One of the best things about the coffee community is that once you start to make friends with other coffee geeks you find yourself sending, and receiving, boxes of coffee samples from all over the place! I recently traded some coffee with John, who is @groundsandrounds on Instagram and one of the samples he sent is Tweed Coffee Roaster’s el Diamante DOS. You can currently buy this coffee for $17.50/12oz at Tweed’s website.
What I love about coffee trading is getting to try new things from regions by roasters I’ve never even heard of! It still boggles my mind on a daily basis how many roasters there are in this country. The OCD collector guy in me prefers not to think about it. 😉 A little bit of research helped me discover that Tweed is the roasting division of Houndstooth Coffee, which has locations in Dallas and Austin, Texas. Tweed seems to have gotten its start in 2013 but is headed up by experienced roaster and coffee competition veteran, Jonathan Aldrich (short, informative interview with Dallas Collective here).
I really, really enjoyed drinking this coffee. I think DOS benefitted from both being a good, well-roasted coffee as well as having great timing in my rotation. When I first tried this coffee a handful of days ago it was after a run of rather hard-edged Kenyan and Ethiopian coffees… lots of acidity, lots of fruit and, don’t get me wrong, lovely coffees. I randomly pulled this bag out of a box of samples John sent me thinking a Guatemalan coffee may have the warm, sweet, pleasant attributes I was looking for and it was PERFECT! It was like being wrapped up in a warm blanket!
I tried this coffee both as espresso and as drip in my notNeutral Gino (like a Kalita Wave 185). It’s very good as both, even though I had trouble dialing in the espresso. I got about 1/2 the volume I would normally get in the same amount of time and it still yielded a very tasty cup! As a pourover this DOS is just sweet and inviting and approachable and has very low perceived acid and is just perfect for a morning coffee. Apparently it’s the second of three lots Tweed purchased from Finca el Diamante, a farm in the famed Huehuetenango region of Guatemala.
It’s a washed coffee and the cup is clean and bright, but leans toward a more traditional, roastier roast. Never fear, though, my lighter-is-better friends, this coffee is far from a charred, oily mess. No sir, when I saw “roasty” I mean it’s sweet, chocolatey with hints of almonds, low acidity, clean and sweet. Did I say sweet? This coffee is sweet, so I hope I remember to mention it!
Ironically for liking this coffee so much I don’t have a ton to say about it because it is pretty straightforward and not super complex, but man, it is just GOOD! It’s milk chocolate with almonds as a drip. As espresso I used 19.5g in and only got 18g back out with a 40 second pull! Normally that would yield a pretty funky cup but this DOS held up, providing a deep, dark chocolate with cherry notes. Delightful!
I hope this isn’t the last of Tweed’s coffee I get to try because this el Diamante DOS just hits it out of the park. Love it!
Since my sample came in a plastic Ziploc I used a photo from Sprudge’s article on Houndstooth’s newest location. Check out the full article with lots of photos here!