This is the third and last coffee from my recent shipment from the fantastic Bold Bean Coffee Roasters in Jacksonville, Florida. This is a washed Guatemalan coffee and it’s pretty different, in some really great ways, from the typical Guatemalan selection. Check it out!
Bold Bean Coffee Roasters website
Buy this coffee directly for $16.50/12oz
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This morning’s coffee is from La Libertad in the famed coffee growing “department” (like a state here in the USA) of Huehuetenango in Guatemala by way of my good pals, Bold Bean Coffee Roasters, in Jacksonville, FL. Bold Bean’s coffee is in my top favorites list, for sure, and in my experience, pretty much anything they roast from the Americas is going to be fantastic.
This is a fully washed coffee consisting of the Mundo Novo variety and produced by Rosa Maria Ovalle and Rogelio Aguirre Ovalle on their farm, Finca El Limonar. The farm sits at about 1850masl and is located in the mountainous border area with Mexico to the north and west of the region. Bold Bean’s website said that El Limonar is right next door to one of the most famous coffee farms in the world, which I am going out on a limb and guessing is El Injertal, but Finca El Limonar is no slouch, either. The farm was established in the 1950’s and is one of Huehuetenango’s first coffee producers! This particular lot comes from the top of the farm, which is crowned by cypress trees, hence the name. Apparently the land on the farm is very steep and it takes several hours to hike up to the top where the coffee shares the land with caves and rock faces. At lower altitudes macadamia trees are also planted.
Rosa Maria owns the farm while her nephew, Rogelio, manages the operations there. Bold Bean’s head roaster, Kyle Graf, was so excited to visit the farm in the Spring that he apparently set a record pace hiking up to the top of the farm. Not bad for a guy who lives in a city that sits at 4.9 meters above sea level! LOL Rogelio was so impressed by Kyle’s exuberance that he promised the gang at Bold Bean the lot from the crown of the farm, and here it is! I used my usual 1:16 ratio of 28g coffee to 450g water in a notNeutral Gino pourover with Kalita 185 filters.
Bold Bean gave us tasting notes of, “green apple, white grape, root beer” for this coffee. I know that last one sounds weird, but man, is it apparent! Especially in the cooler cup, the root beer note is super clear and carries all the way into the long aftertaste, too. Along with the sweetness and slightly herbal tones of root beer there is a green apple acidity that elevates it and almost gives a sense of effervescence to this coffee. I found the acidity to be a little lemony on the front end of the sip, too. I’m actually pretty ambivalent when it comes to coffee descriptors, so I didn’t expect to get much of the “root beer” note, but it’s so apparent I was smiling as I drank this coffee because it was funny to me, for some reason!
This is a bright, yet sweet and super-drinkable coffee and quite different from most of the Guatemalan coffees I’ve had in the past. It’s a really unique cup and a beautiful coffee handled, as always, exceptionally well by the folks at Bold Bean. And that root beer, though! LOL I will definitely be keeping my eye out for next year’s crop of coffees from La Libertad and Finca El Limonar! This one was killer!