like the same variety of plant.

We’ve met a lot of small business and entrepreneurs that use the mindful practise of making coffee to centre themselves and get their days started. “For me it's a mindful practise, when I make coffee...I'm just there to make coffee. Whereas sometimes when I drink coffee that is not case. But I like making it because I can go through the whole process, and at least I am still in that mind frame where at least the first 2, 3, 4 sips are very conscious.”

Many of our customers, friends, and partners practise mindfulness and use coffee as a mindful tool as opposed to a caffeine fix. “If I miss it, then my day feels a little less calm. I find that if I start my day with those moments, it sets the pace for the rest of the day.” says Caine, regarding his daily two cups of coffee. “It's a little bit about the ritual. So even if I brew a coffee that doesn't taste great, I like the ritual of making coffee. It's like a meditation.”

Caine started full time with Kokedama in October 2016, diving into the crazy, challenging, and in his case, rewarding role as small business owner. “I was doing kokedama just for myself.. I was really enjoying it, but at the time I didn't quite understand what it was about kokedama that really resonated for me. That didn't come until recently. I was enjoying kokedama...but wondering if it would resonate with others.”

Fast-forward a couple years and Caine has built a community around Kokedama, creating new friends and collaborations. During our brew time with him, he shared his insights on community and loneliness. Although community wasn’t his original focus, he found himself in need of it, and the midst of it.

“While you're working on whatever it is you're starting, it will inevitably feel lonely somewhere along that journey. And probably more than once. The thing that I discovered is that even in the times that I felt like I was walking alone..that was actually just a self-centred thought. There were always people around me, and there were always people supporting me. They didn't always understand all the parts of it, but they were always there.”

We’re thankful for what Caine and Kokedama add to our community, to our shops, and our greater Calgary community.

Aeropress Brewing Recipe

You’ll need:

- Coffee! - Aeropress - Filters - Kettle & water - A scale - Timer (some scales have timers, otherwise just use your phone!) - Grinder - A spoon - Cup or server

To start, weight out 16.5g of coffee beans, and grind on medium/fine. Caine used a Porlex hand grinder in our brew guide, but you can use any conical burr grinder (hand mill or electric).

Place a filter in the black aeropress filter hold, and pour a small amount of hot kettle water on it to rinse. Shake excess water from the filter, or screw it onto the aeropress and allow it to drip off for a couple of seconds.

On your scale, place the aeropress with filter in place on top of your cup or server. Pour ground coffee into the aeropress, and tap the side to create an even coffee bed. Zero your scale.

Start your timer, as you begin to pour in your water (we used water heated to 200F). Pour quickly, making sure all the grounds get saturated. Fill your aeropress to 280g. Carefully move your aeropress and server together off the scale.

At 1:10, break the crust of coffee that will form at the top of your brew (this stops the extraction), and at 1:15 begin to plunge. Use even, slow, and firm force. You want to finish plunging the coffee at 1:45, so keep an eye on the timer and the amount of coffee left to plunge. It may take a few times to get a hang of pacing your plunge time.

Remove your aeropress, pour yourself a cup, and enjoy!

This week I am in the Volcan region of Panama at Ninety Plus Gesha Estates. I am here to participate in Maker Series 5. The Maker Series is a continuing effort to connect international baristas with one another and with production and experimentation on the farm level. This takes many forms, from collaborating and supporting one another at competitions, to sharing knowledge about different processing techniques. Each Maker has their own unique set of skills that they bring to the team and this creates an extremely unique environment to learn. Since arriving here, I have asked many questions, but never felt foolish for asking them – it is the perfect culture for learning!

While I am here I will cup coffee with the other Makers, design an experimental processing project, and start to learn more about what makes this farm special, unique, and exciting.

Ninety Plus Gesha Estates is in Volcan. Looking at the lush vegetation and the numerous shade trees, it is hard to believe that only 7 years ago this coffee farm was actually a cattle farm, filled with hard, compact soil and invasive grasses. Joseph Brodsky saw the potential in the land. Much of the farm borders protected forest providing biodiversity and native shade tree species, a river surrounds the property creating a natural protective boundary for the farm, and the winds from the Baru volcano and the ocean provide cool winds to the farm when the temperatures increase. Joseph went to work: He removed the invasive grass species carefully and with as little negative impact as possible, improved the soil, planted local vegetation and trees, and replaced the unhealthy coffee trees with healthy gesha.

This hard work and vision paid off. Parts of the farm that once were just pasture are now filled with birds and plants. The farm is so healthy and welcoming to the native species that a black jaguar lives nearby (the Ninety Plus team saw it a few weeks ago and we saw its paw prints on the river bed). The coffee trees look very healthy and the vegetation and terrain have created numerous microclimates that Joseph and the team are slowly identifying and cataloguing.

I’ll continue updating as we spend time on the farm exploring, experimenting, cupping, learning, and collaborating.  

- Ben

For this post on Ninety Plus Gesha Estate (NPGE) I am going to focus on two critical processes on the farm: Picking and processing. Coffee producers spend months and years devoted to preparing their land for coffee, choosing specific varieties, and building infrastructure. Once harvest begins, the time scale narrows. Now days and hours are measures of time and precision and data collection are the keys to unravelling the best practices that will produce exceptional coffee for that particular farm.

Picking coffee only when the cherry (coffee fruit) is ripe is essential to coffee quality. Coffees produced from ripe cherry are sweeter, more complex, and have more intense and vibrant flavors. Sound great, right? Just pick the red ones! Unfortunately, picking only ripe cherry is a laborious and expensive process. It is laborious because cherry might look ripe on one side, but have areas of under ripe fruit on the other. It is expensive because coffee doesn’t ripen all at once so pickers have to pass by each tree multiple times during the harvest and producers have to pay coffee pickers more per pound because the pickers volumes are lower.  Ninety Plus Gesha Estates invests very heavily in picking. They train their pickers and pay these pickers high wages. The results show in both the vibrant, deep reds of the freshly picked cherries and in the extraordinary flavours showcased on the cupping tables. It also had an unforeseen benefit: Ninety Plus is slowly developing a reputation in Panama as a farm that you want to work for and migrant pickers return year after year.

This year, Joseph has taken an additional step in picking by having the pickers do additional sorting in the fields to further separate the ripe cherry. Now each day’s harvest is from a specific plot and is separated into varying stages of ripeness. The results are fascinating. First, this additional separation greatly improved some of the first harvest lots. First harvest coffee generally is not exported because the cherry is unevenly ripened and developed too fast to transfer sweetness and complexity to the bean. Last year, Ninety Plus wouldn’t have had exportable coffee that early in the harvest; this year I tasted a coffee from the very first part  of harvest that is so good that Ninety Plus is keeping it as a separate micro-lot. By improving sorting, they added months and multiple batches to their harvest. This separation is also revealing how different stages of the harvest react to their different processing methods.

Over the last three years, Ninety Plus Gesha Estates performed countless experiments with processing. They record and catalogue these methods and are slowly building a roster of different taste profiles the span the flavour spectrum of coffee. At the moment, NPGE has five flavour profile designations that are different expressions of their of their washed, honeyed, and natural processed gesha: Lycello, Juliette, Perci, Silvia, and Lotus. These different profiles highlight something important for me that I didn’t fully consider before: We cannot accurately categorize coffee flavour profiles using only the three well known processing categories. The industry has already started acknowledging this with honey-processed coffees in Costa Rica. Initially there was just honey processing. Over time this process was developed and now there is white, yellow, and red honey processing. Each of these names designates not only a method (how much mucilage is left on the coffee), but also an anticipated flavour profile. Variations in washed and naturally processed coffees do not have the same type of easy classification and as a result they are often painted with a broad brush by baristas and consumers, but this is changing on farms!  For example, I tasted naturally processed coffees at NPGE that I thought were washed coffees because of the delicate flavours and squeaky clean acidity. More and more farmers are experimenting with processing and refining their processing methods to their farm’s unique terroir. I believe that the longer that this goes on, the less value broad terms like “washed “ and “natural” will hold for classifying coffee’s flavors, unless we add additional qualifying terms. NPGE’s flavour designations are one potential answer to this problem and also a great example of the diverse, often unexplored flavour profiles that exist beyond the three classic processing methods.

It would be remiss to talk the vision of NPGE and initiatives on the farm without mentioning the many, many people that live and work at NPGE. I will discuss this in my final Panama post!