Spotting the Single Origin Trend

Similar to the ever-popular trend of local produce and products comes the offshoot movement of single origin specialties. Superior in that they are purer than the alternative, chocolate, coffee, and honey makers are all making a point of concentrating their products to solo locales.

Michel Cluizel offers a dainty stack of his single origin chocolates, which range from the Tamarina dark chocolate (hailing from the Tamarina plantation in São Tomé) to the Los Anconés plantation in the Dominican Republic, which produces chocolate that is 67% dark.

Valrhona also specializes in single origin chocolates with estates in Trinidad, Madagascar, and Venezuela, to name a few.

The chocolatiers who boast chocolate that comes from one location intensifies and focuses the beans to achieve distinct flavor profiles.

Kenneth Nye of Ninth Street Espresso, who purchased entire sub lots of single origin coffee beans, follows the same creed. His cafés press a different bean each week from plantations in Colombia, Rwanda, Honduras, and Sumatra. At Café Grumpy in Chelsea, all of the coffee options are single origin and they are brewed to order. A Bolivian coffee from the Cenaproc Co-Op was a Dish favorite, as was the Zaragoza Mexican decaf, which was surprisingly smooth.

And speaking of smooth, even beekeepers are making honey in the single origin method. Honey has two components that need regulating—the flowers and the bees that pollinate them. Single origin honey is single-flower honey that bees, exclusive to that patch of flowers, pollinate. The colors, flavors, and crystallization rate range from region to region. The most popular single flower honeys come from the mountains of Carolina (from the sourwood flower); Georgia, which produces a tangy tasting honey from gallberry flowers; and in Florida, from where perhaps the most well-known and accessible tupelo honey comes.

For now, their single locations raise their price tags a bit, but with the trend creeping towards the masses, we hope that the popularity of single origin goodies will alleviate some of the costs. Until then, it’s singularly worth it!