S&W Craft Roasting Panama Boquete Finca Lerida

S&W Craft Roasting is a company based in the small town of Coatesville, Indiana. They sent me a box with a lot of coffee in it and today’s review is of their Panama Boquete Fince Lerida. This coffee is grown by the Chiari family in Ciriqui, near Boquete, Panama. It’s Catuai varietal grown at 1500masl. You can buy this coffee directly from S&W for $14.95/lb.

Finca Lerida looks like an amazing place and is one of the oldest coffee plantations in Panama. Coffee is still grown there today and it looks like you can stay in their boutique hotel, high in the mountains and surrounded by coffee, too! There are some gorgeous photos of the property in that second link.

I tried this coffee as both a pourover as well as AeroPress, either of which are recommended by S&W as the preferred preparation methods. S&W’s website says this is their lightest roasted coffee and that it can be a challenge for other extraction methods.

This coffee started with a sweet, marshmallow aroma for me. At fresh-brewed temperatures I picked up hints of mint in the flavor as well as a minty feeling on my lips, but that did not persist as the cup cooled. There is a fair amount of bitterness in this cup, especially on the front end when the coffee is still pretty warm, and as a pourover I picked up flavors of green pepper, too! The body was quite dense with a lingering aftertaste and was not the floral, light cup I expected, although it wasn’t unpleasant, either.

The AeroPress brought out more sweetness for me. I didn’t get that green pepper flavor and the bitterness was a bit more mellow overall. I really enjoyed the AeroPress more as the cup cooled. It was sweetest and had nice melon (honeydew and a bit of watermelon long in the aftertaste) flavors and some florals as it approached room temperature. This one improved more and more as it cooled, for me.

This is a nicely-roasted coffee and I found it interesting in that it just kept improving as it cooled. It was quite a bit different to my palate than the description on the website, so maybe this is a tricky coffee to extract or it’s just a perception difference, but either way I found this to be a dense yet enjoyable cup.