In this edition: six new coffees and a little story about coffee in Minnesota.

Not in this edition: the woman fined £150 for pouring her morning coffee down a street drain in London. (It was revoked.)

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Did you subscribe to Aviary? Christopher Feran messaged me last night to tell me that of the 500 subscriptions he aimed to sell by the end of the year, there were seven spots left for sale after five days. I woke up this morning to see that the season is now sold out. Massive congratulations to Christopher!

Did you miss the eugenioides I wrote about in Vol. 6 – the one that NOMAD sold out of in six hours on October 10? Well, they flagged to me yesterday that they have another 50 bags for sale (as of this morning, only 32 are left). They also told me the discount I shared three weeks ago is still valid (if you haven't used it yet), so use the code CoffeeIndex10 for 10 percent off anything NOMAD sells.

Coffee leftovers

I bought (and was given) a lot of coffee about a month ago. It won't be long before I start panicking about it getting past its prime, so I'll start sharing some of it in the weeks to come.

E-mail me for 40g of Paola Trujillo's wush wush or aji – both roasted by Will Warren at Mirra. I also have 60g of his Henry Burbano offering (no link because the page has been taken down, but the tasting notes are dried lemon, thyme, persimmon; I loved this coffee).

A huge thanks to Will for sending me such a giant box of his coffees. Everything he roasts is beautiful.

Welcome to the ninth edition of the coffee index.

Over the past seven days, I added 102 coffees and two new roasters to the list. Total coffees manually tracked to date = 2818.

1. The list currently contains 79 co-fermented coffees. This week, Resident Coffee in Gainesville, Florida dropped the only coffee I've ever seen fermented with araza – an intensely citric Amazonian fruit that apparently has qualities resembling a pineapple crossed with a mango. The coffee itself is a castillo variety grown at La Sirena farm in the Quindio region of Colombia. Tasting notes: Passion fruit, gummy worms, pineapple, honey.​
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2. In Vol. 5, I wrote about SL28 coffees not grown in Kenya. As I wrote, they're grown in Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, India and a few other countries. This week, a new coffee was listed by The Coffee Project in New York – an SL28 grown in Myanmar. It's from the Shwe Yi Mon Estate near the city of Mandalay, and it's a naturally processed coffee that TCP notes was grown 4300 miles from Scott Labs, where the variety was developed. Use the code CoffeeIndex20 for 20 percent off this wild coffee. Tasting notes: Pear, red currant, mulled wine, oak barrel.​
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3. I try hard not to constantly make the newsletter a gesha-fest, but some weeks I can't resist. Loïc Péneau at Datura in Paris roasts an incredible selection of coffee, and this week, he released two from Finca Santa Teresa in Panama. The "Sophie" offering is "clean, pure and intensely floral," so if you're hunting for a floral bomb, this one may be for you. Datura is sold at a number of shops here in the U.S. – Suited, Rề Cà Phê, Dissent, Komakase, Fount and plenty of others – so keep an eye out for this one. Tasting notes: Jasmine, orange blossom, white peach, bergamot.
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4. Here I go again – falling prey to a coffee because the tasting note was just too good to ignore. Yeah, I know, the notes are only one person's subjective opinion about the coffee. I don't care. Tell me you don't want to try a coffee that tastes like "funky pineapple." Fredy Orantes, the producer of this Sidra lot roasted by Stamp Act in Seattle, pops up a few times on my ever-expanding list of coffees. His coffees are roasted by Manhattan, Scenery, Subtext and a few others that I track. Anyway, this one is naturally processed, and Stamp Act says Fredy laid the cherries out at 10am every morning and collected them at 2pm – ensuring they dried during the warmest part of each day. Tasting notes: Fruit punch, brown sugar, funky pineapple.​
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5. Here comes Will again from Mirra (and from Vol. 5 – the SL28 edition). Well, yesterday he dropped the most interesting SL34 I've ever seen: a honey processed lot from Zhou Wu Mountain in Taiwan. He also has a honey processed Gesha from the same farm. "I didn't think I'd ever bring in any coffee from Asia until I found these," Will told me. He writes on his website that these coffees exhibit "none of the earthiness, savoriness, or woodiness often associated with coffee from Asia." If the Burmese SL28 mentioned above is astounding due to its anti-proximity to Kenya, this coffee is that much more remarkable. Tasting notes: Lychee, honeysuckle, stewed cherries.​
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6. You may have heard of the "Bourbon Aji" variety (and how it's not actually a type of bourbon at all). It may have been José Salazar's Aji that took sixth place in the 2021 Cup of Excellence competition that led to that discovery. A footnote on the the page linked above says "After questions were raised about the 6th ranked Bourbon Aji, we employed RD2 Vision to test this variety and it has been determined to not be a bourbon variety, but instead a newly discovered Ethiopian Landrace not found in many accessions...." Wow. All of which is to say, this Salazar lot roasted by one of my all-time favorites (and subject of Vol. 4), Passenger, is sure to be an excellent example of the variety, and you can use the code INDEX_Y9DWK for 10 percent off. Tasting notes: Raspberry, citrus peel, black tea.

Why does some of the best specialty coffee in the world pass through Minneapolis – yet so few people there want to drink it?

I asked two people named Nathan.

Nate Broadbridge is SK Coffee’s "spreadsheet guy." SK is one of the more serious coffee roasters in the Twin Cities (that’s Minneapolis and St. Paul, for those reading abroad). Last weekend, SK hosted their third Great Northern Roaster Showcase, an absolute gift to the coffee community of the Northern Plains.

And Nathan Voss started the Twin Cities Coffee Club, which meets monthly in SK’s event space.

"The initial goal was to find other people who were like me and kind of build a community with them," Voss says. After checking out the coffee roaster showcase last year at SK, he approached Broadbridge and his co-founder, Sam Kjellberg, with his idea for the club.

"Right from the get-go they were like 'Yeah, that sounds awesome. ... I can't believe we didn't think of that,'" Voss says.

So it’s not that there aren’t any specialty coffee lovers in Minneapolis. The coffee club has about a dozen regular attendees, plus a few newer folks showing up each month to check it out.

How did Voss get into coffee? You probably won’t be surprised.

"I had a natural. Ethiopian. Blueberry bomb," Voss says, pausing between words as if he’s expecting me to say what I’m about to say: "It’s always that coffee."

"A while down the road when I started getting into more online stuff, hearing that it was like, Goddamn, I’m just another cliché," he says, as we laugh at the truth.

That was about 10 years ago. He bought a Kalita. And a Chemex. He bought a Baratza, then traded it for an Ode.

"And then within a year from there, I had at least a dozen brewers," he says. "I got a 1Zpresso grinder, I got a Pietro. I got an espresso setup…"

Sound familiar to anyone?

Now he buys coffee from the Nordic and ultra-light style roasters: Sey, H&S, Hydrangea and the like. He purchased 15 grams of the Finca Nuguo competition lot from Hydrangea and will make it for whoever shows up to the next meeting of the Club on November 9.

So, Voss is sampling a $228 per cup coffee for his coffee club and a modest 15 people might show up for it. Why is the specialty coffee scene in such a dense metropolitan area so relatively small?

I assumed the cold Minnesota winters had turned everyone toward dark, roasty coffee. And nope, that’s not it at all.

Broadbridge points to three local players that shaped the scene: Caribou Coffee, founded in 1992 in nearby Edina (now an 800-shop behemoth of a chain); Peace Coffee, roasting since 1996 and selling fair-trade blends in supermarkets and on Amazon; and Cafe Imports, one of America’s biggest specialty coffee importers, also born in the 90s.

The first two sort of defined what "local" coffee meant in the area. Both Caribou and Peace were (and are) a step up from your pre-ground supermarket commodity junk. To many, when it comes to coffee, they’re enough.

And then there’s Cafe Imports.

By one account, $250 million worth of coffee passes through Cafe Imports' Minneapolis warehouse every year. Consider them the intermediary between coffee farmers around the world and coffee roasters in America.

"Cafe Imports is, without question, the driver of the Twin Cities coffee scene," Broadbridge says. "[Them] being here and really partnering with small, independent roasteries, has helped the coffee scene."

And it makes sense – if you had a massive warehouse of specialty coffee in your backyard and knew that they’d warehouse whatever you want for basically nothing (great for cash flow), you might be inclined to give coffee roasting a shot. And a lot of people did.

"In a competitive market, you're either competing on quality, service or price," Broadbridge says. "And you have to choose what you're going to compete on."

Many chose price.

"In a way, it hurts [the coffee scene] too, kind of, because so much good quality coffee is available so quickly and easily that really high quality coffee that comes direct from farms is seen as far more expensive, so people aren’t quite as willing to jump at it."

But that’s not the fault of Cafe Imports, which Broadbridge says is "the best partner we have."

I’ll end on a personal note. There are certainly enough coffee lovers in the Twin Cities to support a few great coffee shops. I’ve been fortunate to visit the area a few times (seven, since 2016, if my records are correct), and here are my favorite shops: SK, obviously; FRGMNT, a multi-roaster featuring a few great European brands; MISFIT, where I once ordered a Whiskyoto (a Kyoto drip cold brew soaked in whiskey barrel chips); and Minneapolis mainstay Wesley Andrews.

Congrats on making it to the end. If you'd like to try anything SK roasts, use the code SHIPIT for free shipping on any order placed before Nov. 14.

Thanks, as always, for reading. If you have an idea for a future newsletter, want to talk coffee, or have any feedback whatsoever — you can reply to this e-mail.

Next week: new coffees as always, and the decaf special I've teased for two weeks now. Share your favorites here.

Thanks for reading.

Jeff