Lets’ start this week off with a new-to-me coffee roaster, featuring Queen City Collective Coffee for the first time! This beautiful Monday morning I’m having a look at their Ethiopia Kochore Tore. Slurp!
QUEEN CITY COFFEE COLLECTIVE KOCHORE TORE
Queen City Collective Coffee is owned by head roaster, Scott Byington. Scott spent the greater part of 10 years doing humanitarian work in Africa. Returning to the United States to attend graduate school in Montana, Scott picked up coffee roasting as a side job and found himself getting more and more interested in coffee and less in academics. Settling down in the “Queen City of the Plains,” Denver, Colorado, Scott founded Queen City Collective Coffee close to two years ago. His roastery has been operating at Bellwether, a coffee shop/bar/barber shop/everything else collective space in Denver. It looks like Queen City is working on plans to move out, soon, into a shared space with The Novel Strand that will be cafe by day and Belgian-inspired brewpub by night.[ref]https://303magazine.com/2018/02/new-denver-coffee-shops/[/ref] Scott values direct relationships with coffee growers and puts special emphasis on coffees grown completely by women, although I did learn that 80% of the coffee labor workforce worldwide is female to begin with.
Scott sent me three of his coffees to try out and share with you, so I decided to start with their Ethiopian selection, Kochore Tore. Looking at the Queen City website, it looks like this coffee has either been rotated out or replaced with a Sidamo Guji, so I will update availability when I hear back from Scott. When we talked about a week or so ago he said these were all current offerings. Tore comes from the Kochore area in the Yirgacheffe region of Ethiopia. It’s named after the village of Tore where this private mill is owned. The washing station itself is located around 1800masl and farmers who bring coffee here to be processed plant as high as 2100masl![ref]http://www.coffeeshrub.com/shrub/coffee/ethiopia-gr-1-dry-process-kochore-tore[/ref] I don’t have a listing on Queen City’s website for this coffee, but based on taste I’m pretty sure this is a natural process coffee, which means the coffee cherries are sorted and laid out on elevated mesh beds to slowly dry, like big raisins. This tends to impart extra fruitiness and sweetness to the seeds (what we call coffee beans) inside. Scott gives us tasting notes on the bag of, “tropical punch, dried berries” for this coffee.
I prepared this coffee with my standard pourover method of a 1:16 ratio of 28g of coffee to 450g of Third Wave Water in a notNeutral Gino dripper with Kalita 185 filter. I use an Aergrind grinder from Knock.
The nose on this coffee as it brewed was floral and peachy and promised good things to come. In the cup, the aroma is a little more tropical and a little less floral. This is a medium-light bodied coffee. There’s a lot going on in each sip and I find myself taking more and more faster and faster to the point that I’m worried I’ll blow through my cups before I get a good impression! In the front of the sip I get a nice peach/apricot nectar vibe from the sweetness and fruitiness. There is an underlying note that I find hard to describe and chasing it is the source of taking so many sips so rapidly. It’s simultaneously floral as well as having some baking spices notes. I’m starting to settle on a light cinnamon note, specifically, and I think there is some red apple acidity to this cup and I’m getting a real homemade applesauce with cinnamon vibe from this coffee. It has been a while since I’ve made applesauce, but this note is apple-y, sweet and has more than a hint of cinnamon and that’s what I’m getting out of the front end of this sip. That’s a lot of stuff going on, but it works beautifully!
The middle of the sip is more of the same, sweet and fresh with apple notes and acidity as well as a little bit of a peach note for me. The floral note is a little more noticeable in the middle for me, and that conjures up images of blackberry for me. The finish on this coffee is just to the dry side of neutral and there is a tropical fruit character to it with hints of pineapple and mango. There is some ferment in the aftertaste, but I quite like that and it’s one of the things I actually enjoy and look for in natural coffees. As the coffee approaches room temperature I get more solid hits of pineapple in the flavors and it’s delicious.
All in all, this is a KILLER example of a natural! There’s a lot of complexity in this cup, but all these flavors meld beautifully and this is a fantastic cup that is pretty easy-drinking, considering the amount of stuff going on inside. I’m very happy with this introduction to Queen City Collective Coffee and Scott Byington’s roasting. I can’t wait to break into the other two coffees he sent, too, so stay tuned this week and next week for those!