--------------------------------------------------------------- The Hill and Valley Gourmet Coffee Newsletter --------------------------------------------------------------- Volume 3 Issue 3, October 2002 This month -:Range of Coffees :Cup of Care - Uganda :Keeping out of the Spotlight :Real Food :Moving On --------------------------------------------------------------- Welcome to the October issue of the Hill and Valley Newsletter. A warm welcome to our new subscribers, and to those who have been with us for the last upteen issues. We really appreciate you taking the time to subscribe, read and inwardly digest all our coffee information, tips and rants - and hope it improves the enjoyment of your regular cup! --------------------------------------------------------------- Range of Coffees --------------------------------------------------------------- As regular customers will know, we are engaged in a constant search to improve our range of coffees whilst trying not to pack the catalogue with "gimmick coffees". Variety of fine flavour is what we are looking for and in this regard we are pleased to make some additions to the range as we move into the autumn season. I am also very pleased that we have been able to add single estate coffees where our suppliers are able to assure us that producing an excellent product is being well rewarded at the farm gate. - BRAZIL BOURBON FAZENDA CACHOEIRA "Pulped Natural", single estate, single variety coffee. We said enough about this in our previous newsletter, but remain very impressed with the successful introduction of this coffee. I think I have found the optimum roast to capture the pronounced caramelly nature of the flavour and in the last month we have developed a new espresso blend that features this coffee. Thanks to Steve Hurst at Mercanta for pointing me to this gem. - BOURBON ESPRESSO Four coffee blend in the North Italian Style. The latter part of the summer has seen us using "BE4" all over the place. Like everyone else who works at Hill & Valley Coffee, I spend a great deal of my time as a "barista" and we all agree that this blend is the espresso that gives us the greatest pleasure to serve on that side of the Rancilio. The addition of 10 percent of a very good plantation washed robusta from India does a lot to complement the other three coffees in the blend. We hope you San Giorgio lovers and Extremists will try it soon. - INDIA PARCHMENT ROBUSTA AB Wet method premium robusta coffee. Although we would be surprised to sell much of this coffee in roasted form (it is essentially a blending coffee), home roasters will certainly be interested to add some of this to their store cupboard. The coffee is a much easier small batch roast than the naturals we have been using (in great moderation - one bag a year!) and doesn't have the same bite as its natural cousin. Using this coffee over the past couple of weeks has even made our popular Krakatoa blend a touch civilised and we've been successfully serving it at The Coffee Tree for the first time this week. - SUMATRA MANDHELING Double Picked dry prep arabica. Lintong out - Mandheling in. A slightly more refined lot this time without quite the same earthiness as the last lot of Lintong. Beautifully sweet and energising. - ETHIOPIAN HARRAR Natural micro region arabica. A nice bag or two of really good Harrar has been a long time coming in our East Africa Range, but I actually feel it may have been worth the wait. Like several other distinctive unforgettable coffees, it is a real "ugly duckling" and green coffee buyers may wonder what they've shelled out the high asking price for. It doesn't even give much away at the grinding or brewing stage either, unlike the best Yirgacheffes which seem to announce their presence at once, making them such phenomenal blending coffees. Drinking Harrar evokes much of the distant past of coffee cultivation and culture and it deserves a little respect - the full ritual in your kitchen or wherever you best enjoy your coffee. - COSTA RICA MESETA TARRAZU Single Estate Washed Arabica. I took quite some convincing before adding a second Costa Rica to the range, with the superb Riserva Presidente seemingly capturing the essence of good Costa Rica. However this coffee is quite different - dare I say more characterful, whilst slightly less refined. It's encouraging me to think that I may try the blending game with it before too long and I may have to slightly revise my personal Guat versus Costa prejudices. - KENYA AA Main Crop "fancy" selection. Why am I writing about a coffee that currently is not in the catalogue, you may ask. Well that's because we ran out of the first delivery of this quite awesome AA, but it will be back within a week or two, fear not! I am still looking for a "killer organic" but hope something will be added in the next few months. --------------------------------------------------------------- Cup of Care - Lisa's Coffee bag appeal --------------------------------------------------------------- This is not the forum for posting family news, but our daughter's gap year sojourn in Uganda has "coffee relevance", as we indicated in our last newsletter. We roasted the last of "Lisa's coffee" (a 60 kg bag of Uganda Bugishu Arabica) at the end of August and our Uganda coffee bag appeal has raised just over 1200 pounds - an insignificant amount in these days of massive TV appeals like Comic Relief and Children in Need, but we had a specific purpose and a specific symbolism in mind which we are proud to say was carried out in the appeal. The bag of coffee was exported by Mbale Coffee exports and every bean was ground by us and turned into a cup of coffee drunk by our customers at The Coffee Tree or on our mobile trailers at outdoor events (Lisa was in Mbale several times and photographed the area under cultivation). Many of these coffee drinkers saw that what we were doing, understood the symbolism and adding their own donations to our own, thus more than doubling the amount collected. We also all got a little bit sick of drinking the Bugishu to the exclusion of the other coffees in our range, but we now enjoy all the others a bit more! We gave to Lisa the decision on what project to undertake with the funds, amongst the many possibilities, but finally she and her room-mate decided to turn one of the rooms in the bungalow on the school grounds where they were living into a small library for the children of the school. They also were able to buy netball bibs (they had to teach the game without them!) and several footballs and goals for the football team (no jumpers for goalposts when you don't wear a jumper). The real and we hope lasting achievement was the library, painted and decorated by Lisa and Rebecca and stocked with literally hundreds of books bought, begged and stolen by Debbie here in the UK and shipped down to Uganda every few days during Lisa's stay. Lisa became quite a personality at the local post office apparently and we think they probably miss her and her books. We are in the process of creating a small display using Lisa's many photos of the school and the kids "reading" in the library, as well as the empty coffee bag and some locally produced goods that Lisa brought back with her. This will be appearing in The Coffee Tree during the autumn. --------------------------------------------------------------- Keeping out of the Spotlight --------------------------------------------------------------- We continue to eschew all forms of advertising for our businesses, and are firm believers of the power of word of mouth and more importantly in the taste of our coffee. We no longer attend trade fairs to talk our product into hotels, restaurants and delis and still prefer to talk directly to coffee drinkers rather than those who try to intercede with our product. However sometimes temptation comes our way or our sense of irony makes an offer too good to resist. So it was when I recently undertook a series of telephone interviews with a very pleasant journalist from Waitrose Food Illustrated on the subject of coffee in general and our cafe in Aylesbury, The Coffee Tree, in particular. My rantings about supermarket coffee, coffee freshness, soluble coffee and big brands were all taken on board. It seemed like the research had all been well done and for once I thought the message may have come across in the right manner. I was a bit surprised that a face-to-face was not required at least on the subject of the cafe, but was too busy to think a lot of it. This month's (October) edition of WFI contains the two articles where we "feature". Part of my interview appears in an article on coffee as an ingredient in cooking(!) and the Coffee Tree receives a paragraph as one of the best ten places in the country to drink coffee (ten?). I was a bit surpised to see that one of the other nine was not a place at all, but Torz & Macatonia's new coffee brand, found in every Waitrose in the country. I was also more than a bit surprised (even shocked) to learn that I had been roasting coffee in Aylesbury for 25 years, when most people who knew me in 1977 thought of me as a somewhat cocky trader on the London Coffee Futures Market, who was trying to bring the experience of a recent BA Honours in Medieval History onto the eternal question of how to buy low and sell high rather than the opposite. I was well on the way to getting the obsession, but it took another 22 years before roasting coffee became it's latest manifestation. Still I suppose we should be grateful for the "publicity". --------------------------------------------------------------- Real Food --------------------------------------------------------------- Amazingly, in these days of farmers markets and when a labour government says it truly has countryside issues close to it's heart, there are still some people who think that you can buy real food in a supermarket. We have had some interesting experiences this year in this area, principally because the summer months sees one or other of our mobile coffee bars trading in a field 4-5 days a week, but also because we are founder members of "The Food Group" a local authority sponsored initiative in our area which seeks to provide marketing and other assistance to local small food businesses. We have tasted (gorged on?) all of our colleagues products whether that is a carrot with (wet) dirt on it from the organic farm co-operative, a chocolate truffle made that morning from our local chocogenius or an apple juice that tastes liking biting a fresh ripe apple. Most of us coffee lovers know when we are tasting real food just like we know we are tasting real fresh coffee. We perhaps are obliged to suspend our preferences in favour of convenience a lot of the time, but that's because "consumer choice" is interpreted to mean the free availabilty of everything everywhere whatever the logic or the real cost. It's also fair to say that the major supermarkets do a very good job on the aesthetics of presentation these days. Nevertheless, how absurd it is to be mulling over the choice between a Zimbabwean dwarf green bean and a Zambian asparagus spear when neither of these countries will be able to feed it's people in the next year, and my local organic farm has to practically give away it's last dirty carrots at a county show attended by over 30,000 people. In these terms coffee cannot be seen strictly as a food - there is no locally produced alternative, but sometimes the economics are equally bizarre. At the same time as there is a so-called "flight to quality" by the coffee consumer, over-production of the cheapest robusta coffees threatens the survival of coffee farmers in the areas producing the highest quality, most expensive to produce coffees the most. So, talk to your friends - get them connected to the realities of coffee and suggest that they look elsewhere than the supermarket for real food AND real coffee. --------------------------------------------------------------- Moving On --------------------------------------------------------------- This year we have served more cups of coffee to more people and sold more bags of our coffee to more people than before. We all love direct interaction with coffee drinkers and, yes, we admit it, we like what it does for our self esteem. We believe that we can continue to do this for many years to come and not get bored with it. Sometimes sticking so many labels on bags gets tedious and the comments we get when we buy 100 pints of milk at a supermarket somewhere don't get any more original (I must apologise to the check out girl at Safeway in Lymington in August - Debbie and I don't really bathe in milk every saturday night, but we have to hope what we may do with it all might be a bit obvious). Business plan economics more than anything led us to feel we had to do certain types of activity to increase our turnover and that we would be crazy to "miss opportunities". Nearly three years on we are beginning to focus more and more at what we like doing - having direct interactions with people drinking our coffee. We sometimes get up very early and go to bed very late to do this! So this means you are less and less likely to be served Hill & Valley Coffee outside of the home unless it is by us or a hardcore of long standing wholesale customers. We have not closed the door on new wholesale business, but we are not actively seeking any either, and there has been a certain amount of natural reduction as businesses close, management changes or issues come to the fore which we do not deal with in the expected manner. As part of the same logic we took the quite difficult (and some would feel disappointing) decision to stop offering coffee machines through our website. Some issues concerning pricing and warranty support came up and we felt that we were unable to take full control without having a full time maintenance facility. The timing of our decision related to personnel changes at one of our main suppliers and we then decided the time had come to cease offering machines. We are still more than happy to offer independent advice on coffee brewing and equipment to those of you buying our coffee, but we will be increasingly reluctant to do so where no customer relationship exists already. There are now many sources of independent review information on the web - and there are other sources of coffee making equipment and home roasting gear. We will forthwith concentrate on the coffee, the coffee and lastly....the coffee. Best Regards Debbie & Charlie Massey --------------------------------------------------------------- Volume 3 Issue 3 October 2002. Copyright (c) 2002 Hill and Valley Coffee Ltd. Information freely distributable, but must include this copyright messages. Formatted and delivered by Trainor Thornton Limited "Let us show you how your business can succeed on-line" http://www.trainorthornton.co.uk?source=hvnews102002 --------------------------------------------------------------- T h e G o u r m e t C o f f e e N e w s l e t t e r From Hill and Valley Coffee Ltd. --------------------------------------------------------------- Web: http://www.hillandvalleycoffee.co.uk E-mail: beans@hillandvalleycoffee.co.uk Fax: +44 1296 482717 Tel: +44 1296 482708 Mobile: +44 468 028021 Address: Hill & Valley Coffee Ltd The Coffee Tree 11 George Street Aylesbury Bucks HP20 2HU Privacy: http://www.hillandvalleycoffee.co.uk/privacy.html ---------------------------------------------------------------