For a fairly small state, Maine was actually a somewhat difficult choice when it came to picking the roaster for this project. There were several other roasters that also looked pretty good, but in the end, the fact that Coffee By Design was offering a coffee from Malawi - one of the few remaining origins I've ever seen commercially offered that I hadn't yet tried - was too good to resist.
State #20: Maine
Coffee By Design
Portland, ME
Coffee By Design has been at this since 1994, a long time for a third wave-style roaster, and you can tell they've been around forever because they use "CBD" as their logo, something that unfortunately has a pretty different association for most people these days. There is no CBD oil in these coffees, I can assure you.
I obviously had to start with the whole reason why I was here in the first place, and happily the Malawian offering did not disappoint. There was a nice citric pop right up front - kind of a lemon/lime mix, not with the full bitterness of lime but with enough evocation of it not to be pure lemon either. Behind that were a lot of sweet notes, raw sugar fading into more like honey. Lower in the cup I detected some tannic notes like tea. It was one of those nice light East African cups you get a lot, with very little not to recommend it. I gave this coffee a 9, Great. A couple more flavor notes would probably have pushed it even higher, but it was slightly on the simpler side and I'm picky with my 10s.
It's been a while since I've had Timorese coffee - in fact, the only previous time on record was more than three years ago, in the period when I was first getting into specialty coffee and ordering through the Trade website. That's also a year before I started keeping a log of tasting notes, so history does not record what I thought of it at the time, but early in my journey I would probably have told you that Indonesian coffees were my favorite. That has not really turned out to be true since then, but I wanted to check back in with this origin. Of course, the island of Timor is perhaps most notable in the coffee world for the introduction of the Timor hybrid, a cross between Arabica and Robusta that has gone on to contribute genetics to a whole range of New World coffees for disease-resistance purposes. CBD does not specify the varietals but some Googling suggested that this was a mix of Bourbon and the Timor hybrid. Usually if you're getting some of those genetics they're further watered down by a cross with Caturra, but this appears to be pretty close to the Robusta parent. So what did that do for the taste? Fortunately, not that much. I won't say it wasn't present, but the Bourbon seemed to be doing a fair amount of the work in this cup, which is obviously a good thing. The acid was unsurprisingly on the lower side, with more of a malic character - softer, more cherry-like. The flavor notes I picked up on included something like a tobacco (probably derived from the Robusta, but not entirely unpleasant), toasted cereal, a bit of chocolate, and a heavier body that helped make more of a caramel sensation. The cumulative effect was a bit like eating a Milky Way bar, if you pulled out pretty much all of the actual sweetness and replaced it with the mild bitterness and acidity of a mellow cup of black coffee. It's not my favorite type of coffee these days but I didn't mind it at all, rating it a 7, Good. Could maybe have been an 8 if the Robusta were a little less pronounced, but what are you gonna do.
You'll probably already have noticed this, but this project is inherently pretty unfair. I'm not comparing apples to apples from roaster to roaster, and I'm not even just ordering coffees from a single country of origin which would at least be a little closer to a fair comparison. I frequently do one African coffee and one New World coffee, but even that isn't consistent. If I was just sampling the coffees that wouldn't matter, but I've chosen to rate and rank them which is kind of silly since they're all using different inputs, which doesn't tell you that much about the quality of the roasters themselves. I say this mostly to note that CBD might have shot right to the top of the ratings had I chosen a second coffee from, say, Ethiopia. Instead, I picked a Timor, which I wanted to revisit but went into knowing that it was pretty unlikely I was going to think it was a 9 or 10. And a lot of that has to do with my personal preferences! I think CBD did a good job pulling the best things out of these beans and I don't know that you could do much better with them. At the same time I obviously can't rate them a 10 with all that Robusta flavor. So it's a challenge. As it stands, the combined 16 is certainly a perfectly respectable score - it puts CBD in a tie with Alma (Georgia) and Quills (Kentucky), both of which were very nice coffee experiences. Anything where the average is an 8 or above, I definitely enjoyed myself. I probably didn't need to spend this much time explaining why CBD could and perhaps by all rights should have been ranked higher, something that you could argue would be true of a number of other roasters as well based on my past choices. But it was something I thought about this morning as I was writing this, so, eh.
Next up is Maryland. And no, just having my dad roast some coffee and send it to me doesn't count.
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