Posted on Friday 29 August 2008
Friday Fresh @ 3
Finca Mauritania
El Salvador
Santa Ana
$17/lb.
Aida Batlle continues to perfect the processing of coffee, selecting cherries that have two ripeness levels: burgundy red, which provides maximum sweetness for the coffee, and blood red, which helps provide the Mauritania trademark tangerine acidity. She has a zero-tolerance approach to unripe coffee (she’s been known to jump into a deep tank to pluck one unripe, green cherry), and she’s continued to focus on perfectly controlled fermentation, washing, and drying. She dries only on clay tiles, which she feels gently dry the coffee, leaving sweetness and aroma intact. All this attention to detail and craftsmanship are a real treasure in the coffee industry, and are part of what make Finca Mauritania’s coffee among the most well-crafted in the world.

It’s been an unparralled pleasure to taste Finca Mauritania’s coffee from the 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007 harvests. The farm has been through its ups and downs over the years, including an eruption of Ilantapec, the volcano on which the farm sits in 2005! However, Aida has continued to lovingly rehabilitate the farm, carefully pruning the coffee trees and cultivating the soil organically. After the eruption, she learned about new, innovative pruning techniques to help the coffee tress recover and improve the quality of the coffee. From what we taste this year, it really worked.

All this artisanship and focus, along with the generous cooperation of mother nature, have made this year’s Finca Mauritania simply extraordinary in the cup. The brown sugar and caramel sweetness is there as always, along with tangerine fruit. This year’s Mauritania is particularly clean-tasting, allowing the taster to perceive all the flavors perfectly.


Honduras is one of those “off the beaten path” origins. For a number of reasons, Honduras never achieved the notoriety of, say, Costa Rica or Colombia as an origin of great coffees. Some coffee people were incredulous when I began traveling there in 2003, serving on the tasting jury of the first-ever national coffee contest. I discovered then that there are indeed spectacular coffees in Honduras, and over the past few years the coffee industry has become electrified with a number of incredible coffees from this beautiful country.
Over the years, I’ve blind-tasted hundreds of coffees from Honduras, and this coffee is my favorite each year. It’s got a unique, incredibly distinct lavender fragrance and purple-fruit flavor, and I can pick it out from a table of lesser Honduran coffees every time. A few years ago, I gave it a nickname: “the Purple Princess,” to signify my affection for this beautiful, regal coffee. It is consistently one of the finest coffees in Latin America, writ large. I’m not the only one who thinks so – the coffee has fared spectacularly at coffee auctions, and it is sought after by a number of great roasters. So, I was especially honored to learn when visiting Honduras this year that the Caballero family had set aside a portion of their crop especially for us. This means a great deal to me, that the Caballeros would reserve such a large portion of their precious crop for us to roast. It’s an honor we hope to live up to!
1. Jay Murrie… we are very excited to welcome our new wine guy to 3CUPS. He brings with him an extensive knowledge and is a great fit for 3CUPS because his philosophy about wine and retail is spot on with ours. Jay most recently managed the wine department at A Southern Season where he worked for 8 years. He has visited many of the small winemakers that we will feature and we are very excited to have Jay join Badi, our coffee guy, in the day-to-day management of the shop.
This week we feature 21st de Septiembre from Zaragoza, Oaxaca, Mexico. We’ve often had this coffee as a decaffeinated selection, but this time we are sharing the full flavored original. Here is Peter Giuliano’s impressions of the 21st and Oaxaca, Mexico…
Most of the 21st’s coffee comes from the village where the cooperative is headquartered, the mountaintop village of Zaragoza, about four hours above of the town of Putla. The village is surrounded by forest, and within the forest farmers tend old stands of coffee, mostly of the heirloom Typica variety. The coffee is picked, fermented and washed by hand, and the coffee is then dried, often on the flat rooftops of the village! The coffee then makes its way down the winding mountain roads, past ancient cornfields and cocoa farms, to port. It’s perfect small-farmer coffee and incredibly delicious: the signature flavor of the region is a spicy chocolate note which mimics the spicy chocolate that has made Oaxacan cuisine famous. The coffees of the 21st often have another, delicious, savory fruit note that lends incredible complexity and nuance to the cup.