Sweetwater Organic Coffee Roasters. “High Spirits” Holiday Blend 2012

I love, I mean really love, finding new, small artisan producers of one of my favorite products, and it is all the more sweet when that producer happens to be in my home state (Florida); this happens often with cigars, but rarely with coffee. That is why I was so excited when my wife brought a pound of Sweetwater Organic Coffee Roasters’ High Spirits Holiday Blend back from a recent trip; the coffee is roasted just a few hours up the road in Gainesville, FL.
It is a light roast blend of African and Central American coffees and the flavors are exceptionally understated (in a very good way); I would place it as one of the most relaxing cups of coffee I have enjoyed in quite a while. There are great milk chocolate notes, soft fruit flavors, a great mouth feel and an almost perfectly balanced acidity, and, like icing on a cake or crema on espresso, they also seem to have impeccable business ethics!
I would highly recommend checking these guys out, you can find them at www.sweetwaterorganiccoffee.com and can order directly from their site. This is the first of their roasts I have tried, but, I promise you, I will be sampling some more in quick order and will post my thoughts on those soon.

Joe Van Gogh “Cafe Femenino Blend” 2012

There is a lot to be said for a quality coffee with a clever name, there is even more to be said for a coffee with solid ethics, so what do you say about a great coffee with a name that, while a touch cliche,  is fun and clever and an ethical stance that is almost unmatched? The answer is you start by trying it then you tell everyone about how great it is! It is impossible not to tell people about Joe Van Gogh’s (a little cliche, but fun and clever, right?) Cafe Femenino Blend, it is a fantastic quality organic, fair trade coffee that supports a great charity.  This is a muli-region blend that has clean spice, cocoa and smoke notes with a pleasant, understated, sweetness; the charity is the Cafe Femenino Foundation,  which started in 2004, in Peru, with the aim of enhancing the lives, and increasing the visibility, of women in coffee production around the world. The have grown substantially since then and are definitely an organization worth supporting; you can find more information about them here: www.coffeecan.org. So you really can not lose with this one, a great coffee supporting a great cause; it doesn’t get much better.

Counter Culture Coffee No.46

There is not much in the world that is more opulent, and less acknowledged, than good artisanal coffee, and there has been an explosion of quality producers in this area in recent years. One of the leaders in the world of artisan coffee is Counter Culture Coffee and they produce a wide variety of amazing single origin and blend coffees. Their No.46 is perhaps their best known, and I would argue one of the best out there, blends; it is typified by an immensely satisfying richness, complimented by a light sweetness, that round out the chocolate notes that dominate the brew. This is considered a European style blend due to the mixing of light and dark roasts to achieve greater depth, oh, and it happens to be certified organic.