May’s Coffee Challenge – Carvetii Coffee

El Tablon – Carvetti Coffee

The month of May rolls on, punctuated by some very fine coffees.  No more coffee for me in June, we are going totally raw (that means eating food that is not cooked above 40 odd degrees, maintaining nutrients, enzymes etc).  I decided to go out with a bang and fit as much brilliant coffee into May as was feasible to body and mind, gradually reducing my sipping towards the end of the month.  So this is it, the last bag of the month and I couldn’t have wished for a better example of why I love coffee.  It’s a Carvetii Coffee.

Today is a radiant day up here in North Wales, the garden is getting a good dose of sun and we fancied trying a coffee packed full of sunshine.  Any excuse for great coffee!

Carvetii Coffee certainly fits this bill.  They are Gareth and Angharad who run a small coffee roasting company located in the beautiful Lake District, Northern England.   They started off in 2006 with a small cafe in North Wales, then gradually progressed to roasting their own beans, initially on a frying pan in their kitchen!  They only roast in small batches and I love the way that they post the next roast date on their website, meaning you can order super freshly roasted coffee.   They are mad about coffee (in a very good way!).

Carvetii Coffee

The ‘El Tablon‘ coffee has a wonderful aroma, you can smell the honeyed sweetness of the bean when it is being ground.  It is a single origin, ‘micro-lot’ coffee from El Salvador.  ‘Micro-lot’ meaning very small, high quality growing.  The bean used is called the pacamara.  It is honey-processed, resulting in that wonderful sweetness and it is certainly very fruity.  The name of this processing comes from the Spanish word for the flesh of this large variety of coffee bean, ‘miel’ (which interestingly is similar in the Welsh language, ‘mel’).

This is a very high quality cup of coffee, with a very smooth, stylish flavour.  I have  never tried a honey-processed coffee and I am impressed by the unique flavour produced by this technique.

I’m looking forward to more of this wonderful stuff.  It is my birthday on Sunday and I can’t think of a better brew to toast my 34th year.

If you are interested in what the good folk of Carvetii Coffee are up to, have a look at there blog.

Thank you to Gareth and Angharad for your passion and excellence in all things coffee.