Holiday Blend Coffee 2018
A beautiful brew that can turn any day into a holiday!
Ari Weinzweig, CEO & Co-Founder of Zingerman’s
If you’re thinking about what to drink when you dive into a nice bite of pecan pie, this seasonal brew from the Coffee Company could just be the trick. We’ve been doing an annual Holiday Blend for over a decade now, but I’m pretty sure that the 2018 vintage is the best one yet!
In Zingerman’s Guide to Good Leading, Part 3, in secret #37, “A Lapsed Anarchist’s Approach to Time Management,” I shared my sensibilities about time. One of the keys to my approach, developed over many years of making mistakes and trying to learn from them, is that I really try to approach every day as if it’s a holiday. This coffee—at least for the next few months—is helping me make that a reality. I’ve been drinking it daily since the Coffee Company debuted it earlier this month, and I plan to keep pouring it straight through ‘til they stop at the end of December. Even with Thanksgiving, Chanukah, Christmas, Kwanza, and any other celebrations coming up in the next few months, the reality is that the majority of days remain…technically just another day in the calendar. This compelling coffee gives you—and me—the chance to make each one of them just a bit more marvelous!
I asked Matthew Bodary of the Coffee Company, the man behind this year’s Holiday Blend, and also one of the staff partners in the ZCoB, for some background. His write up was so good, I figured I’d just quote him here:
“When we developed this year’s Holiday Blend, we started with our favorite estate coffees from Costa Rica and Brazil. For complexity and balance, we added a bit of cooperative-grown coffee from Colombia. The resulting blend is rich, layered, and smooth with hints of cocoa.
We’ve been working with Brazil’s Daterra Estate since our early days. Over 10 years later, Daterra Estate is still producing some of the finest coffees we have ever tasted. The mix of natural and pulped-natural beans from Daterra that make up the base of this blend give it a smooth, velvety body with a nice cocoa-like quality.
The Costa Rica component, which adds natural sweetness and a caramel-like note, comes from our friends at Hacienda Miramonte. Started in 1917 by the matriarch of the Gurdian family, Lucila Duval de Morales, the farm is now operated by her great-grandson Ricardo.
We rounded out the blend with a bit of a great Colombian from a producers’ group of 15 farmer associations and coffee cooperatives in the mountains of Southwestern Colombia. The coffee has a balanced, clean profile that is classic for high-grown Colombian beans, and we think it adds another dimension of complexity to this blend.”
To my point about making every day a holiday, Matthew closed out with this: “We think the Holiday Blend is the kind of coffee you can drink day or night, at breakfast or with dessert, indoors, outdoors, with family and friends, or just by itself, as you sit fireside wrapped in a blanket. You and your coffee, comfort and joy.” Beautiful with babka from the Bakehouse, perfect when you pair it with that pecan pie, or after a bowl of the Creamery’s terrific Cardamom gelato(more on that soon—seriously check it out!).
Happy holidays!
Excerpt from Ari’s weekly Top 5 E-Newsletter. To stay in-the-know about things that Ari is excited about in the Zingerman’s family, sign up here!