Promising syrup, roundness, spice, sweet molasses, candied fig, and citrus zest acidity.

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.

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…

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.

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.

…from Pasadena and this juicy, juicy Intelligentsia Kenya Tegu.

Closer to the sun today, I think. That must be it.

Ed. Note… I am pleased as punch to introduce you to my very first guest poster: Joanne Wong.

I met Joanne while frequenting Oakland’s “Original coffee taproom”, Modern Coffee and I’ve enjoyed and greatly appreciated her take on the coffees she’s tasted. It’s always instructive, enlightening and a ton of fun tasting and waxing prosaic about coffee with her.

When she tweeted out that she was able to score samples of some new coffees from one of Oakland’s newest roasting endeavors, Highwire, I had to get her on here to get her take on them and give you, dear reader(s), the benefit of her no-bullshit style of coffee connoisseurship.

Without further ado…

***

It’s taken me four days to get this coffee right. FOUR DAYS. But my patience has been rewarded.

I’m not known for exacting coffee preparation — quite the opposite, given my lackadaisical tendency to scoop beans vaguely by volume and pour however the hell much water I feel like down the gullet of my V60 (pictured above), sometimes just barely escaping overflow out of an opaque container below. Thanks to the recent acquisition of a Hario glass decanter with 100 mL markings, I can now vaguely and lackadaisically measure water volume, much to the delight of one Tom Baker.

Back to the coffee. The beasts to be tamed are depicted above, and they are from the very first batch of coffees released by Oakland, CA’s Highwire Coffee Roasters, formerly known as Peaberry’s Coffee and Tea. I could go into the history, acquisition, and new directions of the companies in question, but I am less investigative reporter and more Let Me Google That For You, and I’m pretty sure Dan asked me to write this more for my tastebuds than my journalistic skills.

In a vast lagoon of lightly-roasted “third wave” coffee with descriptors like lemon curd and grape Jolly Ranchers (which are disgusting and belong nowhere near coffee), Highwire’s Coffee may seem startlingly dark. The coffees are probably closer to a medium roast, geared less to showcase novel adjectives and and more to adaptively display the depth and beauty of each coffee’s origin.

The Kenya Kamuthanga, which I first tasted Day 2 after roast, is affable and juicy, as Kenyas are, but with a darker edge which reminds me of Korean roasted corn tea. While the Kenya is lovely, it’s the El Salvador Santa Adelaida that has a more interesting story to tell.

After making many perplexing carafes of coffee that were akin to drinking effervescent liquid charcoal, I gave the El Salvador some air, literally and figuratively. I left it to contemplate its own untamed existence in an open jar for a few days. Today, Day 5 after roast, I made a V60 with a coarser grind and slightly cooler water. The El Salvador shone with jewel-like facets of fire-roasted sweet-tart stone fruits and well-caramelized brown sugar; it amazes me how much the juxtaposition of delicate acidity with the darker roast profile rings on the palate (and how many hyphenated terms I can fit in one sentence). Suddenly, there is balance in the world, and all is right.  Or… maybe that is the caffeine speaking.

I look forward to future offerings from this newly reborn roastery. Check them out.

Twitter: @HighwireCoffee Facebook: Highwire Coffee Roasters Website: forthcoming

’til next time, @jo

n.b. – It is intended that this post have a soundtrack.

This beautiful Kenya was my first stab at a coffee offering from one Los Angeles’ newest roasters, Tonx Coffee, and was gifted to me by a friend in Oakland. In fact it made an almost comic journey to my cup: roasted in L.A. and shipped to Oakland, only to make its way all the way back to my new Southern Californian home as a gift. It’s an amazing world we live in.

Tonx is new and small. He (“Tonx” being both his company and his nickname) offers up extremely small batches of coffees he finds exceptional and is exclusively mail order. And he runs out fast.

Distinct from some other Kenyas I’ve tasted by the balance achieved between it’s dark sugar and its fruity sides. Molasses, fruit punch and apples & cinnamon. Gorgeous.

It’s a rare coffee that can deal with the time well, developing a minimum of off flavors and sometimes gaining or revealing some interesting flavors unavailable when inside the generally accepted 10-day zone of coffee deliciousness. The majority of the time capsule coffees I’ve tasted get worse. A select few, though, get interesting.

Keeping a bag around for its full life-span, from full to empty, also gives me time to hone in on the perfect combination of variables, finding the magic combo of grind, time, water temperature, method and technique that results in a cup I think represents the best that a given coffee can taste on a particular brew system, a sort of wise old cup gained from experience.

I mention all of this because I kept OneNinetySeven’s Tanzania Mbinga around for what amounts to eons for coffee, the longest since a bag of  Ritual Roaster’s Finca Matalapa La Cidra, El Salvador a couple years ago. Alternating it with a couple of bags of Intelligentsia, gifted to me by a generous barista here in Oakland (you know who you are [hat tip]), I was enjoying cups of the Mbinga for about three weeks. OneNinetySeven’s Tanzania Mbinga is one of those coffees. It ages well.

The young Mbinga: fragrant grounds of dark brown bread and brown sugar, the cup full of grilled peaches, anise and a pleasant cranberry-like acidity.

As it aged, I found the flavors mostly dulled and coalesced into a simple few key components. It never tasted bad, just simpler and subdued. The acidity waned, escaping to the background, the fruit became mellower while the brown sugar gained prominence, even while it too slowly morphed into a quieter version of itself. Pleasant throughout.

I used a Hario V60 the entire time and settled on a recipe that uses…

• 23g of coffee at a finer grind than I normally use in the V60 (the 1st “fine” marking on my Capresso Infinity grinder vs. the 3rd)
• 430g of water at 92°
• A flat grind bed
• :60 pre-infusion
• A little swirl action at the beginning of the pour but slow, gentle and straight down the center for the bulk of it

Now, I’m not saying you should start looking for old bags of coffee. Not unless you have a thing for torturing your palet and throwing away hard-earned cash on what will mostly be terrible coffee. But, if you have to keep a bag around for a significant amount of time, you can’t currently do much better, I would think, than to pick up a fresh bag of the Tanzania Mbinga from Eric at OneNinetySeven, either from his site or at his weekly gig at the Rogue Café on Saturdays here in Oakland. It’s enjoyable the whole way through, from the first bean to the last.

The roastery at Verve

An epic weekend journey led us from Oakland to Santa Cruz and, well, when in Santa Cruz, one does not bypass Verve if one is at all interested in fine coffee prepared well.

FWIW: Costa Rica Los Angeles Reserve Espresso, plain and as a macchiato. Not so sure it held up to the milk that well, but as a shot it was absolutely gorgeous: as bright as the day. Citrusy. Chocolate. Tasty.