Cooper & Co

Monsooned Malabar coffee doesn’t have the “sex appeal” of the fully traceable, single estate / farm coffees that are so millennial but it does have longevity, and in many ways is probably a coffee classic. Never really in or out of fashion.

As you sip your cup of coffee it's almost impossible to comprehend the amount of work that has gone into processing every bean. In this blog I'm focusing on just one of the vital processes that are necessary to ensure that only the ripest and healthiest beans reach your cup. In November 2016 I visited Northern Sumatra and for a week toured the regions coffee farms and factories. Big factories are amazing to look at. Tons of coffee can been seen at a variety of stages in the processing journey, however on many occasions things are happening so fast that it is difficult to comprehend exactly what is going on.

The explosion in everything coffee has been extraordinary to behold over the last decade or so. New ways of making coffee at home seem to appear every week. Capsules, Pods, Aeropress, Hario and Chemex are products that have gone from having a niche audience to mainstream in an incredibly short period of time. One coffee maker though that has stood the test of time is the Bialetti stove-top coffee maker.

The title of this blog came from one of our food service customers. The call went something like this……”The ground coffee in our group handle is always wet and soggy and the resultant drink has little to no crema, can you sort it out?”

Jamaican Blue Mountain Coffee is a classification of coffee grown in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica. The best lots of Blue Mountain coffee are noted for their mild flavour and lack of bitterness. Over the past few decades, this coffee has developed a reputation that has made it one of the most expensive and sought-after coffees in the world.

In my misspent youth many moons ago I collected stamps. It’s a hobby that in the age of the Internet and email seems to have been forgotten. Although I didn’t know it at the time it provided an amazing education in geography and politics. Learning without knowing you are learning.

In all the years that I’ve been in the coffee business rarely has an origin thrown up such a moral dilemma as that of Myanmar. Currently there isn’...

The following is a step by step guide to using the Aeropress which we believe will deliver a great cup of coffee every time particularly of course if it's Cooper's!

Recently I've been cutting back on my sugar in-take. I've been a milk and two sugars person in both tea and coffee for ever. However following a trip to Sumatra in 2016 where no fresh milk was available I came back with a new determination to drink my coffee black without sugar at least once a day.

A couple of years ago I had the privilege of visiting Araku Valley in south east India. The "adventure" resulted in me writing a book "Big Ideas for a Small World" which talked about the huge efforts being made through the help of NAANDI to rebuild the eco-system.

I was called out by a customer of ours last week complaining that our coffee was tasting bitter and strong compared to what we usually supply. Of course, all sorts of alarm bells ring. Are we roasting too dark, have we ground the coffee incorrectly?

The first thing to point out is the difference between “aged” coffee and simply “old” coffee. Truly aged coffee is carefully aged, usually for six months to three years, by regularly monitoring and rotating the beans to distribute moisture and even out the aging process between coffee bags. This prevents mould and rot from occurring. Coffee is usually aged at origin, and is often aged at a higher altitude, where the temperature and humidity are more stable than at lower elevations.