La Colmena coffee, direct from the farm in El Salvador.

First, a big thank-you to Terra Bean Coffee for sending us this coffee, and sharing their story.

Before we get to the coffee tasting, let me share a little of that story. It’s a good one.

Terra Bean Coffee doesn’t grow coffee, process coffee, roast coffee or even have a store where you can buy a lot of different coffees.

What they do is build relationships between roasters and individual coffee farmers. And then, each month, they feature a single coffee that has become available through one of those relationships.

This month’s coffee is La Colmena, grown on the Los Alpes farm in El Salvador, roasted by Johnson Brothers Coffee Roasters in Madison, WI...and featured for this month only (Dec, 2012) on the Terra Bean Coffee website.

Next month they will feature a different coffee. And each coffee of the month will have come from a small farm in some coffee-growing region of the world.

If you like the idea of providing direct support to small coffee growers, and trying a new coffee each month, you can subscribe at the Terra Bean Coffee website. Each month you’ll receive one bag of a new coffee, along with an information sheet about its origins and history (as you can see from the photo above.)

OK. That’s the story. Now to taste the coffee itself.

This is a medium-roast coffee, with a smooth and sweet taste. The sweetness is not candy-sweet, it’s a more dry sweetness, like a dark, unsweetened chocolate, with a hint of dried fruit.

It also has a little bite, with a touch of bitterness that tingles the mouth.

What we liked about this coffee is how all the taste elements blend together, giving you a smooth and harmonized taste experience, with no one aspect drowning out the others.

This isn’t the kind of coffee to chug down when you need a heavy-hitting brew first thing in the morning. It’s coffee to taste, appreciate and enjoy.

This month you’ll find La Colmena coffee featured on the Terra Bean coffee website. Next month, it will be something else.

Read more of our coffee reviews...