Anyone tried Mezcla?

[migralda]

I have been a coffee fanatic for 45 years.
I home roast and have almost every brew method available from my E61 espresso machine to a simple cone and paper.
One of my favourite coffee's is "Mezcla" a type of coffee seemingly unique to Spain.
I have been an active member on several coffee forums for years and no one could give me any information about it until one Dutch gentlemen enlightened me.
Apparently a percentage of the beans are soaked in sugar syrup and dried before being roasted then blended with normal beans, the end result being a very full bodied dark roast with incredible mouth feel.
Anyone else experienced it?

 

[Mick]

Not seen that one.

 

[StillShaving]

I have never seen any. I do recall hearing something about sugar roasted coffee years ago, and when I looked online found mention of Torrefacto roasting process and this article which gave more details but was one-sided and negative:
Torrefacto – How a Post-War Roasting Process Has Ruined Coffee

 

[migralda]

Yes that is the same process, obviously taste is a very personal thing but I absolutely love it.

 

[StillShaving]

When reading about it online, it seems the taste can be more polarizing than most coffee things; that some people like it and others do not. Which makes me think it might also be more about the quality of beans used.

Based on this article it seems that Mezcla is a 80/20 to 50/50 blend of non-Torrefacto beans to Torrefacto beans. I may try it out sometime.

Photo of a Mezcla blend from the aforementioned article:

 

[migralda]

Very interesting articles, thank you.
The authors can obviously put whatever spin they want on them..
It seems unlikely several million Latin American coffee lovers can be conned ?

 

[StillShaving]

I agree with your interpretation @migralda. If I were as judgmental I might think those two articles were written by persons who grew up on third wave coffee and are conditioned to dislike anything else as being inferior.

Earlier I was reading this article on "clean" eating: Why we fell for clean eating
It is quite long and off topic for this thread except it mentioned of coffee made from sugar and chicory, which besides reminding me of this thread, it makes one wonder to what extent was coffee "stretched" in the centuries before. Since coffee shortages seem to have been common way-back-when.

We are not the only generation to have looked in disgust at an unhealthy food environment and wished that we could replace it with nutrients that were perfectly safe to eat. In the 1850s, a British chemist called Arthur Hill Hassall became convinced that the whole food supply of London was riddled with toxins and fakery. What’s more, he was right. Hassall had done a series of investigations for the medical journal the Lancet, and found that much of what was for sale as food and drink was not what it seemed: “coffee” made from burnt sugar and chicory; pickles dyed green with poisonous copper colourings.

Years of exposing the toxic deceptions all around him seems to have driven Hassall to a state of paranoia. He started to see poison everywhere, and decided that the answer was to create a set of totally uncontaminated food products. In 1881, he set up his own firm, The Pure Food Company, which would only use ingredients of unimpeachable quality. Hassall took water that was “softened and purified” and combined it with the finest Smithfield beef to make the purest beef jelly and disgusting-sounding “fibrinous meat lozenges” – the energy balls of Victorian England. The Pure Food Company of 1881 sounds just like a hundred wellness food businesses today – except for the fact that it collapsed within a year due to lack of sales.