Today I have for you, dear readers, a special coffee from this month’s MyCoffeePub.com subscription and Brandywine Coffee Roasters in Delaware. I’ve had a little bit of Brandywine’s Coffee in the past and I am fully obsessed with their bag artwork, featuring prints of artwork by Todd Purse. The prints are amazing, the wax seal on every bag is amazing. It’s my favorite branding/packaging in coffee, hands down. Oh, and their coffee is really good, too! Links, then read!
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BRANDYWINE COFFEE ROASTERS MICROLOT SERIES: COLOMBIA (MYCOFFEEPUB.COM 9/16)
OK, I can’t keep gushing about my homies at MyCoffeePub.com and how they kill it month after month with their selections or they’re going to start thinking I’m weird. We’re so on the same wavelength it’s not even funny. Use the search on my site for “mycoffeepub” and you’ll see how great of a job they do. And I can’t keep gushing about Todd Purse’s artwork and Brandywine’s bags any more than I have or they’ll think I’m weird, too. So, let’s focus on the coffee!
This coffee comes from the El Retiro farm of Gustavo de Jesus Rivera, located in the Antioquia department (like one of our states) of Colombia made famous by Medellin. Gustavo’s farm amazingly sits at 2200masl. That is high. Maybe the highest altitude coffee I’ve gotten my hands on. High altitude usually means lots of sun and also large temperature swings between day and night, which is good for coffee complexity, but a side-effect of this altitude is that it’s colder than lower altitudes and Gustavo is able to ferment his coffee longer in the washing tanks. Usually in Colombia, washing coffee with fermentation takes 24-36 hours, but because it’s colder at 2200masl, Gustavo ferments for three full days! Brandywine offers tasting notes of, “papaya, brown sugar, peach” for this coffee. Let’s see what I think (and, I need to get some papayas so I can finally figure out what that descriptor is supposed to taste like!).
I used my 1:16 pourover ratio of 28g of coffee to 450g of water in the notNeutral Gino dripper. Allergies have my nose a little plugged up today, but the aroma is sweet with some tropical fruits in the mix. When it comes to Colombia, I love bright flavors and this one delivers in spades. This coffee has a medium-light body but the flavors are really intense. Right up front I get a tropical sweet-tart flavor that has a bit of lemon to it, too. In the middle there is a peach-like note that is more of a not-quite-ripe-give-it-another-day-or-two flavor. LOL It’s peachy but almost a little… puckering… on the palate. The finish is caramelized sugar that is absolutely beautiful and there’s a spicy note I cannot identify but that combines nicely with the sugary notes and blends into a warm aftertaste that lingers on the palate for a long time.
This is a beautifully complex coffee. It’s so bright it’s almost effervescent, but at the same time that brightness is balanced by the second half of the sip and aftertaste that are sugar-heavy and sweet. This is a stunning example of a Colombian microlot and reminds me of everything I adore about coffees from that country. The fact that this is a $14 coffee is the reason why I can’t wrap my head around coffees that are $60-$80 or whatever for a handful of ounces. There’s no way there is a coffee in existence that is 6-10 times better tasting than this, so what could you possible be paying for?
Anyway, great job, Brandywine, and to MyCoffeePub.com for hooking subscribers up in a big way this month! WOOHOO!!!!