Anyway, you should come down and see it for yourself.

We're having a party to support Tulsa Opera on Friday, February 6 from 6-730p.  A few of the performers will be here to entertain us.  We'll also have some great wine, provided by Vintage 1740, Thirst Wine Merchants, and Grand Vin Bottle Shop.  And of course, the freshest coffee on the planet.

If you've never been to the opera, I'm sure it sounds dreadful.  It's not.  You may not know it, and you may not believe it, but I'm a big fan of the Tulsa Opera.  The first opera I ever went to was Tchaikovsky's "Eugene Onegin" in February of 2005.  A few of the opera singers had been coming into the DoubleShot and I became curious, so they got me a ticket and I found myself in the 5th row watching this amazing performance unfold.  Onegin was performed in Russian with English supertitles, but it didn't take me too long to realize that it's not all about the words being sung.  I've been to almost every opera since Onegin, and every time I am impressed and amazed.  It's not like watching a movie because it's a live performance.  Each time will be slightly different, known only to the people having their own unique experience.  And the tipping point for me was the opera singers telling me I don't have to get all dressed up to go.  I can wear jeans and my cowboy boots and be comfortable.  Now this should be a ringing endorsement to everyone, since I'm just a simple boy raised in the middle of a big cornfield.  I think if you go to the opera and open your mind, you'll see what I see:  people with amazing talent and dedication; huge, fantastic sets that blow my mind; beautiful music played by the orchestra; and it's all composed and flows so beautifully and perfectly.  Once when I was riding my bike in Crested Butte Colorado, I was having a particularly good ride and the scenery was fantastic.  The bike was flowing beneath me on 15-inch singletrack.  The mountains were above me and below me and all around me, Emerald Lake to my right.  The wildflowers were in full bloom and I started to notice that all the colors were so varied but none clashed.  And then a rainbow appeared in front of me and I thought I might ride right through it.  All the colors and events orchestrated so perfectly and at that moment, soaring down the mountainside, I thought, "This is just like the opera."  That's the best way I can describe it. 

Check out the Tulsa Opera website.  And I highly recommend going to see the next opera, Hansel and Gretel, which goes on stage Feb 21, 27, and Mar 1.

Tulsa Opera @ DoubleShot Coffee Company

Friday, February 6 from 6-730p

Remember last February when I traveled to Guatemala?  I feel like I made some inroads in Antigua, but no coffee has resulted from it yet.  The Hoja Blanca region is one of the last to harvest each year in Guatemala due its high elevation and heavily shaded slopes. These two factors combine to slow the development of the coffee cherries resulting in an extremely dense and more chemically complex bean. In 2002 Finca Villaure was selected in the Cup of Excellence competition as one of the top 33 coffees in Guatemala. The farm was also selected by Illycafe as the best producer of coffee in Guatemala in 2003.
Edwin describes the Villaure as having "Candied grapefruit taste with jasmine fragrance and a sweet, crisp finish." In my cupping of the coffee, I definitely found it to be pleasantly acidic, with very clean, sweet, grapefruit-type flavors and a super-clean, delicious finish.  This is a coffee that is very easy to drink, and unlike anything we're roasting right now.  Hopefully it will become one of your new favorites.

The trip paid off in a big way.  We met a lot of great people in the Colombia coffee industry.  One woman, Cristina Garces, has been an enormous amount of help connecting us with small farmers in the region of La Concordia (which is in Antioquia).  It was so great to have the ability to walk into a cupping lab in Concordia and taste coffees which had just been picked and processed in the fields around the town.  We tasted coffees that were fantastic and met some of the farmers who produced them.  

The first coffee we received from Colombia is one we cupped in Medellin.  It jumped off the table as the clear winner.  The problem with it is there is only 54 pounds of green coffee.  That means there's not even enough for one bag, and usually it would be blended with other coffee.  But we snatched it up.  Through careful separation and laborious micro-milling, I'm now sitting next to a 54 pound bag of coffee fresh from Colombia.  It's amazing.

This isn't just a micro-lot.  It's a nano-lot.  The coffee is from a farm called La Estrella.  The owner of the farm is named Rafael Herrera.  I didn't get to meet Rafael while I was there, but hopefully I will next time I go to Colombia.  Rafael is 60 years old and he has owned the farm for 37 of those years.  He and his wife, Luz Marina, have 7 children, one of whom works with him on the farm.  He planted the farm with Caturra and Colombian Varieties of coffee trees.  In a good year Rafael will produce 34 bags of coffee (each 154 pounds green), but this year they have had bad weather and most areas are predicting an 80% loss.  This particular lot is so small because Rafael recognized that the pickings from one day were different and he thought they would be better than usual.  So he kept them separate and told Cristina that he wanted her to cup it.  That's when we stepped in, tasted the coffee, and were amazed.  The coffee is much fruitier than Colombian coffee usually is.  The coffee we tasted on the table that day (which I assume will be approximately the same as this bag) had strawberries, honey, and other exotic fruits.  That's amazing for a washed coffee.  Most fruity coffees are dry-processed, but this coffee was wet-processed in Rafael's micro mill and sundried on a patio in parchment form.

Cristina organized a competition in Concordia for the farmers in 2007.  An international jury came to cup the coffees that were submitted.  And Rafael won!  His coffee scored 92.3 points.  That's outstanding.  And in my opinion, this tiny lot we have from him is probably some of the best from the best in Concordia.

Obviously it cost a lot to get such a small amount of coffee here from Colombia.  But it's one of the most exciting things we've ever done here at the DoubleShot.  And I only have enough coffee for three (3) roasts.  So I wanted to let you know BEFORE I roasted it what is going on.  This is a limited opportunity.  We'll sell Rafael's La Estrella nano-lot for $25 per pound.  Part of that money goes straight back to Rafael.  Cristina is the exporter in Colombia and also the importer in the U.S.  So she makes a deal with the farmers that she'll pay them a bit more for their coffee upfront, and then she pays them 19 cents per pound after it is sold- which they call a "differential."  After discussing the possible effects of screwing with the economics in this small town, I agreed to double the differential to the farmer, so we paid 19 cents more per pound that goes straight back to Rafael.  It doesn't sound like much (and really, for us it isn't much), but it goes a long way to help these small farmers and encourages them to keep producing coffee that we think is good.

Next Monday will be our first roast of Rafael's coffee.

Don't miss it.