This morning we’re looking at an interesting two-coffee blend from this month’s Barista Coffee Box featuring St. Louis roaster, Blueprint Coffee. I don’t know of too many 2-component blends out there, so I’m excited to taste this one! Let’s check it out…
Purchase this coffee directly for $15.50/12oz.
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BARISTA COFFEE BOX JULY 2017: BLUEPRINT COFFEE TEKTŌN V.7
I love Barista Coffee Box because I get to try at least four coffees from a roaster and get a pretty good idea of what they’re all about. This month’s roaster, Blueprint Coffee, is located in St. Louis and I’ve had their coffee and visited their shop before. It’s definitely a top stop for specialty coffee when you’re in St. Louis! I reviewed the two single origin coffees Blueprint included in this month’s box, so I’m on to the blends, now. This morning I’m having a taste of Blueprint’s Tektōn V.7, which is a two-component blend of Guatemalan and Ethiopian coffees for this version. Blueprint take their inspiration from wine and cocktail blending where the individual components are transcended in the blend to something different from what any one component can be on its own. Tektōn blends are always seasonal blends, so the components change from version to version.
Tektōn V.7 is 70% La Esperanza from Guatemala (Blueprint’s current single origin offering from Guatemala) and 30% from Sidamo, Ethiopia. Both coffees are washed. Finca La Esperanza is located in Cerro Pecul and this component is a Caturra grown around 1300-1400masl. This particular coffee is fermented with wild yeast in the fermentation tanks, which also have fruit added to the water to get the microbes really active. A pretty wild process, literally and figuratively! Blueprint gives us tasting notes of, “caramel, graham, malic, stone fruit, strawberry.”
I used my standard pourover method of a 1:16 ratio of 28g of coffee to 450g of water in a notNeutral Gino dripper. My Handground grinder was set to 3 and I used Third Wave Water, as always, in my brewing.
This gave me a super-balanced, sweet, beautifully drinking cup! For me, this coffee has a medium to just on the lighter side of medium body. In a blind tasting I would never pick up that this is a two-component blend, they mesh that well together. There is a caramel sweetness throughout the sip that has some reminders of apple juice. The “malic” descriptor Blueprint gave is malic acid, which is the acidity found primarily in apples. Malic acid gives a nice, crisp apple like acidity but also seems to go with a refreshing sweetness, in my opinion, and I find it often in Guatemalan coffees. On the front end of the sip it’s all sweetness and that apple-like crispness and then an apricot acidity with a hint of tartness comes in for the second half of the sip. I do get some notes of very ripe, maybe just slightly overripe, strawberry in the cup, too. Most of the brightness of this cup comes from that delicious apricot acidity and that note lingers with the caramel sweetness into the finish and long aftertaste.
Man, what a coffee! Perfect balance, lots of delicious flavors to suss out without being overly complex, incredibly drinkable (I finished this way too fast). I hate to use descriptors like “smooth” but it really fits this coffee. A perfect blend, I couldn’t be happier with this coffee if I tried!