Madagascar Washed Ampary

Pear, Milk Duds, Sweet Grain You don't see lots from Madagascar often. The origin is so rare that James Hoffmann's World Coffee Atlas doesn't even bother to include it in its catalog, which is either an oversight or a tacit confirmation of the origin's otherworldliness (given Hoff's well-documented infallibility, it's probably the latter). Making things weirder, Madagascar's biodiversity is pretty much peerless; nearly half of the world's recognized coffee species are indigenous to the island. There's a scene in Reality Bites when Winona Ryder's character tries, but fails, to define irony. She would have done well to have simply said, "It's Madagascar's coffee output." Why is Madagascar so poorly represented on specialty shelves? Well, once upon a time, the island had a real industry, but political turmoil and falling prices caused it to collapse. Farmers abandoned their trees; infrastructure decayed, and the industry never recovered. Complicating matters, deforestation ate away at cultivation. Today, Madagascar, a country that should have as booming a coffee scene as any, has almost none. This coffee is a killer microlot from the Madagascar Coffee Company, one of the few outfits reliably exporting from the origin. It's from the Itasy region, and it was cultivated on plots less than two hectares in size (for those of you unaccustomed to the measurement, that's Micro Machines small). It represents an intercropping approach, with the trees settled alongside things like maize, cassava, avocados, citrus, and bananas. The lot went through washed processing and came out with the perfect mix of washed clarity and dense sugars. This coffee is sweet. Ridiculously sweet. And its natural sugars express in a few different ways. To begin with: pear. As fruit tones go, pear is tricky because a ripe pear tastes only faintly like an under-ripe pear. The note here assumes a middle ground, landing with acid to keep it lively and sugars to make it inviting. Milk Duds comes next, and it might be the dominant note. From the moment it appears, the impression is unmistakable: a malted milk, chocolatey throwback to movie theater candy. And that note brings up a third tone: sweet grain. Think oat scones or sweet rice porridge. The flavor starts faint but grows muscular on the cool, and it dovetails beautifully with the cup's other sweet aspects. Bottom line: this is a worthy brew from a worthy origin that you almost never see. If you're a coffee snob, you should grab a bag. If you’re not, you should still grab a bag. Because honestly, it’s pretty hard not to like.