- Today we have some very, very old coffee.
Someone watching these videos very kindly got in touch
and said they were going
through an old relative's sort of stuff,
and they found this.
And they thought it came from 1908,
and they had a good reason to think so.
They saw Harrods,
Harrods, big department store in London,
and they knew that their relative
had been an Olympian who was not English.
He had traveled to London for the 1908 Olympics,
and so they thought it was likely
they'd picked up this Harrods-branded coffee then.
There were some problems with this, though.
There were some confusing aspects of this package of coffee,
and let's just drink it in for a minute.
Is this not a beautiful thing?
And I'll say now we will be desecrating this
a little bit later on today.
We have to open it.
We have to know what's inside.
Looking at this was a bit confusing,
the idea that this came from Harrods in 1908,
predominantly because almost all
of the text on this is in Spanish.
Now that's confusing.
If you look at the front here, obviously you've got café.
It's extra superior.
You've got verde there, green.
Mm, interesting.
We'll come back to that in a second.
Up here, you've got a little guarantee of Harrods' quality,
and then you can see it's from Peru.
It's a single origin.
That's good news.
Down the bottom, there's some other stuff
that's kind of confusing.
On the back, more Spanish, right?
Like it's Departamento de Comestibles,
the department of consumables, I guess.
That is not a thing that Harrods has in London.
So what's going on here?
Now, what we did do was email the archivist for Harrods.
Turns out Harrods has an archivist,
and they're very helpful, so thank you to them.
And they said this came from Buenos Aires.
Confused? So was I.
Turns out in 1913, Harrods decided to open a branch
of their department store in Buenos Aires.
It's still there.
It takes up a whole city block now.
It's not run by Harrods anymore,
but the sort of brand went on there for a long time.
And this seems to be kind of branded product,
but at this point, a separate business
because the archivist said this logo dates to the mid-1930s.
Now, on the one hand,
I was very satisfied to have an answer.
On the other hand, I was a little bit disappointed
that it wasn't 100 years old or older
'cause you know I love some old coffee here on this channel.
But it's still very old.
It's still 90-ish years old, which is old.
Coming back to the front, down at the bottom here
is the single most confusing thing going on here.
This says a quarter of a kilo net,
but this does not weigh a quarter of a kilo.
This is heavy.
This is solid.
Now, my first thought is, one, it's green coffee.
This is raw coffee, maybe.
It says green on the front.
Maybe this is raw coffee.
You know, it wasn't unusual way back in the day
for people to roast their own coffee
and want to get the best and roast it fresh.
And that's not a new idea.
So maybe it's green coffee, but why is it so heavy?
In fact, how heavy is it?
This weighs 1,200 and about 12 grams,
which is a lot more than the 250 grams net it suggests.
I have no idea what's going on here.
It feels weird, right?
Like you've got this very nice kind of wax paper outer.
There's another inner layer there
that stops you really feeling what's going on,
but it feels like it could be greens, maybe.
I've been confused before with very old coffee.
So who knows, maybe it's just nearly a kilo of mold.
We'll find out, and to do so,
we've gotta do that thing where we we cut
into this very old package and look at what's inside.
I don't how to do this in the least damaging way.
There's a bit of the wax paper sort of loose here.
I don't know what to do.
I don't know.
I don't wanna just tear it open like a child at Christmas,
but I also want to open it.
I could just try and snip the back maybe.
Look at you.
Now,
obviously it's not green anymore.
If you look at normal green coffee,
it has that lovely greenish hue to it.
This looks like aged coffee,
and if you ever drink aged coffee,
and you roast them yourself,
you'll know that they can often go quite pale
and quite yellow.
This is the oldest raw coffee I've ever seen.
The grading has not been fantastic on there.
There's some black beans.
There's kind of broken beans in here,
stuff that you really don't wanna be drinking.
We're going to need to roast this.
And I am gonna screen it,
take out all the defects that I can see
because I wanna give it the best chance
to to be drunk and enjoyed, if that's possible.
We will need to roast this, obviously,
and I'll get hold of a roaster of some sort.
I just find something charming in that smell.
I don't think it's gonna make good coffee.
Now, under sort of modern definitions,
this is not specialty coffee.
You're allowed up to five defects
of various kinds per 300 grams.
So, you know, it's not specialty grade
under the modern definition, but maybe it's good.
Maybe it was.
Maybe we'll find out.
Let's go and roast some coffee.
I'm back, and I brought an IKAWA Pro.
Now, this is a sample roaster.
It roasts up to 50 grams at a time.
It's very cool. It runs on an iPad.
It does good stuff.
We use them at Square Mile.
They're really useful.
We're not gonna talk about this thing today
'cause it's not what the video's about.
But I ran a couple of different profiles
because, honestly, there's no one out there
who really knows how to roast coffee this old.
So one has to speculate, and speculate we did,
and I ran a couple of different roasts.
Both are sort of in the medium range.
I figured going super light on this
wasn't gonna bring me much delight.
So I went a little bit more developed.
Let's drink it.
Now, I thought a little bit about how to brew this,
what's the right way to do it.
I think I should grind it by hand.
I should crush it manually with my physical strength.
I don't know why.
I just feels like it's more appropriate,
you know, to the age, to the time.
So I've got a little hand grounder.
We're gonna brew a cloth-filtered V60.
I don't know.
Again, I definitely want filtration in this.
I don't want like a French press or a cupping bowl.
I want some kind of cleaning up from the filter.
So cloth just seemed kind of nice.
Let's brew like a 15 to 250.
Wish me luck.
Now, this was roasted about an hour ago.
Some of you watching are gonna be stressing out
that I'm drinking this coffee too fresh.
I hope you think about that for just a second
in the context of what we're drinking here.
(laughs)
It smells joyful because as a kid,
I used to love like the hand-cranked pencil sharpener.
That was like a special treat to use at school,
and this smells like that.
Oh my, it's like peanuts and pencil shavings.
Yeah, that's basically it.
Okay, let's brew it up.
I have had old raw coffee before.
I drank something that was harvested in the early 1950s
and was roasted fresh in Cafe L'ambre
in the Ginza District of Tokyo.
And that really freaked me out at the time.
Like, that just tasted like it had sort of fermented
and molded for like 50, 60 years.
This smells different.
I'm definitely cautious.
I'm nervous of this.
Whew.
I don't need a big cup.
I will say I was very excited the day
that this package arrived.
The idea of tasting this was really exciting.
It's interesting how that has changed
as this has gotten closer to my face,
but it is time, cheers.
(exhales)
No, goodness me.
That's really not what I expected.
Okay, let me go back in, I think.
So that is staggeringly bitter.
That's not like a super dark roast,
and the bitterness is not a roast bitterness.
It is like a bitter compound bitterness
like a tonic water bitterness,
yeah, like a bitter compound bitterness.
I don't know how else to describe it
because there's not a big roasty flavor to it.
It's just this initial punch of bitter.
And then, wood, a lot of wood,
different kinds of wood, pine wood, pencil wood.
What wood do they make pencils out of?
I don't know, but whatever wood that is, that wood.
It's rich and woody,
a little fruit,
like a little citrus berry-ness somewhere, somewhere,
but you're really searching pretty hard for that.
And the bitterness up front kind of freaks me out,
if I'm honest.
I don't know if I've had anything like that.
Genuinely unsettled by that, you know what I mean?
Like there's a bit where I'm like, no, this is food safe.
It's been roasted, and this is making me go,
ooh, is this safe?
Are you being an idiot?
Now, I know what you're thinking
'cause I know the way you think.
You're thinking, "He said he did two roasts,
and one was more developed,
and he's only brewed filter coffee."
What have I done?
This, we had to grind this really, really, really fine,
like way finer than anything,
and it still poured a little fast, like early 20s.
Yeah, that's bad.
I mean, it is everything we had in the filter brew
but more powerful, more potent.
Okay, espresso
from four score and 10 ago.
(exhales)
So definitely should have brought some water for rinsing.
That was a mistake.
That's a lot.
That is,
oh no, it's still coming.
Wow, okay.
Gathering my thoughts, I'm gonna go in for another sip
'cause my brain just couldn't cope with the shining pain,
the searing pain of liquid wood.
It's more than the pencil of the brew.
It's like mega pencil.
It's like I just pulled shots of pencil shavings.
It's got a little of that rotten goodness in there, too.
So, there it is, coffee from the 1930s,
Harrods' finest, as it was, from Peru.
Fascinating to see.
Just to nerd out for a minute,
to see the bean prep
from what would've been expensive coffee back then
be kind of disastrous by modern standards was interesting.
And this comes from a time
before there was like descriptive language for coffee.
It would've just been like fine or not fine.
And this would've been fine coffee, but it's not now.
It's not now.
Anyway, I'm gonna stop there, I think.
Actually, one more thing, one more thing.
A lot of you been asking about these prints
that have been in the background.
Let me tell you about these prints
'cause we are very, very excited about them.
One second.
So we worked with botanical artist Lucy Smith
and Dr. Aaron Davis of Kew Gardens
to create sort of six botanical drawings
of the kind of cultivated species of coffee.
So you've got Coffea arabica,
your friend and mine, Coffea canephora,
liberica, still popular,
still grown in many parts of the world,
the hot new favorite, eugenioides,
that no one really knows how to pronounce.
Stenophylla, we've made a video about this species
on the channel, super interesting.
And one more species that some of you may have come across,
which is racemosa, so, so interesting.
Tiny little beans, really cool little species.
So all of these are grown commercially
somewhere in the world at some point.
And so we figured it would be fun
to kind of make a collection of botanical drawings.
We also have all six on one kind of print.
Let me get that.
It's quite big, but it has to be.
There's a lot of detail here
because every species has annotations
explaining what kind of defines it as a species.
On the A4 and A3 size print, these are actually life size.
This is how big the cherry is.
It's a one-to-one scale on this stuff.
You've still got all the detail here about it,
and it's just a beautiful drawing.
You've got fruit. You've got flowers.
You've got like leaf structure.
We went nerdy on this one because they're just so cool.
We're super proud of them.
We think Lucy has done an amazing job with them
and Aaron as well, and we really hope you enjoy them.
We certainly are enjoying them here at the studio.
All right, that's it.
That's everything.
I really hope you enjoyed today's video,
certainly a lot more than I did,
but let me know your thoughts down in the comments below.
But for now, thank you so much for watching,
and I hope you have a great day.