Fairtrade coffee that you make for yourself

Fairtrade Fort­night may be over, but that does­n’t mean it’s not some­thing to still think about. When someone else is mak­ing the cof­fee for you, you may be drawn to par­tic­u­lar beans because of their fair trade status. Why not apply the same cri­ter­ia when you’re drink­ing it at home or work? Hand­ily the good people at Fair Trade New Zea­l­and sent us a big box of fairtrade good­ies to sample, so after the jump, we sample six dif­fer­ent cof­fees for you. You’re wel­come!

The method

First, a word about the sci­ence of it. I haven’t ever been to a prop­er cof­fee cup­ping ses­sion, because they gen­er­ally hap­pen later in the day and I can­’t do caf­fiene after 12pm (please don’t take my ‘ista status away from me when I con­fess I can only have one cup a day). How­ever, in order to make the tast­ing more sci­en­cey, I did wear a white coat, which makes any kind of test­ing more sci­entif­ic. The first bag of cof­fee said we should let it steep for three minutes in a plun­ger, and use one scoop per cup, which is what we did, until we did­n’t. Two of the cof­fees came in whole bean form so we bor­rowed a hand grinder (which was kind of annoy­ing in that the beans fell out of the top as well as we passed it around).  The tast­ing pan­el con­sisted of myself, two food blog­gers and a former barista and cur­rent judge for 48 Hours, who knows a lot about the need for caffina­tion. One of the pan­el turned out to be too hun­gov­er to even try the cof­fees, but we won’t name names. If you would like to match our research, you might also wish to bake these Filipino coconut buns, as they are deli­cious and go very well with the cof­fee. Now onto the res­ults!

The results

First up was Scar­bor­ough Fair . The grinds had a rich smell, but the cof­fee itself when we’d plunged it did­n’t have much of an aroma. We thought it tasted watery (des­pite us mak­ing it exactly to the spe­cific­a­tions on the bag) – per­haps we could have doubled the amount of cof­fee for a bet­ter res­ult though. There was a faint chem­ic­al after­taste as well.

Next we had Inca Fe, which is made from Per­uvi­an beans roas­ted in New Ply­mouth. Although also in a foil bag, this tasted fresh­er than the Scar­bor­ough Fair. We noticed a lot of rais­in & cit­rus notes in this cof­fee and were stoked when we read the bag label and found it described like that.  It tasted a lot like cof­fee you’d get some­where with a bot­tom­less cup, like Monterey. That said, we should have made it stronger too. This cof­fee went home with one of the pan­el­ists because they liked it so much.

Then we had Robert Har­ris Ethiopi­an Fair Trade, and the phrase “for Kiwi tastes” on the bag put us off straight away, we were expect­ing some­thing as chal­len­ging as but­ter chick­en but it turned out to be worse. The smell was described by one per­son as “like a stew” and by anoth­er as “like a doc­tor’s wait­ing room”. The hun­gov­er per­son fled at this stage. There was an arti­fi­cial berry taste to it, and it seemed over-roas­ted and burnt for the illu­sion of strength. We had used two scoops for this brew, but it still lacked actu­al impact. Plus the foil bag it was in smelled really chem­ic­ally. Not recom­men­ded.

We moved onto a lovely paper bag after that, which made us happy after that chem­ic­al war­fare. In it was Hutt com­pany Cel­cius Cof­fee’s Cap­it­al Blend, and we were all like “oh yes, THIS is what cof­fee is sup­posed to smell like” as we poured it out. It was a chocol­atey cof­fee, free of nasty burnt feel­ings. It was quite a subtle cof­fee and we can ima­gine with a name like that it would be blen­ded espe­cially for flat whites, because it was quite acid­ic. It would be great with cake.

Time to bring out the grinder then, as we moved onto whole beans, again from Cel­cius but this time their Fire­house blend. The beans them­selves did­n’t smell that strong, but once we had them in the grinder, they really woke up. This was uni­ver­sally our favour­ite cof­fee, with a lovely after­taste, rich and smooth. Yum!

Finally, we fin­ished by grind­ing up some Kokako Ran­gitira beans. They smelled sur­pris­ingly minty actu­ally, like pep­per­mint Whit­takers Sante bars. We found the Kokako to be a little bit­ter, but it was great with the fairtrade chocol­ate we’d been sent along with the cof­fee!

So there you go, five com­pan­ies, six dif­fer­ent kinds of cof­fee, all avail­able in Wel­ling­ton and all fair trade. Maybe you wanna give some of them a go next time you’re going to make a brew at home?