Feel Good Coffee
As part of their vision for a well being focussed coffee shop, Kiera and Aimee wanted to create a Feel Good coffee blend, connecting with us as a Manchester coffee roastery with a like minded desire for connection and transparency. We love helping people feeling connected to their coffee,
So it was a brilliant opportunity to use two coffees we are particularly passionate about
The One From Honduras
Miriam Perez is the Fair Trade representative for Central and South America, a women’s rights activist and a world renowned coffee farmer. Her farming and fermentation methods produce stunning coffees, and have become an indispensable part of our coffee range here at H&G.
She is also one of the founders of COMSA coffee coop, whose coffee we use in the FGC blend.
Miriam visiting us at the roastery
The vision of COMSA starts with caring for the whole person. They call it Finca Humana (Human Farm), the good we put in ourselves makes us grow healthy and helps us reach our full potential. Through their school and training programmes they focus on caring for the planet and the wellbeing of their coop members and local community.
It’s COMSA coop coffee that we call Serendipia, the Spanish for serendipity in honour of the marvellous combination of circumstances that brought this coffee to us. A story that all started when Miriam’s niece Suita first found us in our old roastery, following the smell of coffee roasting to a dodgy looking building in Salford.
Suita still arranges our coffee buying from Honduras and is part of our coffee family.
It’s a coffee that forms part of our DNA and felt destined to form part of the FGC blend, both for its sweet cocoa and caramel flavour and also its story.
The One From India
The other coffee in the blend is an Indian coffee from Melkodige estate. At 100 hectares Melkodige is in the top 1% estates by size, they are family owned and they are pioneering India’s drive towards world class speciality coffee.
The estate is in Karnataka near the town of Chikmagalur, one of world’s top biodiversity hotspots. The coffee is grown under three levels of forest canopy, amongst insanely rich biodiversity. The nearby hills of BabuBudangiri are where coffee was introduced to India in around 1670 by Sufi mystic Babu Budan himself, who allegedly smuggled in seven prized coffee seeds in his beard, on returning from Yemen.
Estates like Melkodige are leading the charge to improve farming and fermentation techniques, creating much improved flavour and allowing us to identify which coffee has come from which farm. This quality and transparency adds value to the coffee and thus more money in the farmers pockets. When we first tried it, we thought we’d been sent the wrong coffee, as it blew away our expectations of what an Indian coffee could be!
The coffee produced has a rich, deep and chocolatey character with deliciously warming spice notes of nutmeg and cloves. It provides a fantastic deep bass note to the blend and together with the caramel sweet COMSA creates a Feel Good Coffee to the max.
We are super proud of this blend and very grateful to Kiera and Amy for giving us the opportunity to create it and get the coffee love out there.
