Metric Coffee Co. Kenya Nyeri Gatura Coop

Metric Kenya Gatura
Today’s coffee review is another one from my friends in Chicago at Metric Coffee Co. The coffee is from the Gatura Cooperative in the famous coffee-growing region of Nyeri, Kenya. I don’t see this coffee on Metric’s website currently, so they may have just sold out of it, but they do have another Kenyan microlot available for purchase here. The Nyeri Gatura Coop I’m reviewing today was available until just a couple days ago for $14/bag and in my experience Metric always does a great job with Kenyan coffees!

This is an AB grade coffee according to Kenyan sizing standards (with AA being the largest beans, followed by AB) and Metric’s tasting notes for this coffee are “sweet, mango, tropical.” I tried this coffee both as a Chemex as well as using a notNeutral Gino dripper (Kalita Wave style dripper) and the were surprisingly different cups, even though I used the same 15:1 water to coffee ratio. The Chemex turned out to be sweet and quite restrained. I don’t mind a mellow coffee but this Gatura was a little too laid-back from the Chemex, for me.

I preferred this coffee from the Gino dripper, which produced a round, medium body and lots of sweetness and fruits. The acidity is there, a little more apparent as it cools, but it’s not an acid-bomb by any stretch of the imagination. There is some crisp apple and a touch of grapefruit in the acidity for me. The aftertaste was pretty light when the coffee was still warm, but the coffee was heavier and sat on the tongue more as it cooled and opened up. At this point I got tons of mango flavors in each sip as well as in the aftertaste. Oddly enough, the mix of inherent coffee bitterness, sweetness, mango and other fruits reminded me a lot of Sierra Nevada’s excellent Torpedo IPA, which uses hops that have a ton of tropical flavors!

This is a crisp, vibrant coffee and I really enjoyed once the tropical flavors started to open up. Metric recommended using this coffee as a cold brew, too, which I have every intention of doing now that things are heating up here in Kansas City!