While I like my coffee unadulterated 99% of the time, something about the holiday season just begs for a booze-infused cup! Sunshower Farms in Hawaii has three barrel-conditioned coffees being offered right now and this morning I’m checking out the rum version. Let’d drink!
Purchase this coffee directly for $8.50/2oz or $33/8oz
Sunshower Farms 100% Kona Natural review
SUNSHOWER FARMS 100% KONA GOLDEN RUM BARREL AGED
Kate and Doug Hickey were successful living the busy, big city life in Chicago as an attorney and futures trader, respectively. Tired of the hustle and Chicago’s notoriously bad weather, they did what any crazy people would do… they moved to Hawaii and bought an 8-acre farm on the western slopes of the big island in Holualoa! They grow and roast coffee, vegetables for farmers markets and restaurant accounts, raise goats, have a beautiful event space (wedding at sunset, anyone?) and live a life that is a 180-degree turn from their previous incarnation. Pretty cool, huh? And hard work, I can assure you! Oh, wait, and I didn’t even mention the homebrew store! I wish Kate and Doug lived a little closer because I feel like my wife and I would be best of friends with them!
Sunshower coffees grow around 2400ft elevation (around 730 meters above sea level), which is pretty low by most standards, yet their coffees have a good amount of complexity and develop much nicer than you may think on paper. There is more to flavor development in coffee than altitude! Kate is one of the few Hawaii-based roasters I’ve come across who is willing to roast their coffee lightly and let it really speak for itself, as opposed to the French/Italian/nuclear roasts most use. I really feel like I am tasting Hawaii when I drink Sunshower coffees and I really appreciate that.
Lately, Sunshower has been experimenting with barrel-conditioning coffee. They are using their washed/wet process coffee, which is as much of a blank slate as coffee can be. The green, unroasted beans are put into used alcohol casks (rum, in this case) for anywhere from weeks to months. Green coffee beans readily soak up flavors from their environment, so the coffee soaks up the cask notes from the barrel and imparts these flavors when brewed. I’ve had a few barrel conditioned coffees that were so subtle I couldn’t tell that they were barrel conditioned, and others that were like drinking out of the bottle right in the aisle at the liquor store! And, personally, I enjoy coffee for being coffee, so I really like it “naked,” but I do like experimentation and I know people like a booze-infused coffee from time to time. They can be used in coffee recipes and they make great dessert coffees, especially around the holidays.
This morning’s coffee is their rum barrel conditioned offering. They use Old Lahaina golden rum barrels for this one and when I opened the bag up it was definitely boozy and rummy! I like a good sipping rum from time to time, so I was looking forward to trying this one out. They use their washed Kona coffee, all grown on their own farm, for this coffee and this features their medium “Dusk” roast level. I am using my standard pourover setup, as usual, of a 1:16 ratio of 28g of beans to 450g of water. I’m using a Handground grinder set to 3 and Third Wave Water in my brewing, always, and a notNeutral Gino with Kalita 185 filter. The brew aroma was a little rough for me, but I know Kate and Doug wouldn’t offer something that doesn’t taste right. The aroma off the brew bed of coffees is always hit or miss for me, for whatever reason, anyway, so I wasn’t worried.
In the cup, this coffee has a nice aroma. This is only the second rum barrel coffee I’ve had, but I think there’s something particular about rum that lends itslef well to coffee. The room note is definitely rummy, but for once my wife didn’t say, “Are you drinking at 7:00 in the morning??!” like she has when she comes into HQ when I’ve been drinking other barrel coffees! I wouldn’t drink this at work, though. Even though this coffee contains no alcohol, why make life tough for yourself and even get those rumors started? Taking a sip, the rum is unmistakeable, but it’s not in-your-face like most barrel conditioned coffees I’ve had. The rum is definitely a big note in the front of the sip, then it’s washed over by the coffee’s malic (apple-like) acidity. I’m getting sweet red apples. In the second half of the sip and into the sweet finish of this cup, the rum comes back, big time, and then lingers on my palate for as long as I can wait between sips.
This is really good! I have full confidence in Kate and Doug, but I’m ambivalent about flavored coffees because I like coffee, but this is really excellent. On the front end of the sip the rum really works nicely with the fruitiness of the coffee’s acidity. In the first half it imparts a gorgeous, rich caramel note and it’s like adding rum to caramel apples. In the second half and in the aftertaste it’s just like having sipped rum but without having to actually drink alcohol, so you don’t get the alcohol burn or have to deal with the sobriety issue. There’s still a lot of caramel in the finish, a ton, really, and some vanilla. I can’t shake a boozy caramel apple, that’s the image I have drinking this coffee.
This is killer! While I’ve appreciated the other barrel-conditioned coffees I’ve been sent over the years, this is the first one that I would consider buying again for myself. The rum marries perfectly with the coffee’s inherent flavors and roast level. The rum is apparent, but not overly aggressive… also not so subtle that I have to look for it. This coffee has the perfect level of booziness in it for me, at the exact balance I appreciate that lets the coffee through, but is still plenty noticeable. I get no harsh or synthetic notes that can sometimes ride with barrel-conditioned coffees and the rum and coffee perfectly complement one another.
Yes, this is a bit of a pricy coffee, but what a great gift for the coffee fan (or rum fan!) on your list! The 2oz sample size is enough for me to do exactly two pourovers from with my settings, which yield about 2 cups of coffee each, so a great idea would be buying one 2-oz size of each of the barrel coffees (rum, wine and whiskey) and then one or two more of their unadulerated coffee, too. For me, a bag of barrel coffee is always too much for me to use, but this is the first one I’m drinking through and not giving away to someone who’s having a dinner party and needs a dessert coffee, so the 8-oz bag isn’t out of question either, especially if you’re entertaining over the holidays. Yum!
Now, a word about that price. Growing coffee is expensive. Growing coffee in the USA is insanely so. Minimum wage, benefits, withholding, etc all mean a much higher cost to employ people on the farm, etc. Sunshower Farms coffees, like most Hawaiian-grown coffees, are expensive, but that’s what coffee from Burundi and Honduras and anywhere else would cost, too, if the labor laws and cost of employment and doing business were equitable with the USA. Think about that the next time to buy a bag of coffee because Hawaiian prices are what the norm would be if coffee wasn’t grown in countries where people make as much in a year as many Americans get paid in a month! It’s an eye-opener!