Pairing the pick of the coffee crop in style
JUST like fashion, coffee offerings change each season.
Certain roasts are in vogue at a particular time of the year, giving coffee shops, restaurants and cafés the creative licence to experiment with distinctive brews depending on the weather and occasion.
While some coffees can be enjoyed in any month across the globe, much of this industry also subscribes to Coco Chanel’s notion that “fashion is fast and goes but style lasts forever”.
This is certainly the case at Starbucks where their Reserve Collection offers caffeine enthusiasts an exclusive range of one of the world’s most popular beverages.
These blends are in accordance with the multinational coffeehouse and roastery reserves chain’s five different seasons, with much of the South African spring offering selling out.
This week, The Saturday Star visited the US coffee giant’s Melrose Arch branch where the head of its Reserve Collection, Ishan Natalie, explained that the coffees originating from Brazil, Rwanda and Ecuador are all in season and that each has its own story, personality and flavours.
“It comes down to the customer’s taste profile and what they like and with Reserve we generally see our regular customers transition from our core offering to this collection because they want something new and they absolutely fall in love with it,” the multiple award-winning barista said.
While Starbucks’s core coffees are widely available and are grown by largescale farmers, the Reserve Collection comes from small growers, mostly from impoverished communities, and this range comprises just a fraction of the world’s coffee contribution.
“Our Reserve coffees form part of just 1% of coffee offerings in the world and in terms of specialty blends, it is just 0.01%,” said Natalie.
As these three blends come from a specific region and just a small batch is harvested each season, this also means that more attention can be paid to it.
This gives consumers a special tasting experience as they can savour more intense flavours and nuances than with regular coffee.
But it’s not just something to quench the thirst, as Natalie, whose name tag humorously displays his nickname of “The Dodgy Barista”, insisted. During the media coffee tasting, he explained that each coffee can be paired with carefully selected fruit and snacks to enhance its flavour.
Hazelnut, chocolate, strawberries, blueberries and dates complement the Brazilian blend, while the Rwandan brew can best be paired with citrus fruit, dark chocolate, graham crackers and nougat.
The flavours of the Reserve Collection from Ecuador, which was shipped to South Africa and other countries for the first time in decades this year, can be boosted by snacking on cranberries and other dried fruit.
“We don’t know if we’ll get this coffee again because it’s in such limited supply and this makes it a lot more special and the quality is phenomenal.”
Apart from its flavour and pairing components, these coffee blends from Africa and South America also have a distinctive background story.
“For the Brazilian coffee, the farmer went to visit wine farms in Argentina to see how they brew and process wine, because coffee and wine are so similar in terms of how it grows, the nutrients in the soil and how it fits into a customer’s hands,” Natalie said.
“He then sundried the coffee beans in natural sunlight for about two to three weeks, which gave it a deeper sweetness and fruit flavour.”
Natalie, who is a three-time South African barista champion and competed at three world championships, said this was his favourite offering for the year.
“It’s soft and delicate and has intense tones of berries, chocolate and nuts.”
The Rwandan brew is also special, with the beans grown mostly by women who have been affected by the genocide and unrest in the country.
“This coffee comes from a village of women who were impacted by genocide and many were orphaned and widowed, this was their livelihood and a way of taking care of their families,” Natalie said.
The Ecuadorian coffee is mostly the product of young farmers who, according to Natalie, left their lives in the urban areas to farm coffee.
“Coffee farmers usually pass their coffee skills and knowledge to their children but this is the opposite,” he said. “I have never seen it before where youngsters who live in urban environments chose to leave their careers and become coffee farmers.”
As these brews are grown in small batches and have to be shared at all Starbucks Reserve collections around the world, they might be more expensive than other core menu items.
But apart from their improved quality, Natalie believes that they are also healthier and more flavourful than a normal cappuccino or latte.