When it comes to creating blends, our coffee traders have become experts at helping you find the right blending components! This time of year, we get a lot of questions about how to add some spice notes to holiday coffee blends. Having that extra boost of warming spices is sometimes all you need to craft the perfectly cozy cup! TJ Salvatore shares some of RNY’s recommendations to make sure your seasonal offerings have the flavor notes you need.

Conventional Offerings for Holiday Coffee Blends

From the Torajan tribe in South Sulawesi, RNY # 54181 is an offering with a heavy, chocolate body. Coffee from this central mountain region is grown at elevations reaching 2000masl. In fact, this area is considered to have some of the highest growing elevations in all of Indonesia! Along with its immense vanilla-like sweetness, SULAWESI TORAJA “SAPAN MINANGA” GR1 portrays subtle undertones of cedar and spices.

If you’re looking for a classic blending component, our INDIAN MONSOON MALABAR is the way to go. This coffee originated in an era when wooden ships loaded with raw coffee beans would take up to 6 months to travel from India to Europe! You’ll find this lot to have a bold, chocolatey body with distinct notes of tobacco and other spices. With the potential to help build the body of your blend, RNY # 55200 is great for that warm and cozy mid-afternoon cup of coffee.

Our last conventional recommendation is RNY # 54253, a coffee from the Sipi Falls Coffee Project in the Mount Elgon region of Uganda. Founded in 1999, the Project now encompasses over 5,000 smallholder producers and covers over 2,000 hectares of production. UGANDA AA BUGISU has a black pepper-like spice note, complemented by a subtle earthiness and an abundance of chocolate. This coffee will be great in your holiday coffee blend to give it that extra “holiday cheer”!

Organic Offerings for Holiday Coffee Blends

ORGANIC BALI BLUE MOON WET HULLED is a fan favorite among many during the holiday season. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Balinese government enacted programs to rejuvenate coffee production. After distributing coffee seedlings to local farmers, an island-wide, coffee-growing campaign began! Produced by the Subak Abian cooperative, this coffee grows alongside shade trees such as Erythrina, Albizia, tangerine, and orange. The profile of RNY # 54844 provides a copious amount of chocolate and spice, especially when taken to a darker roasting level.

A wet hulled, or giling basah coffee, RNY # 54752 comes from Koperasi Serba Usaha. The growing co-op currently has about 150 members, each member averaging around 2-2.5 hectares/farm in Kayumas and Taman Dadar. Furthermore, Serba Usaha’s members range from as young as 1st generation coffee farmers to 4th generation! When you try our ORGANIC JAVA TAMAN DADAR WET HULLED, you’ll find it have a molasses-like body and mouthfeel with underlying notes of a black pepper-like spice.

Lastly, we have our ORGANIC TIMOR FAIR TRADE. Another fan favorite, this coffee comes from Cooperativa Haburas Kafe Organiku, a fair trade and organic certified group comprised of a few thousand farmers. These dedicated, well-trained, and motivated members truly make this coffee special as they consistently work hard to make significant improvements in the quality and quantity of their production. Really driving home the feel of the holidays, RNY # 54170 has notes of chocolate and cedar, perfectly complemented by an almost nutmeg-like spice on the finish.

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