In over 15 years of serious coffee tasting, I have always followed my own motto: Push the specialty coffee experience to the very edge of the experiential frontier – and then push it a little further.
And in one and a half decades of boutique coffee browsing I have sipped coffee from the most exotic climes; Like beans from far flung places like St. Helena Island – Napoleon Bonaparte, no less, wiled away his final days there. Coffee beans pooped out the tail end of marsupial civets… from three different sources no less! Thai civet coffee, Indonesian Kopi Luwak and Vietnamese farmed civet coffee. I have had Jamaica Blue Mountain coffees from all the major estates on the little Island that gave us some of the most remarkable rums and reggae music. I once held in my hands a 10 pound bag of Panama La Hacienda Esmerelda coffee… worth over $1600. And yea, I got me some!
Some of my favorites java jolts have come from Ethiopia, Yemen, Uganda, Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama, Papua New Guinea and, of all places, Australia and Thailand.
And despite all these varied experiences, nothing could have prepared me recently for my greatest caffeinated challenge to date… Girlie Coffee
Deliciously Girlie comes from Kealakekua on the Big Island of Hawaii – it’s a tranquil little town nestled along a very narrow region of land scarcely a mile wide and 7 to 10 miles long – and 1200 to 1750 feet above Sea level – it shares the strip of weather beaten State highway 11 and a luxurious landscape with town names like Captain Cook.
Deliciously Girlie coffee is 100% Pure Kona coffee that is very lightly roasted – probably as light as you can go – and only produced within the natural environment of the ideal coffee production facility… the farm. And the roaster. That is it. No intermediate steps. No corporate influence. No processing.
What I was fundamentally unprepared for were the consequences of brewing up several pots and presses of coffee actually intended for the exclusive consumption of the fairer sex… that is, the ladies.
In my lab at the University of Victoria, I work with a wide range of folks of both sexes and all ages. And as word went around that there was some newfangled brews to peruse, the buzz for this joe became palpable.
Cups of the Deliciously Girlie coffee were passed around to the crew and much to our surprise, the coffee was… mild and quite Kona like… with light body and very focused lemony notes. Ah. So far so good. Within about 15 minutes however, the guys in our coffee circle became quite blethering… verbose… chatty. Fact was, this lightly roasted coffee packs an immense caffeine wallop – somewhat higher than your typical burnt out Starbucks roast – Deliciously Girlie is at the other end of the roast spectrum and as you might not know: the lighter the roast, the higher the caffeine content.
And one of the reasons why they call this Girlie coffee (and there are lots of reasons on their informative webpage…) is that women are better equipped to deal with the different chemistry of this coffee – like more caffeine, and more complex antioxidants – those delightful little cancer fighters that many natural foods (like coffee) contain.
What of the ladies in the lab and offices around ours that sampled the women only java? They carried on about their day as if this was a normal, but tasty, cup of coffee to enjoy.
The guys? Well, we chatted and chatted and ran over into an elongated coffee break… and chatted some more. Then hugged. And went back to work.
But don’t take my word for it! Deliciously Girlie coffee comes in a remarkable packaging that looks unmistakably Jean Paul Gaultier (the designer!) – and not surprising, the creators of Deliciously Girlie used to work for companies like Prada in New York City.
This blog on Deliciously Girlie Coffee begins yet another season of our beloved series, Summer Fun Food and Drink! I hope you all enjoy reading these stories as much as I enjoy writing them! Can we talk?