Spotlight on Excellence: The Brown Coffee Co.

"Nothing is more powerful than beauty in a wicked world." - Amos Lee

When things are done with excellence, whether designing buildings, digging ditches, or roasting coffee; we enter into the realm of the sacred. Because we worship and are to reflect God, who does all things to perfection, it is our privelege to join Him in the pursuit of perfection. We will never achieve it here on earth, or possibly ever, but that knowledge, in some strange way, actually sets us free to pursue it that much harder, with giddy delight, free as children. I think of my son grunting and exerting with all his might as he "helps" me move a heavy object, delighted to be helping me, and me, my heart bursting with pride and love for my son, the hard worker. And so it is with us, our hearts full of God's love, seeking to bring little reflections of His light and love into the world through excellence. Because we live in a world that is full of mediocrity, and ourselves feel the pull of the siren song, "good enough", I believe we must shout aloud and champion the excellence that we do run across. With all the energy and vehemence usually reserved for protesting the shoddy, unjust and subpar, we who have tasted the eminent must cry out. This crying out starts with our very relationship with God and continues on down the line from transcendant art to exceptional service and yes to something as insignifigant as coffee. Now I want to make it clear that I am not trying to pull some cheap trick that devalues God by tying him to a product. However, I believe that when Jesus came to earth and humbled himself, "taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness", he elevated all of life. Jesus, who has given dignity and honor to shepherds, fishermen, and carpenters, has elevated every vocation to the realm of the sacred when they are done with excellence and as a gift for Him.

Having said that I would like to shout aloud that I have for the past seven months been drinking some of the finest coffee ever to wash down my thirsty gullet. But before I talk about the coffee, a bit of context is necessary to shed light on where I am coming from. I first started drinking coffee when I was fourteen in an attempt to be more like my grandfather. He was an incredible man worthy of imitation, always working on a cup somewhere, and when you hugged him you were enveloped in the wonderful aroma of coffee that surrounded him. So despite the horrific taste of coffee in those early years, I kept at it convinced that somehow in some small way it would make me more like him. Over the past twenty years I have evolved from a ton of cream and sugar in a styrofoam cup guy to a black and bitter in a styrofoam cup guy to a ritualistic black and bitter in very special mug with the occasional luxurious trip to Starbucks sort of guy. Then in June I met Aaron Blanco who supplies our church with coffee on Sunday mornings. That first cup didn't do much for me as I was conditioned to equate bitterness and a heavy roast with quality, however my wife went nuts over the coffee and week after week kept raving about how good it was. So we bought a pound from Aaron and let's just say, I haven't been the same since. He has ruined me. The amount of water that I must now drink to offset the enormous amounts of caffeine that I ingest is staggering and umm...inconvenient. As usual I went overboard, became a total coffee lush and am now seeking some form of balance in my day to day life.

Aaron Blanco recently celebrated the one year anniversary of The Brown Coffee Company that he owns and runs. I've said in these pages before that I love over the top people, those who go the extra mile, who go way beyond what would be acceptable or "good enough". Aaron is one of those people. After working his way up through Starbucks, he turned down a job as District Manager because it would have "taken [him] too far away from the coffee." So instead he went out on a limb and started his own coffee company. Aaron loves coffee, the entire process from the farm to the cup. He keeps an incredibly interesting and wide ranging blog about all things coffee that I have linked on the sidebar of this page. He recently organized and ran the Texas Barista Jam, a meeting of some of the finest coffee minds in Texas and is currently organizing a trip next month to the farm in Guatemala where they grow my favorite coffee, Guatemala Huehuetenango, Finca Vista Hermosa.

Earlier this month, Aaron invited me over to his house for a coffee tasting, called cupping, where we pitted four of the world's finest coffee's against two of his. It was gourmand heaven for this newbie to the world of exceptional coffees. One of the coffees we tried sells for 30 dollars a pound! Coffee cupping as they call it is an unusual way to experience the essence of what a coffee is all about. It is the process the buyer for a coffee company goes through as he pits various coffee beans against each other to determine their worth. Rather than going into a detailed explanation I will give you the laymans' version now and post photos along with an interview some time next month. Hot water is poured into small cups directly over the ground coffee where it sits for four minutes and develops a crust. You break the crust with a spoon while your nose is as close to the cup as possible and inhale the "essence" of the coffee in it's rawest form. This essence contains smells ranging from chocolate to tomatoes, strawberries, and cinnamon. I now believe those stuffy wine guys, you really can taste and smell some of these things. After inhaling the essence, you taste the coffee by sucking a spoonful into your mouth. The goal is to take it in with such force that it becomes a fine mist and coats the back of your throat with coffee. I never really got this part down despite my best efforts. As you are doing all of this you are taking down copious notes detailing everything from acidity, to flavor, fragrance and aftertaste. Then you score everything on a pretty simple scale in six categories and voila, you have a winner. Despite talking very little, Aaron and I both discovered many of the same flavors and scored five out of the six coffees very close. The coffees from the Brown Coffee Company going head to head against four of the best coffees in the world scored 3rd and 5th on my sheet. And no, I won't say who scored first because I'm partial to Brown, although just to show you what a standup guy Aaron is, he freely praises all four of the other coffee companies on his blog. Aaron believes in roasting the beans very lightly to allow all the complexities and flavors of the bean to come through. You can actually suppress and overpower the bean by roasting it too long, but that is how the majority of the coffee we drink in America is roasted. Because of his light touch in the roasting process, Brown's coffee is unusually clean, more sweet than bitter, and doesn't leave you with an aftertaste that has you scrambling for the breath mints. I want to honor Aaron for his pursuit of perfection. I hope you will give his coffee a try and come back here to post a review.

The Brown Coffee Company can be found online at www.browncoffeeco.com