Daniel of Arabica
brew, drink, repeat
Up next: Intelligentsia’s Shegole, Ethiopia
Promising syrup, roundness, spice, sweet molasses, candied fig, and citrus zest acidity.
Coffee Common’s First Public Event in North America
Coffee Common’s First Public Event in North America is going to be in New York City….
And it’s only $5. Sheeeeeit, that’s cheaper than two cups of coffee at Intelligentsia in Pasadena. I’m there! Oh, wait, no I’m not. I’m stuck here in California. But if you’re in New York and you love the coffee, you should go … and let me live vicariously through you.
Handsome Roaster’s Kenya Ruthagati is…
V60/3:12
…blackberries, vanilla, tobacco, a bright explosion.
AeroPress/2:43
Hot: …sharp, concentrated, blackberry syrup made with molasses
Cooler: …bright, darkly fruity.
This was the last of Handsome’s stock of Kenya Ruthagati. You will be missed. It made a hell of a SO shot as well.
Tonx’s new Colombia Huila in the V60
Full name: Colombia Huila, Los Naranjos Co-op, Fly-crop Harvest
Maybe I’m biased—tis the season and I love the season—but I think Tonx has a perfect coffee for the holidays on their hands.
The premiere brew
Their latest coffee shipment is tasting great out of the v60o. True to Tonx’s stated intent, sweetness prevails in the cup. But I’m also of the mind to say that there is some subtle spiciness happening as well: cloves and cinnamon. Nothing is overpowering at all—not the sweetness, not the spice. Balance and harmony. Zen coffee.
For the nerd inside you:This first cup was brewed on the V60 using my normal, quite fine grind (a little finer than I use for a normal cone filter), a 1 minute pre-infusion, a little swirl on the pour in the beginning to integrate the water and the grinds but after that, slow and straight into the center.
More as the brewing progresses…
A new piece on the humble folks of Tonx in LAWeekly
…all I did was just not fuck it up
— Tony “Tonx” Konecny of Tonx in LAWeekly
Full disclosure: I’ve met both Tony and Nik, think they’re both stand-up gents and wish them all the success in the world with their new coffee venture.
In agreement with Mr. Konecny’s take on the role of the roaster in the process of getting a good coffee from the farm to the cup. I have a great amount of respect for those I’ve heard say the very same thing. It’s a humble and respectful attitude—both toward the people involved as well as the product itself.
Congratulations to Nik and Tony of Tonx on their new piece in LAWeekly.
Tonx’s Kenya Karinga in the Chemex
Mmmm…pie…
Tonx coffee’s Kenya Karinga, out of the Chemex, wants to be a piece of blackberry pie, with all it’s constituent parts—butter, sugar, flour, etc.—making a showing, married to a rich chewy molassesy ginger snap cookie, with a strawberry afterwards (I don’t know, maybe you found it in the fruit bowl or something).
And it does a damn fine job of it.
It also wanted me to grind it finer than I usually do for the coffees I have in my favorite 60s era blown-glass coffee maker. I mistakenly ground the Karinga for the V60 the first time out. Turned out wonderful (as stated above). The second time, with grind corrected?
Where’s my pie?!
A “roasty” grind
This grind conundrum dovetails nicely with something I learned, but forgot, about grinding (even slightly) darker coffees, and a component of this particular Tonx offering that a couple friends and I noticed: it’s a little more “roasty” than we are accustomed to in a Tonx coffee.
Ok, let’s see if I can get this out in some sort of concise but intelligible written form… In my experience, the more darkly a coffee is roasted, the finer you need to grind it for a given brew method.
In other words, all other things being equal, if you were to take a coffee, roast it two ways (one darker than the other, of course) and brew the two resulting bags of beans using the very same method, the more darkly roasted of the two would require a finer grind than the lighter to achieve optimal extraction (i.e. to taste its best). “What?”, you may be asking, “are you talking about?”
I’ve been told (and it makes sense to me) that more darkly roasted coffees are more porous—less dense—than lighter roasted beans. So it follows that a more porous bean is going to allow more water through than one that is roasted more lightly. This is something that I’ve forgotten but that, in a wonderful bit of serendipity, has come back to prove itself true: a roasty grind (i.e. a finer grind) for a roasty coffee. In order to hold the water with the grinds long enough to get a good extraction you’re going to need a finer grind.
Gawd, I love this stuff…says the nerd.
More pie, please
Lucky for me, I have more. Tomorrow, for breakfast, I’ll be having some more blackberry pie. If you have any Tonx Kenya Karinga and a Chemex, I hope you’ll join me.
An update — brew time
Now that I’m paying closer attention, a note on brew time: with a finer grind you’re going to get longer brew times of course. My blackberry pie experience came courtesy of an unusually long 4:15 brew time. That’s not normally what I go for—aound 3:00 is the goal—but I’ve found that the Chemex, in particular, seems to handle longer brew times with more panache than others.
Intelligentsia’s Colombia Finca Santuario Bourbon Micro-lot
Colombias seem to be very good right now. Tonx had a tasty one a little ways back and this morning I had another fine example in Intelligentsia’s Finca Santuario Micro-lot.
I made my way over to the only reputable coffee bar in Pasadena, Intelligentsia, and ordered a cup (and carafe, of course—there’s no way out of it) of the Finca Santuario.
Tastes like…
Chicken, of course … just kidding. Prepared in a V60, it was juicy without being tangy and punch-like and the word that came to mind was licorice. Black licorice. Or maybe anise but with a sweetness that wasn’t quite molasses but not white sugar. Caramelized anise? Yeah, that sounds good. It was a full, hefty sweetness, not round but concentrated.
Awesome mouthfeel and a pleasant after-taste as well.
With that sweetness, I wonder what it might be like out of the Chemex. Think they would humor me? If they do, you’ll hear about it here.
Pasadena, anyone?
Oh, and will somebody please fix Pasadena up with another decent coffee bar? It’s like a desert out here with but a single expensive oasis.
Sightglass’s Guatemala Finca Rosma
Ready for it? One breath. Go: Guatemala Finca Rosma.
Rrrroooolls off the tongue. Rolls onto it as well.
This coffee from Sightglass came highly recommended by the wonderful folks at Modern Coffee in Oakland, Ca., where it was apparently brought in by one of Sightglass’s SF competitors. Yeah, they liked it that much.
Chemex and V60
Chemex? Meh. V60? Yeah. Not enough acidity to shine in the Chemex, I think. Falls a little flat for me. But, in the V60 its sweetness really shines—a full, round sweetness. Earthy sweet.
The AeroPress
The Rosma’s profile in the AeroPress could be thought of as a sort of combination of those found in the Chemex and the V60. The acidty zzzzing that comes through when made in the V60 is fairly muted but not as much as when brewed through the Chemex. The Chemex killed it. The AeroPress just hides it somewhat behind a big, round sweetness made up of tobacco and wood with a little blip of vegetalness (probably not a word) and a pleasantly viscous mouthfeel.
Wrap it up…
If all you’ve got is a Chemex at home, I might look for something that has a little more liveliness but if you’ve got anything else—from a cone to an AeroPress—I say go for it.
Find out more about this coffee—and buy it too—at Sightlgass’s website.
The problem with “Specialty” coffee
David Walsh, with you’re post “specialty”, you’ve crystalized my thoughts perfectly…
Taken as a whole, the term speciality (emphasis mine), in its literal meaning and in its usage, for me fails to define this subset of the coffee industry.
Like “artisan”, “natural” and the like, “specialty” is too easily co-opted a term––when both Starbucks and a company like Tonx Coffee or Ecco Café can be grouped into the same category, there’s a problem. Unlike “organic” There’s no government regulation to tie down any one of those terms to a quantitative batch of variables. They are simply unregulated marketing-speak.
I don’t know that I agree with his call on his choice of word to replace it––“progressive”––but I also don’t know which other word one could use without having to replace it a year later.
I wish the part of the coffee industry I love didn’t have to resort to a catch-phrase at all. I quite like Geoff Watts’ quote in my prior post, “The one transcendent element in Zak Stone’s ‘The End of Cheap Coffee’” but then again, I suppose that even that bit of prose could be easily co-opted as well.
So, yeah, no answers but I agree that “specialty” really doesn’t cut it.
The one transcendent element in Zak Stone’s “The End of Cheap Coffee”
Zak Stone’s piece for Good, “The End of Cheap Coffee”, is all over the map. At various times it’s both patronizing and objective. It’s peppered with provocative tidbits of misinformation—$6.50 for a cup of Intelligentsia’a Tegu?…I guess it depends on what you think a “cup” is—while, in other places, it’s objective and insightful.
What is it about the subject of coffee, though, that brings this tone out? It’s almost as if it’s a template.
I suspect the patronizing tone, especially evident in the beginning of the piece, is meant as a way of identifying with the reader—I’m going to assume Good knows it’s readership better than I—but it’s that exact type of patronizing prose that keeps the subject of specialty coffee an “us and them” proposition, where “us” comprises the group popularly reduced as “coffee nerds” and “them”, that majority set of (by implication) more reasonable, commodity-minded people. It’s the usual ball and chain of a zeitgeist that will, unfortunately, be a large part of this era’s legacy of publishing—fomented polarization. The tone is inherently un-educational. Good can do better than that.
Mr. Stone does get one thing right. Or should I say, he proves a good judge of quote-worthiness, when he picks out a well-stated and transcendent nugget credited to Geoff Watts, Intelligentsia’s vice president and green coffee buyer…
It’s interesting to me that the same consumer that will go to 7-11 and buy a bottle of Fiji Water for five dollars will go crazy and complain about a cup of coffee, […] This is a meticulously grown agricultural product from halfway around the world that was hand-harvested, hand-picked, and roasted and brewed.
Wurd.
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