It’s August and we’re back with another exciting round of featured coffees! This month’s offerings include two incredible Geishas from a Mexican coffee legend plus our climate-critical Cold Brew Blend.
Featured Microlot: Finca Garabandal, Mexico
This month’s microlot release is bittersweet. Earlier this year, Mario Fernandez Sanchez of Finca Garabandal passed away at his home in Coatepec. A good friend and one of our very first contacts when we began sourcing coffees from Veracuz, we’ve been visiting Mario’s farm since 2018. Although this is the first year we will feature his legendary Geishas at Little City, it’s not for lack of trying. He simply never had any to sell us. Every year we inquired and every year it was “sold out.” So, it is in honor of this great man and Mexican coffee legend that we finally receive and release these incredible coffees to share with our friends in Austin and beyond.
For our microlot subscribers, this month we’ve chosen to feature Mario’s Red Honey Geisha. Sweet and floral with delicate jasmine, honey, and vanilla notes, it is a beautiful example of the classic characteristics we love in a great Geisha. For something a bit bolder, we’ll also be featuring Mario’s extended-fermentation natural Geisha. This coffee is bursting with intense flavors of ripe fruits like strawberry and plum; it has bright, tropical acidity akin to pineapple and finishes with just a touch of warming spice. These two coffees represent two very different expressions of the same cultivar grown on the same farm, and they are shining examples of how a skilled coffee producer can manipulate flavor through post-harvest processing. Both coffees are available a la carte or at a discounted price with our Garabandal Geisha Bundle. We can’t wait to hear your feedback and are curious to know which you prefer (or if you’re like us, that they were too good to pick just one).
Featured Blend: Cold Brew Blend
Available whole-bean or ground to your liking, our twelve-ounce bags of Little City Cold Brew Blend feature the exact same coffee that we use to make our nitro cans, kegs, and growlers. As some of you know, I came to coffee from the craft beer world, and my first-ever project here at Little City was to help formulate a new cold brew blend and launch the draft nitro program. Virtually unchanged from the recipe we developed during those initial R&D days, our cold brew is sweet, chocolatey, and creamy with a bit of red fruit juiciness. It is, in our opinion, perfectly formulated for cold extraction.
Wanna make it at home? Below you will find my go-to recipe. While there are many great and commercially available cold brew sets on the market like Toddy, Coffee Sock, and Hario, I use a good old-fashioned mason jar, mesh strainer, and standard paper coffee filters for this recipe, items most people already have in their kitchens. And. of course, our Little City Cold Brew Blend.
Ingredients/Equipment
- 4 oz (113 g) coarse-ground Little City Cold Brew Blend
- 32 oz room temperature filtered water
- (2) 1-quart mason jars
- Fine mesh strainer or sieve
- Paper Coffee filters (optional)
Process
- Grind the Little City Cold Brew Blend beans on your grinder’s coarsest setting (No worries if you don’t have a grinder. You can always order pre-ground coffee from our website. Just be sure to choose Coarse Grind (French Press) at checkout.
- Pour grounds into a clean mason jar and fill to the top with filtered water, completely saturating all the grounds.
- Wait a few minutes while the grounds form a crust on the surface of the water, then stir to incorporate the grounds back into the water.
- Cap the jar and steep for at least 12 hours, but no longer than 24, occasionally and gently turning the jar upside down and back to make sure all the grounds remain under water.
- When the coffee reaches your desired strength, gently pour through a fine mesh strainer into another clean mason jar (TIP: for a less cloudy brew, line the strainer with a paper coffee filter to capture and remove finer grind particles.)
- Taste preference and desired strength vary, but I treat this as a 2x concentrate, meaning I will typically mix 1:1 with filtered water before drinking. If you plan to use ice, milk, or dairy alternatives, you’ll want to use a little less water because these liquids will also contribute to dilution.
- Keep concentrate refrigerated and use for up to a week in your favorite coffee drink, cocktail, or even food recipe. I like it in BBQ sauce. More on that later.
