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Lately, it seems there are quite a few articles being written comparing the various attributes of two of our favorite beverages--wine and coffee. As Sonoma County's leading purveyor of sustainable coffee, we can appreciate the similarities. Both require a painstaking labor of love and in return offer us an intriguing world of flavors and aromas to explore. Both come to us from distinct regions around the world and take on a signature, or terroir, from the unique places they are grown. Both have developed into a kind of personal ritual, often as bookends to our day.

But the comparison fails us when it comes to one important difference: freshness. While wine can often improve with age, we can say from experience that this does not hold true for coffee. Coffee is best when it is fresh, and in this respect is perhaps more akin to bread than wine. Over time coffee, like bread, loses its essential flavor and becomes a shadow of its former self. In fact, in our opinion, more breakfasts are spoiled by stale coffee than by stale bread.

In recent months, Taylor Maid's continuing concern over our environmental footprint together with the recognition of the importance of sourcing more of our food locally, has led us to reconsider the practice of offering our coffees through our website. Fortunately, the United States is now populated with a number of coffee companies that serve their local communities with fresh, high-quality products. Our belief has always been that local communities are best served, and are actually strengthened, by supporting local businesses.

It is for these reasons that Taylor Maid Farms will no longer be offering our products by mail. If you have been purchasing our coffee and tea at your local grocery store, café, or our own Maid at Home stores, we encourage you to continue buying our fresh and locally roasted products. For those of you who live in other parts of the country and would like to continue to purchase our products, we recommend that you order through Dandelion Goods, www.dandeliongoods.com, our neighbors here in Sebastopol & exclusive mail order partners.

Please continue to access our website for information about specialty organic coffees and teas, tips on coffee preparation, organic agriculture as well as news about the coffee industry. Also, we will soon be adding a store locator feature to assist you in finding Taylor Maid Farms coffee in your neighborhood.

With best wishes,

The folks at Taylor Maid Farms

Oswaldo Acevedo’s revitalization of his grandmother’s coffee farm (originally planted in 1872) to become the first social and ecological demonstration farm in Colombia has earned praise from environmental and business groups worldwide. We have proudly supported this coffee since 1994. Doña Isidora is medium to full in body, distinctively sweet and fruity with tones of cherry and chocolate.

In 2003, Taylor Maid Farms planted over 190,000 antique heirloom coffee trees on Oswaldo Acevedo’s legendary El Roble farm. This variety was chosen due to its superior taste and plant health, as well as its rarity. El Roble is the social and ecological demonstration farm of Colombia, earning praise from coffee organizations worldwide. Don Oswaldo is medium-full in body, elegant with notes of tobacco, toasted bread and baker’s chocolate.

This antique cultivar comes from a group of farms near the El Imposible National Forest, a critical reserve for endangered species of migratory songbirds. The same families have been working these farms for generations and have managed them since El Salvador's agrarian reform acts of 1983. This is a classic Central American coffee with a rich history, offering a complex cup with notes of dried fig and tawny port.

Taste Ethiopia Yirgacheffe and know why many in the coffee trade consider it to be one of the finest coffees in the world. This coffee, grown by the Oromia coffee farmers cooperative, offers a cup that is rich and complex with lemon-like tartness, fruity body and a gentle floral aroma.

This unique coffee comes to us from the small, remote island of Flores located in the Indonesian archipelago. The Mangarai co-op is made up of 1,119 farmers with an average farm size of just under 1 hectare each. Grown at altitudes of 1200-1800 meters, the coffee has a deep, earthy flavor that is common for Indonesian coffees, but also boasts blooming floral and chocolate notes with a clean finish.

The growers from the 23 villages that make up the "21 De Septiembre Cooperative" grow heirloom coffee on small plots of land in what many consider to be the best coffee land in Oaxaca, Mexico—the Sierra Madre del Sur mountain range. Grown at altitudes ranging from 1,200-1,800 meters, the cup quality of this coffee is sweet, fruity and deliciously citrus with notes of semi-sweet chocolate and ripe cherries.

The eighteen families that make up Nicaragua's Miraflor Natural Reserve produce organic coffee, vegetables, and dairy products on small shaded farms, as well as house the largest collection of orchids (220 species) and birds (236 species) in Central America. The cup profile of their wonderful coffee is bright in acidity with rich body and a sweet, creamy flavor.

The Aceh region of Indonesia has been long renowned for producing exceptionally unique coffees, unlike any other in the world. Grown in what might be best described as “coffee gardens” of one acre or less, these coffees exhibit a deep, earthy sweetness with hints of cacao, caramel, roasted hazelnut and honeysuckle A great choice for espresso.

From the highland area of Takengon, in Indonesia’s Aceh province, comes this classic: Heavy-centered, with hints of wine and a character more complexly pungent than sweet. This farm is in the buffer zone of the Gunung Leuser National Park, a forested area that contains critical watershed areas and sanctuaries for rare and endangered wildlife. Decaffeinated using the mountain water process.


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