Let’s start this week off right with another selection from this awesome sample box sent by Berlin’s The Barn! Slurp!
Purchase directly from The Barn for €12.50/250g ($15/8.8oz)
Reviews in this series: Colombia La Montaña | Rwanda Huye Mountain | Ethiopia Hunkute
THE BARN COSTA RICA LA ISLA
The Barn is an iconic specialty coffee roaster and cafe in Berlin, Germany, known worldwide for the quality of their coffee (and, not to mention, the press’s reactions to rules like no WiFi and no child strollers!). Pia from the Barn sent me a sample box of their coffee and I have to admit, I’m a fanboy now! LOL This is my fourth review I’m posting from The Barn’s coffee and it has all been spectacular! People have been asking, so as of right now, if you’re going to order one coffee from The Barn (but, get more than one and make the shipping worth it!), it has to be the Colombia La Montaña, but the others are fantastic is their own right, too. This morning I’m checking out La Isla from Costa Rica.
This morning’s coffee was grown by Laszlo Banyai, a Hungarian whose background started in wine. Laszlo purchased two farms, La Isla and Lourdes, in Costa Rica’s West Valley about five years ago. This particular selection is a mix of Caturra and Catuai grown at 1500-1600masl. This coffee is processed in the “yellow honey” method. Honey processing is a method where the coffee cherries are picked and milled to break the skin of the fruit open. Inside a coffee cherry you have (usually) 2 seeds, what we call coffee beans. But there’s also mucilage, this sugary, goopy, honey-like stuff that feeds those seeds. In honey processing, some of this goop is left on the beans as they dry, and it is supposed to impart more fruitiness and body into the coffee. When that goop is completely washed off, that is called a “washed” coffee and if the cherries are left whole and dried slowly like big raisins, those are called “natural” coffees. Costa Rican coffee farmers are masters of the honey process, and they generally refer to their coffees as “yellow”, “red” or “black,” with each color designation meaning more of the sticky mucilage was left on the beans as they dried. In other words, yellow honeys are more like washed coffees and black honeys are more like naturals.
The Barn gives us tasting notes of, “pineapple, guava and papaya. High sweetness and an exciting acidity” for this coffee. I’m using my standard pourover method of a 1:16 ratio of 28g of coffee to 450g of Third Wave Water in a notNeutral Gino dripper. My Aergrind grinder is dialed in and gave me a total brew time of 3:00, not including a 30 second bloom.
This coffee is exactly as promised! Lots of tropical fruits going on and it’s a light, almost effervescent coffee on my palate. Taking my first few sips, I would say this coffee lands on the light side of medium or the heavy side of light in terms of body. It has interesting mouthfeel that is almost effervescent feeling… there’s something almost cooling about this coffee on my palate, like the effect of mint, but without any mint flavors. This is a sweet coffee and the tropical notes just crash in right at the front of the sip. There’s definitely a ton of pineapple notes in here with a little tartness that I associate with pineapple, too. We have been eating dried mango, guava and papaya from Whole Foods recently and I get reminders of all those fruits in this cup, too. It’s like tropical fruit salad in coffee form! Honeys are nice for people who want the fruitiness of naturals but can’t handle the ferment notes that often come with them (I love it, the funkier the better for me). This is a very clean-tasting coffee as far as ferment goes. The acidity is beautiful and really reminds me of the tartness of pineapple, like I said. It’s balanced perfectly by all the sugary sweetness in the cup. This coffee, overall, reads as very bright to me, with its light body and its tropical flavors, but at the same time it doesn’t have tons of perceived acidity, for me. It’s hard to explain what I mean, so to try to put it another way, this is a coffee with lots of notes in the high end, which I know mostly come from acidic compounds in the cup, but even though this is a bright coffee, it still has tons of balance and is super sweet and inviting, too, so the perception of this being an “acidic” coffee differs from how bright it actually is. Hopefully that makes sense.
What an awesome cup! Every sample packet I open brings me closer and closer to just having my paycheck sent directly to The Barn in exchange for coffee! LOL I’m really enjoying the small (around 35g or so) sample packets, too, because although there is some pressure to have to get it right on the first shot, each of these coffees is like having one snapshot photo from a perfect vacation. With more coffee you’re able to play with it more, adjust your variables, be a real nerd, but then you get used to it, too. That incredible blue of the Caribbean is probably no big deal when you live there, just like I used to see the Colosseum all the time when I lived in Rome and, sure, it was awesome every time I saw it, but I also saw it hundreds of times and it was just part of the scenery. These packets are giving me these little, perfect snapshots that I can’t mess up by getting used to them. I don’t know if I’m making any sense this morning at all, but suffice to say, this coffee is #4 in a line of absolutely brilliant coffees from The Barn and I still have more to come!