Kohana Coffee

Kohana Coffee’s answer was to your call – you loved it – we bottled it. It’s being used by chefs, mixologists, foodies and coffee appreciators with endless creativity in favorite drink and food recipes. This Organic and Fair Trade coffee concentrate holds a world of possibilities.

We’ll plan to put fan recipes on the site so if you have one please send to info@kohanacoffee.com and we’ll include with those we’ve formulated.

Thank you to all who have helped champion this endeavor – your support is immeasurable. Our Kohana hats are tipped in your direction!

Sometime things just fall into place…as was our experience on the last day in Boquete. One grower, who’s coffee we’ve been selling for years, was on our list but we had yet to connect. Casa Ruiz holds a rather historic place in our business; not only as a mainstay in our coffee lineup from day one, but also acting as somewhat of a visual achievement of success for us. The framed coffee bag in the photo was given by Kohana Coffee staff to Victoria Lynden (owner of Kohana Coffee) – she helped roast the inaugural beans that came from that bag  -  and it just happened to be the Casa Ruiz Panamaria.

We tried to set a meeting with Casa Ruiz – which wasn’t so easy. They are busy people producing award winning coffees. Because we couldn’t imagine going back to Austin without meeting; we basically showed up at their doorstep. Actually, we started off at Cafe Ruiz which happens to be one of the best coffee houses in Panama. Through great internal efforts the Casa Ruiz brand has expanded straight to the consumer by perfecting brew techniques and using top of the line equipment. I had a Pacamara pour over that stayed in my dreams that night. All I could think about the next day was getting back there to duplicate the experience.  Before leaving we stopped by the office to ask if it was possible to talk with anyone about purchasing green coffee.  After a small wait Dr. Maria Ruizwalked out.

Because I have a yen for the behind the scenes of businesses, my research had taken me to the history of this family and their path to greatness. Specifically, I was fascinated by Dr. Ruiz’s journey and the acclaim she had received along the way. I couldn’t believe our great fortune in having her accross the table. We spoke for a while about what Kohana was looking for and then moved to the cupping lab. La Berlina Organico,  a Catuai, the Pacamara, a Cerro Horqueta micro lot, a non-estate Berlina and a Ruiz profile coffee were on the table. Cupping these coffees was an exceptional experience to put it lightly. Dr. Ruiz is a rare person in our coffee industry – she ‘shapes’ things – and we admire that about her.

Since we’ve been back our attention has been on the roasted sample coffee’s we carried home that we’re currently cupping.  Those samples are;  both La Berlina’s (conventional and organic) as well as the Caminos del Zuto Pacamara. I carry them with me wherever I go (for safekeeping, of course). La Berlina Organico – wow. When grinding this coffee today a waft of cinnamon came up…cinnamon??! There’s just so much to it – so many layers. We’ve decided that our favorite coffees do have just this; a part ‘A’, a part ‘B’, a part ‘C’, etc. Similar to a symphony of sorts in your mouth – the pieces unravel before you. It’s the type of coffee that stays in your mind as a reference point.  This can be a good and/or bad thing. Coffee snobbery – ‘yeh yeh’ in Panamanian terms – can be a lonely place in a location where there are no good coffees.  Fortunately, the Western Highlands of Panama is not in that category.

We look forward to future business with Dr. Ruiz. Her family’s continued quest for distinction in coffees of highest quality is worthy of all our attention. We love to see the unending search for excellence in all parts of her business. It’s fascinating, really.

Tito Vargas and his quite talented interpreter Jason

Finca La Milagrosa

Today was our first day up into the coffee farms. Our first stop was Finca La Milagrosa, run by Tito Vargas. What we appreciated about this farm is Tito’s ability to create such good coffee with what he has…a beautiful piece of land, discarded car and machine parts, ingenuity and sheer determination.  La Milagrosa translates to ‘the miracle’ and he believes each stage of his path toward great coffee has involved many.

Tito sample roasted a small batch for us to complete the explanation of his cycle – and one of my favorite useful items he made was a screwdriver welded to a spoon to act as his roast sampler. With the patina of many a roast – this qualified as a prized possession. You can see why.

A screwdriver welded to a spoon to act as his roast sampler.

Left side, currently working sample roaster – on right, still missing that one key piece

His newly created sample roaster (on the right) is not ready as he’s still missing one integral piece he needs to recycle from another piece of machinery. The roaster on the left is his currently working sample roaster – check out the front end made of a headlight casing.

Tito grows 7 different varietals of coffee including Gesha and has created quite a bit of acclaim for his small farm full of good coffee. We look forward to bringing samples home to play with.

The Entrance Sign to Don Pepe Estate

Don Pepe Estate

After a brilliant lunch of local fare at Nelvi’s we met Tony Vasquez from the somewhat infamous 4^th generation of coffee farmers, Don Pepe Estate. The farm, located at approx 1500 meters in a lush mountain side setting, is where we get our first view of coffee truly growing straight up a mountain. My first question is how they possibly harvest – imaging the challenge – but the answer is that the local pickers have done it with talent and ease for generations. He also joked that they used a shotgun to seed it – which didn’t seem so farfetched. I wish I had a better photo to include for you to get the visual as it was amazing.

Washed Coffee Sun Dried "African Bed" Style

Mr Tony Vasquez talking about current harvest and how heavy rains in Boquete have affected this years crop

We’re interested in Don Pepe’s superior cupping Bourbon’s from this estate. Historically they are a great balanced, sweet coffee that fits a profile we wish to fill. Although plenty of coffee is already harvested, it’s still in a critical rest period that we don’t want to rush. We anxiously wait for this coffee to be ready in March.

Bourbon varietal waiting for lucky roasters

We arrived Panama City Sunday night – just in time to get to hotel and try to grab a drink paired with a small bite of local fare. What we got was a bad glass of ‘merlot’ (which I opted out of…life is too short) and a beef dish that we spent the rest of the meal trying to figure out: ‘is it pork, is it processed – my take was that it was jerky…in the slim jim family.

Panama City is a gateway city – full of commerce and new business opportunity. Since the ‘take back’ of the Panama Canal in 1999 the city has experienced transformation into new possibility and growth. That may sound more romantic that it should – but you can see the country influx of new all around you.

Today I prep for the trip to Boquete tomorrow. We fly from Panama City to David early tomorrow morning and take a 45 minute car ride to our hotel in Boquete. This area of Panama is referred to as the Western Highlands and is a perfect hot bed for some of the finest highland coffees in the world.

Some of the coffees in Boquete are shade grown, a more traditional method where the plant grows in the shade of a forest or among trees planted for this purpose. Trees provide habitat to hundreds of bird species – many being migratory birds. Bird watching is a treasured pastime here. The other advantages are that trees preserve the chemical balance of the soil, prevent erosion and produce a natural mulch which can act as a fertilizer. It’s also believed to help protect the crop from pests requiring less pesticide – always a plus. Those that aren’t shade grown are usually that way because of the needed sunlight, how much cloud cover they experience and where the coffee is grown in relation to the mountains and when sunlight hits them.

Coffees here are normally harvested by hand from October to February. A large part of the workforce are migrant Ngobe-Bugle farm workers who are critical to the coffee industry in Panama. The harvesting is done by hand to enable fully formed, ripe red fruit to be pulled from the tree rather than under ripe/immature green that might get pulled as well in mechanical harvesting. Once dried (most are sun dried, a process that takes 8-12 days) the beans are stored for approximately 3 months for a curing (aging) of sorts. This coffee is ready to sell in late March or early April. Obviously, this isn’t an perfect opportunity to taste test new coffees as most are ‘resting’ – but our opportunity came now and seeing the promise of new crop on the tree is a rare treat.

Coffee is on!

Piper

The short answer has to be, ’because we love it’. If you’re into great coffee, and totally appreciate tasting something unique that differentiates itself from other products in the same category – you’d be a great tester at Kohana’s cupping table. We look for coffee’s that make us involuntarily say ‘ahhh’, or mutter, ‘mmm’. We taste test, re-test, modify, compare and experiment on a daily basis – always challenging ourselves against our norms.

Still not convinced?

1)    We do it because we couldn’t find great coffee and wanted it – badly. After falling in love with great tasting coffees in Hawaii years ago we searched everywhere to replicate the experience and found very little. That should be reason enough to start a business, right?

2)    We do it because we want to share that experience with those we know love it as much as we do. And there are a lot of you out there – thank God – and your input is invaluable to how we do business.

3) We do it because we want to share with those that are open to fresh, new and mostly better ways to drinking coffee. We love turning people on to something new that they can fall in love with.

4)    We do it because it challenges us – daily – and we never stop learning through this process. Specialty Coffee as an industry demands excellence and that is our motivator.

5)    We do it because it helps us meet you. Our team consists of appreciators – we find something great and want to tell you about it. Luckily, Austin has a large grouping that respects and cherishes the idea of just this; unique, great offerings worth the extra effort to obtain. But it doesn’t stop there – through Twitter and FaceBook we’ve gotten to interact and learn from many more of you out there. Thank you for finding us!

6)    We do it because it’s fun. Oh yeah, it’s non-stop hard work – but working that hard at something you love, for the most part, doesn’t feel like ‘work’. We love that.

So, our question back – why do you do what you do?

photo by Gservo’s Photography

A major coffee company recently found through Facebook and Twitter research that the two most used words were ‘with’ and ‘you’. Two little words that rose to the top of all coffee industry jargon to encapsulate what drinking this little brown gem was all about.

Victoria Lynden and I had the great pleasure of being in New York last week – many things are good about this but getting out of our ‘day to day’ had to be at the top. As a coffee enthusiast I looked forward to new shops showcasing specialty coffees and seeing how coffee niches are ever evolving. The trip, although NOT all about coffee (which I was reminded on several occasions), did not disappoint. With pre-trip help from @gservo and a general refining of my ‘list of wants’ – I forged a small window of opportunity where I could get visit my inner coffeegeek.

On my short list was McNulty’s Tea & Coffee where we sell Kohana’s Org Ethiopian Harrar, Org Ethiopian Sidamo and Org Sumatra. David Wong, who runs the store with his father, is the perfect coffee conversationalist and we love being included in this 115 yr old shop of choice coffees and teas. We enjoyed a lovely cup of Puerto Rican Yauco Selecto he just brewed – it was one of his favorites and has always been high on our list. If you have a chance – go there, it’s in the village, and check out the Kohana coffees he carries.