Let’s celebrate Wednesday with a new coffee from The Barn! I usually have a tough time getting excited about Brazilian coffees, but The Barn has me anxious to get into this one, so without further ado…
Purchase directly from The Barn for €12.00/250g ($15/8.8oz)
Reviews in this series: Colombia La Montaña | Rwanda Huye Mountain | Ethiopia Hunkute | Costa Rica La Isla
THE BARN BRAZIL FAZENDA UM
This is my 5th review of new coffees from Berlin, Germany’s The Barn, and I’m over the moon with all the others. It’s rare that coffee after coffee after coffee from the same roaster impress me, but man, that has been the case with The Barn. On a side note, this is the last week to order their La Montaña from Colombia (review above) and if you can afford the expense of international shipping, it is SO worth it. One of the best Colombian coffees I’ve ever had. Getting back to The Barn, they have an international following, mostly for their coffee, whcih has proven to be excellent, but also because the media loves to write about their no WiFi and no baby strollers policies in the cafe. Somehow I’m guessing those articles miss the point, which is excellent coffee served with excellent service, but hey, that doesn’t make headlines!
This morning’s coffee is from Fazenda Um in Minas Gerais, Brazil. This is the heart of the Brazilian specialty coffee trade and coffee grows around 1000-1300masl at Fazenda Um. This selection is Mundo Novo that is dry (aka “natural”) processed and roasted to The Barn’s “espresso roast” level. With only about 35g in the bag, I can’t risk dialing in for espresso, so I am drinking this as a pourover. This is The Barn’s second season working with Fazenda Um, which is owned and operated by descendents of Korean immigrants. Natural coffees are picked and sorted by hand, then the coffee cherries are dried whole and unbroken, like big raisins. This tends to impart fruity flavors and sweetness to the coffee beans inside, but frequently at a cost of some ferment flavors that some people don’t care for. In my experience with Brazilian coffees, the ferment in naturals is always really light, if present at all, and the fruitiness is a lot different and more subtle than Central American naturals or, especially, African. The Barn gives us tasting notes of, “Fresh dates, dark chocolate, creamy” for this coffee.
I’m using my standard pourover setup of a 1:16 ratio of 28g of coffee to 450g of Third Wave Water in a notNeutral Gino dripper. I also use a Knock Aergrind and this morning’s coffee brewed in 3:20, not including a 30 second bloom. This coffee has a medium-light body for me, and in the initial sip there is a fruity brightness right up front. I don’t think I’ve ever had fresh dates, although I’ve had a lot of dried ones, and there are some Medjool date-like flavors in this cup, right up front as well as in the finish, for me. These are less cloyingly sweet than dried dates, but the flavors are there. I get some pretty good dried date in the aroma, too. The acidity in this cup is interesting and hard for me to put my finger on. The acidity is apparent right in the front of the sip, then it changes and amplifies all the way through to the finish, where it is substantial. That being said, this is a nicely balanced cup with plenty of sweetness, too. I’m definitely getting some citrus in the acidity that reminds me of orange and there is a touch of lemon in there, too, but there’s also some apple-like malic notes to it. And I know this is going to be a bit of a weird one, but I’m also getting coriander in this cup and every sip reminds me of coriander-forward witbier like Blue Moon. This coffee has a semi-dry finish on my palate and all these flavors do meld into something that is reminiscent of a good quality singole origin dark chocolate bar between sips.
This is a nice coffee. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that I’m not going to put it up there on the same level with these other four I’ve reviewed from The Barn because Brazilian coffees with their stable temperatures, bright sun and low altitudes are just very different from those other coffees. That being said, who doesn’t love an easy-drinking and balanced coffee? There’s actually a lot to explore in the complexity of the acidity in this coffee, so as far as Brazilians go, it has more to keep your interest than a lot of them do, so this Fazenda Um still has The Barn’s signature all over it in that regard!