Thursday, April 20, 2006


the los lirios c.o.e.

today i'm going to talk about the coffee i received yesterday from scott & jessica from batdorf, the 2005 colombian second harvest c.o.e., the "los lirios." lirios means irises or lilies in spanish.

so appropriate, as you will soon see. . .

got your scaa flavor wheel handy? as promised, i made a half-pot of this coffee in the chemex in the so-called oren proportion.

and once i did, i understood why scott loved this coffee so, even tho' it wasn't one of the highest-ranked coffees by the end. why?

lemme say something very strange and wild, and then explain myself. drinking this coffee is like watching nureyev dance.

hold that thought, please.

scott roasted this coffee, roast-dated the 17th, to what i'd normally call full-city. but it's hard to describe this: many beans show small patches of oil, but the roast color isn't as dark as you'd expect for showing oil; actually the color is a light-city color, but with oily bits.

when freshly ground, this coffee has an intense, narcotic floral fragrance -- scott says stargazer lilies -- and i think that's pretty close.

it's definitely in the running with that jasmine/gardenia/ tuberose thing. you know, heady, intoxicating.

the flavors appeared this morning as malty, nutty and with a lot of lovely vanilla-like syrupy aromas. this coffee, to my mind, is the textbook definition of the sparkling taste.

scott talks about the black currant flavor, but i didn't see that this morning in the chemex. i'll look for that in the vac pot tomorrow.

what i want to note is the silky, supple body and the cup's elegant balance. here's where the nureyev comes in: it's a wiry, balanced cup.

just like looking at the above linked picture of nureyev -- this coffee has a pefectly taut, balanced, muscular, and equal "line," so to speak.

many coffee lovers grew up with some version of the classic colombian cup, and i think it's those people who would really love this coffee without quite knowing why. the why is that this bean's a gorgeously refined version of that classic profile.

but not little-dogs-and-heavy-drapes-prissy-refined. nope: nureyev's-feral-athletic-dancing refined.

i think love this coffee, can you tell?

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