Reboot Roasting Brazil Fazenda Rainha

Reboot Roasting Fazenda Rainha

Reboot Roasting is yet another roaster I’ve met through Instagram and owner/roaster, Matt Boshart, and I immediately bonded over our logos featuring nerd glasses, and the fact that we’re both Midwest-based coffee geeks! Today I’m having a look at the first coffee I’ve tried from Reboot, their Brazilian from Fazenda Raingha. Links below and read on to see how this coffee tastes!

Reboot Roasting website

Reboot Roasting Instagram

Cafe Imports Fazenda Rainha page

Buy this coffee directly for $13.95/12oz bag! 


REBOOT ROASTING BRAZIL FAZENDA RAINHA

Omaha, Nebraska’s Reboot Roasting has a cool aesthetic… not just the nerd glasses featured in the logo, but I found Matt’s website to have a nice, clean interface and the cartoon on his homepage is really cool, too. The company has an overall clean and modern aesthetic while being fun and human at the same time! Like many coffee roasters, Matt started out burning coffee at home on a popcorn popper-based Frankenroaster he cobbled together himself. He started Reboot Roasting in 2015 and that leads us to today’s coffee!

This coffee comes from Fazenda Rainha, south of Minas, a big coffee-growing region of Brazil. The farm consists of 280 hectares, with about 200 of it planted with mostly Yellow Bourbon variety coffee as well as a handful of others. All of Fazenda Rainha’s employees live on-site and get health plans and unlimited hospital care as well as being able to send their kids to the on-site school. They were Cup of Excellence Brazil finalists in 2000, 2001, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010 and got first place in 2011, so these folks know coffee and know how to pick and process it, for sure! An interesting side-note, famed modern architect, Oscar Niemayer, designed the chapel that sits on the fazenda’s grounds, and it was built by the workers of the farm. It was one of Niemayer’s last projects before he passed away in 2012 at the age of 105![ref]http://www.cafeimports.com/beanology/view/pulped-natural-fazenda-rainha-yellow-bourbon-grainpro-3603[/ref] Cafe Imports has a bunch of great photos of Fazenda Rainha, so check it out!

Niemayer Chapel courtesy of Cafe Imports

OK, so what about this coffee?! Reboot’s selection is a Yellow Bourbon varietal grown in the 1150-1350masl range. This is a pulped natural, which is also referred to commonly as “honey” process. In this method, the cherries are picked and sorted and then they are run through a depulper, which mechanically tears the cherry skins and some amount of pulp/mucilage from the seeds inside (what we call coffee beans). These sticky beans are laid out to dry and get frequent turning and circulation so as to not develop mold or other defects. Honey process coffees tend to get some of the body, sweetness and fruitiness associated with natural process coffees, but they also tend to be cleaner than naturals. Personally, if I was blind tasting coffees, I’d probably call most pulped naturals/honey coffees washed coffees because they tend to have more in common with them.

Matt gives us tasting notes of, “Fruit, chocolate, tart lemon, floral.” Yum! I used my usual 1:16 ratio pourover in the notNeutral Gino with Kalita 185 filters. With 28g of coffee and 450g of water I did a 30-second bloom and the total time, including the bloom, was 3:30-3:35 for this coffee. I’d call this roast, based purely on visuals, a solid “medium” for what that’s worth. Being a Brazilian coffee I didn’t expect this coffee to knock my socks off with crazy complexity or tons of acidity or other wild stuff going on in the cup. Brazil is a relatively low-lying country when it comes to coffee and, frankly, their beans have it pretty easy there. Ironically, harsher growing conditions tends to have a beneficial effect on coffee, to a point.

That being said, what Reboot Roasting has for us in this coffee from Fazenda Rainha is one, very pleasant, very easy-drinking selection. If you tend to think you like “low acidity” coffees this one fits the bill. There is a hint of lemon/citrus acidity in the cup, but it’s a condiment, not the main dish. And, let’s be honest, coffees without acidity are boring, flat and lifeless, but I know the word “acidity” means different things to coffee pros vs regular people. Nonetheless, the perceived acidity on this cup is low, in my opinion. It has a solidly medium body with nice presence on the palate and a neutral, if not slightly sweet finish and aftertaste. I get a little floral hint here and there in this cup and the aftertaste has some slightly roasty notes, nuts and something that reminds me of warm baked goods. There is something in the sip, especially at cooler temps, that reminds me of peaches or maybe apricots and there is a hint of roast as well that comes off like roasted nuts, but nothing specific. I took a few bigger sips as I got toward the end of my cup and that peachiness was even more apparent. If you’ve read a lot of my reviews you know I’m a sucker for a peachy coffee! I wouldn’t call this “peachy,” per se, but to my palate there is definitely peach in there. YUM!

really found myself enjoying this coffee. I always turn my nose up at Brazilian coffees because I had a couple of bad experiences with them early on in my coffee writing career and I guess I am still marred by that. I need to see a coffee therapist and work through it because every time a roaster sends me a Brazilian coffee I think, “well, that’s going to be boring…” and I end up enjoying it! This is a super easy drinker that’s sweet and balanced but if you slow down and really dig you’ll find more complexity than you thought you would. I revisited this coffee as I was writing this review and even close to a month off-roast it still has all the flavor notes I described above and is a wonderful cup. This would make a great afternoon coffee, but if you’re looking for a good Brazilian to try out, look no further!

Reboot packaging

How great is this presentation? In my box there were some nerd glasses stickers (note the “reflections” in the lenses are coffee beans!) and a nice postcard with directions for making an icy, milky cup of coffee. Those instructions can also be found on Reboot’s website, but the postcard was a cool addition. Love the aesthetic and presentation, overall!

2 Responses

  1. SGG
    |

    Leave it to KC Coffee Geek to inform me of a roaster in my own town – gonna have to go check them out

    • Reboot Roasting
      |

      Hey SGG, check us out! We offer free delivery in Omaha and Bellevue. ??☕️