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?