My first-ever Sunday review, but with so much coffee in-house right now there isn’t a morning to waste! This morning we’re back in Central America with Theodore’s Coffee Roasters’ Los Planes from El Salvador. Let’s dive right in!
Purchase this coffee directly for $19/12oz
THEODORE’S COFFEE ROASTERS EL SALVADOR LOS PLANES
Theodore’s Coffee Roasters founder, Darwin Pavon, spent years in Honduras working to create better fertilizers and this led him to meet Ramon de Jesus, the owner of Finca Los Planes in the Chalatenango region of El Salvador. Ramon grows Pacas variety coffee at 1800masl on his farm, which is very near, if not inside, Montana El Pital, a natural reserve found on the border of El Salvador and Honduras. Ramon’s farm is 32 hectares and he is mostly self-reliant there, growing and raising whatever he needs. Chalatenango is a challenging district to buy coffee in, but Darwin’s personal relationships with farmers allows him to find real gems in this region.
I used my standard pourover setup to prepare this coffee: 1:16 ratio of 28g of coffee to 450g of water, Handground grinder set to 3, Third Wave Water and a notNeutral Gino using Kalita 185 filters. Theodore’s gives us flavor notes of, “Baked apples, butterscotch, chocolate, Crispy, tropical fruits and lemon” for this coffee. Not sure what “Crispy” is, but it’s definitely a unique descriptor! LOL
Theodore’s took this coffee into a nice “medium” roast and I’ve come to expect excellent, clean cups brimming with sugary sweetness from their roasters! This coffee has a medium body with lots of sweetness, as expected, as well as a lemon-lime acidity that is readily apparent but more flavorful and less “acidic” than lemon-lime can appear in some coffees. In other words, the acidity in this coffee is definitely citric with lots of lemon-lime flavor notes, but it’s well-balanced by the sweetness in the cup and the acidity is adding more flavor and less top end than it does in other coffees. Hopefully that makes sense. There is some nuttiness in the cup as well as some milk chocolate in the sip. The finish on this coffee has some notes of baking spices, for me, along with a shortbread cookie kind of vibe. As the cup approaches room temperature I start getting some nice tropical notes in the finish and aftertaste, too. A little pineapple and mango.
This is a nice, pleasant cup. It’s clean, sweet, balanced, has just a hint of roasty notes and all the flavors work nicely together. I find absolutely nothing wrong with this coffee. This is a pretty mellow cup. It’s not “flat” or “dull” but it is… restrained? A bit reserved? Some cups of coffee are punk rock and others are shimmery ambient soundscapes and this one is the latter, for me. That doesn’t take away from the pleasure of drinking this coffee, at all and it’s a nice accompaniment to a Sunday morning!