Tree Town Blend is BACK!

Tree Town Blend from the Coffee Company is a caffeinated homage to Ann Arbor

Ari Weinzweig, CEO & Co-Founder of Zingerman’s 

This is our fourth year of doing this terrific Tree Town Blend at the start of the autumn season. I’m starting to weave it into my expectations of autumn’s arrival—the days get shorter, students come back to town, football season starts back up, the Jewish holidays appear on the calendar, and Tree Town Blend makes its annual appearance at the Coffee Company. Every year, the crew at the Coffee Company adjust the Tree Town just a bit to come up with something special using the best of the single-origin beans we can find. The 2021 Tree Town is a blend of beans from Brazil, Guatemala, and Uganda (last year’s had some Tanzania in place of the Uganda we chose this year), that thoughtfully makes for a lovely caramelly, cocoa-y brew with a hint of gentle apricot in the background. The Coffee Company crew say the cup is “complex and juicy!” The “Tree Town” moniker dates back much farther than the Coffee Company’s blend. It was derived over the years from the high volume of trees in the city. Until the arrival of Europeans, most of this part of the world—originally home to the Ojibwe people—was forest, but one of the first acts of newly arriving Europeans was to take down large numbers of trees for timber, and then to plow previously virgin lands in order to farm. Most of the city’s original trees were clear cut in the second half the 19th century to use for building here and for sale back east. Fortunately, early in the next century—around the time that Rocco Disderide built what’s now the Deli’s building in 1902—the city embarked on a reforestation program and as I write, we have nearly 1.5 million trees in town. Given the positive impact that all those trees have on the aesthetics and ecology of the town, it seems that all of us who live here now ought to give those who led that project a big round of appreciation. The Tree Town blend is a celebration of that beauty. Like all coffees, the flavor of the finished cup will be different depending on any number of variables like grind, water temperature, and brewing method. The Big Brew Board at the Coffee Company is a wonderful way to test out how different a coffee can taste in two different methods. (I regularly order the same coffee two different ways at the same time to try it.) I’ve tried four to five different brews of the Tree Town and all have been delicious. The staff at the Coffee Company seem to be universally high on the syphon brew right now. Thanks to the crew at Coffee too for bringing back what we here refer to as “the third grinder,” which allows us to make the Coffee of the Month into an espresso—the shots of Tree Town I’ve had this past week have been super smooth and terrifically tasty. Order one and raise a toast to trees and all the good things they do for our community.

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 community, sign up here!