Jamaican Blue Mountain Coffee - Mavis Bank

[liralen]

Bought: From Blue Mountain Coffee, before I'd ever heard of Sweet Maria's. Yes, it's at a crazy expensive price at the moment. I think I paid around $35 for the 3 pounds, more than two years ago, rather than the $55 it's now at, but with the hurricanes going through there, the coffee crop for the last couple of years was very badly damaged and diminished.

Mavis Bank is one of the mills that collects coffee from the various growers and does the processing on it. They're the only mill that does it at altitude. They're likely one of the largest, taking in about 40% of the beans produced on the Blue Mountain. Roasted prices for the coffee now go on the order of $40 a pound. I'm actually rather impressed that Sweet Maria's tasted this last year's batch and decided it just wasn't good enough and aren't carrying it at all when the margins are so huge at the moment.

Roasted: This morning, five minutes before I ground and brewed it. I started at the "cool" setting for the FreshRoast and once the beans yellowed, I went to the medium heat setting. Half the beans I did at a City Roast, i.e. just at the end of 1st crack before it goes into second. The second half I did as a Vienna roast, well into 2nd crack so that the oils are on the surface. Having both gives me both roast characteristics and the bean characteristics, what there are of them.

Brewed: SwissGold one cup filter. 2 Tbs beans ground two notches finer than normal drip coffee, about 6 ounces of boiling water (203). At sea level you might want to let the water cool a little from 212 down to about 200.

Yeah. The big question. "Is it worth it?"

It really depends on what you want. Blue Mountain Coffee is smooth, mild, mild, mild, nearly creamy compared to nearly any other coffee. No acid, no bitterness even if roasted nearly to carbon, just smooth coffee flavor. It's got a nice, medium body, great aroma and fragrance both wet and dry, very little prominent acidity, and a very creamy, mild aftertaste or finish.

No flowers, no fruit, no earthy mustiness, no chocolate, no nuts or trees or...

Nearly no flavors other than the central concept of what coffee, alone, is. Completely undistracted, it can be, on one hand, extremely boring, and on the other, the essence of what coffee, alone, should be. Depends on your point of view.

At $10 a pound, pre-roasted, with about a 30% weight loss from roasting, it's quite well worth it. At $40 a pound... for me, it's a "No." I'd rather drink my Papua New Guinea or the Brazilian Cerrados or my Australian Mountain coffees than pay $40 for this. It's very nice, and I enjoy it a great deal, as you can see from my rating and I need to drink this stuff before it gets too much older. But I wouldn't buy more at these prices.

Rating: 9 of 10

Comments

[niherlas.livejournal.com]

Back in Seattle, there's a wonderful coffee shop and roasters named Stauf's. The owner, Tom, used to give 2-hr classes (in association with Ohio State's continued ed thang) in coffee history and tasting - until they because so popular (both the classes and the shop) that he just couldn't do them anymore. I was lucky to attend one back in, oh, '97 or so.

He talked about the mystique of JBM - and said that, like the Hawaiian Kona, it was excellent but much overvalued due to the small crop. JBM especially, because a large percentage of the crop is purchased by Japanese companies who use it to make vending-machine coffees for Japanese consumers.

A coffee Tom recommended (and which has never failed to impress, when I can get it) is Puerto Rican Yacao. "Not quite as good as Jamaican Blue," he said, "but only a pro coffee taster is going to be able to tell you that - and the bang for the buck is much better." He wasn't kidding - PRY usually runs 1/3 to 1/4 the price of a given year's JBM harvest.

[liralen.livejournal.com]

I am now intrigued. :-) Is it related to the Puerto Rican "Yauco Selecto"? Makes sense in many ways, as it's another island coffee. The Australian "Mountain Top XF" is also an island coffee, same kinds of characteristics. All are low production, high cost.

I'll have to poke around some and see if I can find some... Thanks for turning me on to that!

[jilara.livejournal.com]

I've had Blue Mountain a couple times, and while it's Really Good, I can't justify it, myself. And when it comes down to it, I actually prefer Maui varietal over most others, including the much-vaunted Kona. And it's substantially cheaper, not having the cachet attached.

[liralen.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. I love the Kaua'i varietals, especially the peaberry that's grown there. Same knock in price. There was a little roaster on Kaua'i that we would drop by every morning, and I ended up asking them for three pounds of the beans, green, nearly ten years ago. That, along with a different pound of the JBM, was what started me roasting my own.

But, yeah, the other islands (http://www.mauicoffee.com/our_coffees/index.php?c=19) have a lot to offer, too.

[space-parasite.livejournal.com]

It seems wrong to have a coffee review end with "Mood: lethargic". :)

[liralen.livejournal.com]

Hee! Someone caught it!

I actually added that as I was too lazy to do my usual morning espresso and ended up just doing drip coffee. Hee.

[space-parasite.livejournal.com]

It's a good thing you aren't silly.

[ogier30.livejournal.com]

JBM is the only coffee I enjoy drinking. I can even drink it black, it's so smooth and pure. I say this as someone who plain doesn't like the taste of coffee at all.

[liralen.livejournal.com]

That makes a lot of sense. If you don't like coffee, usually, it's a very kind coffee. And there are very few drip coffees I'll drink black and this is one of them.

I think that most folks that love coffee love a lot of the stranger and less friendly characteristics of the stuff along with the things that are easier to tolerate. So most 'experts' and professional tastes just kind of shrug at JBM and the Konas. Nothing here to see, move along, move along.

[izzylobo.livejournal.com]

I can definitely see that - most of the coffees I like/will drink black are coffees that afficionados will probably turn their noses up and "meh" at... :-)

[liralen.livejournal.com]

Hm... possibly... though often, for professionals, it's more along the lines that niherlas pointed along, as in why pay that much money for a really mild coffee when you could pay a third to a fifth as much for coffee that actually tastes very similar? It's only the coffee snobs that say it lacks character. :-)

JBM...

[izzylobo.livejournal.com]

Is more like fifty buck a pound (pre-roasted - I don't know if green is even available here) in the Rochester area. I usually end up buying one pound a year - half a pound for me, half a pound for my parents, for Christmas time.

It's damn fine coffee (thank you, Special Agent Cooper...), - it is, in fact, tbe best coffee I've ever tasted (although I'm interested in trying the PRY, if I can find a local distributor) - but not enough so I'm willing to shell out substantial portions of my monthly food budget on it. I usually end up buying Green Mountain - substantially cheaper per pound, and Fair Trade to boot.

Scott Taylor

Re: JBM...

[liralen.livejournal.com]

Mmm... fair trade. Yeah. I totally understand. :-)

Wow. Fifty a pound. That's pretty impressive. Two pounds worth of money would buy you a roaster and two pounds of green. Though there is the persnickety part of learning how to roast... back when I started roasting JBM was cheap enough, green, that I started on that. I'm mildly horrified by that now, but, hey, I had to start somewhere...

Re: JBM...

[izzylobo.livejournal.com]

That's pricing through Gloria Jeans - which currently lists their price as $49.95 a pound (and is the only place that has it - as I think I noted over on my journal today, Java Joe's doesn't have JBM - they don't even list it on their web page, but that doesn't seem to be a reliable indicator for what they do and don't have at any given time - which makes sense, really).

But Gloria Jean's prices are known to be kinda wonky - they have HueHuetenango - which sounds like a Muppet, or some alien from Men In Black - listed as varying between 8 bucks and sixty eight bucks a pound. Weird.

Roasting my own beans would, alas, require more kitchen than I currently posess - counter space is limited, and so is cupboard space for largish items.

Scott