The task of choosing components to build our bends here at Ruby is always approached with great consideration and intentionality. Planning for blends often starts behind the scenes, many months in advance. This seasons Cheers Holiday Blend is no exception. Let’s get into some more details about this season’s Cheers blend and why we selected these components.
This years Cheers component breakdown is 20% Sumatra Putra Gayo Natural, 30% El Salvador Talnamica, 50% Costa Rica Cerro La Cruz.
During our Indonesia sourcing this September, we came across a really wonderful lot from Putra Gayo that became a focal point of the flavor profile for the blend. It is a natural process coffee that nicely balances unique Sumatra origin characteristics with additional intensity from the way the coffee is handled after being picked. Our cupping notes were things like ‘cider, mulberry, black currant, intense grape soda’ and similarly juicy, wine-like flavors. We decided to use its intense complexity to drive up the ‘mulled wine’ notes in Cheers and expand the light baking space notes throughout. Even though it’s only 20% of the blend, this coffee really shapes the identity of this year’s flavor profile. We’re exclusively featuring this premium offering in Cheers!
For the next component of the blend, we explored our most chocolatey offerings and tasted different blend variations to decide which one would work best in Cheers.
El Salvador Talnamica emerged to be the best fit with the other two components. Many of you will already know that we have been sourcing this coffee since Ruby’s very beginning and our relationship with the Mendez and Ortiz families goes back over a decade. We love this coffee for its rich vanilla notes, elegant caramel undertones and sweet brownie flavors. We think of it as the well-structured bridge between the fruity Putra Gayo and the final coffee in the blend.
For the third selection and the largest percentage of the blend, we decided Cerro La Cruz would be a perfect fit. We’ve been working with the Esquivel family for many years, each season selecting several micro lots from their cluster of farms in Tarrazu, Costa Rica. During our visit to Costa Rica this season, our roaster Katy and business manager Ashley selected six lots from throughout the farm and earmarked their coffee to be a component for Cheers. The lot we’re using has exceptional candied citrus, mellow spices, honey and other attributes that blend harmoniously with the first two components.
We’re so proud to launch this limited edition 2023 Cheers with such a unique combination of coffees that we have selected for very specific reasons. They have a delightful complexity that creates a brewed cup with layers of sweet, elegant, and lightly fruited layers. It’s the coffee we’ll be drinking this winter.
We have a limited quantity of this offering available and we expect to sell out before the end of the year.