MCP x The Abbey Coffee Co. El Salvador Monte Verde Ciprese

January’s MyCoffeePub.com release is The Abbey Coffee Co.’s El Salvador Monte Verde Ciprese Farms. The guys at MCP always do a great job with their sourcing, and this Indiana roaster is a new one for me, so I’m excited to try it! Links and drinks!

MyCoffeePub.com

The Abbey Coffee Co. 

Purchase directly for $13.50/bag

Life & Thyme interview with beautiful photography (by Alexis Dierker)


MYCOFFEEPUB JANUARY 2017: THE ABBEY COFFE CO. EL SALVADOR MONTE VERDE CIPRESE FARMS

MyCoffeePub.com has been providing great coffee for me to review for a long time now. It’s a great subscription. At the middle of every month, a bag of coffee arrives quietly and unassumingly on your doorstep. It’s a great surprise to open the package every month and see what’s inside, and the gang at MCP do a great job curating a mix of both well-known and relatively unknown roasters. Search “mycoffeepub” on my site and you’ll see the list of coffees they’ve picked over the last year and a half. I’m honored to have their support on KCcoffeegeek.com! This month’s coffee is one of the “relative unknowns,” at least to me, and I love that!

The Abbey Coffee Co. is located in Marion, IN. I know Indiana decently well and I had to look it up, too! Located about midway between Inadianapolis and Fort Wayne just west of I-69, Marion is home to Indiana Wesleyan University (and The Abbey!). The Abbey is owned by Chris Marse and it has a cafe space as well as a roastery with online and wholesale operations. According to Alexis Dierker’s great article (photos are beautiful, too!), The Abbey has collaboration and meeting space, an open layout with the scales and roaster in full view, many bookshelves, a retro video game room and even some woodworking space! Marse proudly visits producers in Ethiopia, where his family adopted his son, so there is clearly a connection with that country that goes much deeper than coffee, and that’s really the thing about coffee, isn’t it? It’s a vehicle to bring people together more than anything else. Plus it tastes good! Marse founded The Abbey as a faith-based company but did not want to use that as a selling point. He took inspiration from monastic life, which is a balance between devotion and prayer and craft, whether printing, woodworking, raising animals, brewing, etc. Alexis’s photos make the place look amazing, but we do have to talk about coffee today, too…

MCP selected The Abbey’s El Salvador Monte Verde Ciprese Farms coffee for this month’s subscribers. This farm is managed by 5th generation growers, the Figeuroa family, and is located about 93km from San Salvador. The farm grows multiple varieties at 1150-1400masl and this is a washed lot. The farm is a sanctuary for stray and neglected animals, too, which just fall even more in love with the Figeuroa’s! The Abbey gives us flavor notes of, “notes of tobacco, milk chocolate, nuttiness and apple butter.” Let’s see! I used my standard pourover setup of a 1:16 ratio of 28g of coffee to 450g of water in a notNeutral Gino with Kalita 185 filters and a Handground grinder set to 3.5.

The aroma on this cup is sweet with some vegetal components that remind me of cigar tobacco. The body on this coffee leans toward the light side of medium for me, but the flavors are really full and structured. This is a really clean cup, too. Lots of balance here. There is a sweetness provided by chocolatey and nutty tones. I’m reminded of something along the lines of pecan or almond but for all the nutty tones in this cup I wouldn’t say it’s anything specific that I would hang my hat on. There is a big fresh nut vibe in this coffee, though. As the sip develops on my palate there is bit of pleasing bitterness on my tongue and then the flavors spread out with some red apple acidity and hints of spices that really do conjure the apple butter descriptor The Abbey uses. The finish is slightly sweet and leaves a reminder of the complex notes of this coffee on the palate for a relatively short time, so this isn’t a coffee that sits heavy on the palate.

This is a cool coffee. It has a lot of complexity which I was apparently in the mood for because I am loving this! Sometimes complex coffees aren’t as drinkable as some of their easier-going brethren, but this one has warm, familiar flavors to me and although it’s complex, it retains an inviting deliciousness. The guys at MyCoffeePub always make great selections and this a superb introduction for me to the roasting skills of The Abbey!