Same Coffee, Different Year
On sourcing our coffees, fresh crop transitions, and Guatemala Santa Margarita 2021.
Most coffees that join our menu spend anywhere from three to seven months in service before we bid them farewell. We like to launch coffees a couple of months after they have arrived in North America, giving us sufficient time to dial in the recipe on the roaster and confidently position newcomers among our other offerings. A coffee’s precise lifespan is ideally determined by how long we believe it will stay vibrant, delicious, and distinct among our other offerings, but factors such as quantity, price point, and versatility come into consideration as well. With that in mind, some coffees stick around longer than others, and a coffee like Santa Margarita is a perfect example -- crowd pleasing, sweetness-forward, approachably priced, and a beautiful foundation for our blend.
This summer, our 2020 harvest of Santa Margarita continued to taste sweet and delicious all the way up until the 2021 harvest arrived in North America, ready for us in almost perfect alignment with last harvest’s dwindling supply. For that reason, we are witnessing a first and likely rare menu occurrence - the fluid transition from one year’s crop directly into the next, with no gap in between. Keeping in mind that coffee is a seasonal fruit, we know that one season’s yields may differ greatly from another, but when working with reliable and talented producers, we tend to see an encouraging degree of consistency year to year.
Santa Margarita is no exception. Compared to 2020’s harvest, we are tasting a little bit more gooey sweetness this time around, a little bit more dried fruit, and perhaps slightly less palpable nuttiness, but the fundamental character of this coffee remains the same -- rich, chocolatey, syrupy, and mellow. If you haven’t been an avid Santa Marg sipper for a little while now, you might not notice the transition in your cup, but either way, we encourage you to be on the lookout when you get your next cup.
Coffees like Santa Margarita are deceptively challenging to source. Rich and syrupy in texture but mellow in flavor, chocolatey without too much bitterness, with that elusive ability to bring out the best in other coffees when blended. It is truly a testament to the work of the producers that a coffee like this can also retain its quality so far from harvest, and that its subsequent yields can be so similar that we know a smooth transition won’t be clumsy or jarring. Other coffees on our menu are much more vivacious, much livelier, and frankly, much more interesting -- but because we want them to be presented in a manner that will amplify these characteristics, we also tend to be less forgiving as their quality ceilings lower with age. Because what we love about Margarita has so much more to do with texture and approachability, its ability to sustain its best traits is deceptively tremendous, and we are thankful for it.
This year’s Santa Margarita represents the largest single contract that Dispatch has ever signed. In addition to this lot, later this year we will also be releasing a tiny selection produced in one corner of the Santa Margarita farm, made 100% with the quasi-mythical Gesha coffee varietal. In terms of cup profile, the “big lot” Margarita and the “little lot” could not be more different -- the Gesha selection is incredibly floral, silky sweet, downright fruit loopy in its array of candied citrus and berry flavors. This farm’s year to year consistency, as well as the diversity of lots that it is able to produce, make it a pivotal partnership for us that we are proud to continue deepening in the years ahead.
