Rose Cafe (Guangzhou, China) Indonesia Sumatra Lintong Mandheling

This morning I have an Indonesian coffee roasted by Rose Cafe from Guangzhou, China! I’m super excited about how it came to be in my possession and the potential for future access to small, obscure Asian roasters. Check it out!

Polecat Asian Coffee Subscription site

Rose Cafe on Instagram

ROSE CAFE INDONESIA SUMATRA LINTONG MANDHELING

This morning I have something unique to share with you, dear readers, and that’s some fresh coffee roasted in China thanks to Polecat, a new Asian coffee subscription service. The company’s founder, Deric Loh, reached out via Instagram and asked if he could send me coffee. After agreeing, I got a little worried when it struck me that the polecat is a relative of the civet, the animal responsible for kopi luwak. The treatment of these animals in the industry is abhorrent, but I was pleased to find out the coffee that came to me had nothing to do with this industry and it’s just a name. Whew! I would never support kopi luwak. Anyway, getting back on track, Deric appears to have a tech and business background but is also a home coffee enthusiast. Once bitten by the coffee bug, Deric started trying every cafe and online roaster he could get his hands on and it struck him that he could curate a monthly subscription to bring great coffees to his subscribers.

I love this idea. I’m a coffee subscription fan, with MyCoffeePub being my favorite, since I receive one bag of coffee from them, always a surprise, every month. It sounds like Deric is planning something very similar with Polecat, only the coffees will be from Asia. The Asian specialty coffee market is GIGANTIC, and so I love this idea, too! Some of you longtime readers know I subscribed to Kurasu’s Coffee from Japan for a little over a year, and I loved getting new coffees from places in Japan I never would have known about. I’m already impressed with Deric’s selection he sent me, from Rose Cafe, mainly because it took me quite a while to figure out where this place is in the world! I NEVER would’ve found Rose Cafe on my own!

Google was no help, but after downloading the correct translation dictionary to Google Translate on my phone, I was at least able to figure out that the coffee was from China! LOL I thought the script on the bottle and card looked Chinese, but I was using the app wrong and I eventually figured it out. As it turns out, Rose Cafe was established around 2003 in Guangzhou, China, a large port city north of Hong Kong. I really couldn’t find much else out about it, but it looks like a legit little coffee shop based on the Instagram link I found.

The coffee came packed in a cool amber plastic bottle and it gassed, loudly, when I opened it. I don’t know if that was just CO2 from the beans off-gassing after roasting or if they nitro charge the bottles before sealing them up? Either way, the bottle is cool. My wife, who doesn’t like coffee at all, even commented that it was nice packaging. There’s a drawing of a port city (Guangzhou?) on the front and a bunch more info in Chinese on the bottle. Google Translate’s app is OK, but it comes up with some crazy stuff in the translation, so I’ll spare you sharing what is probably inaccurate info from the bottle! LOL

This particular coffee is a dark roast of Lintong Mandheling from Sumatra, the large coffee growing Indonesian island. It has been quite a while since I had a dark roast, so while I knew it wouldn’t have a lot of origin character, I was pleased for the opportunity to get back to my early coffee drinking roots with a nice dark roast. I enjoy them on occasion! According to the info card from Rose Cafe, this coffee appears to have been grown at 1400masl and it’s a wet-hulled coffee. Wet hulling is a very Sumatran method of processing coffee that can potentially result in some really weird, off-flavors, but this was a nice, clean, normal tasting coffee, so the wet-hulling was done carefully and the coffee was treated in such a way that it didn’t absorb any off flavors or develop molds and mildews along the way. Curiously, “Mandheling” and “Lintong” are words used for different growing regions in Sumatra, so I’m not sure if this is a blend of coffees from different regions or if something is lost in translation or what. Based on my handy app, the flavors in this cup that Rose Cafe highlights are, “Walnut, cream, herbal incense” and while this sounds like a weird mix, it’s right in the pocket for a darker roasted wet-hulled Sumatran. As I said before, this is a dark roast (the info card shows a cartoon of a very red, very hot coffee bean sweating and with fire blasting out of his ears and mouth!) and the beans had a nice, uniform sheen on their surface.

I used my standard pourover method for this coffee of a 1:16 ratio of 28g of coffee to 450g of Third Wave Water in a notNeutral Gino dripper with Kalita 185 filter. Grinder is a Knock Aergrind. This coffee has a heavy body, as I’d expect from a nice dark roast. There is a lot of roastiness in the flavor right up front and throughout the sip, as I expected. The “problem” with darker roasts is that you trade origin character for roast character, so coffees start to taste very similar the darker they are roasted. There’s a lot of dark caramel sweetness in the cup for me and a creamy mouthfeel and flavor, too. I get the “walnut” descriptor as there is a good amount of nuttiness in the cup, but I’m not sure if I could specify walnut on my own. As far as the herbal component, I get a little bit of a perfumed incense note in the finish and aftertaste, but it’s subtle. This coffee has just a slightly dry finish, using texture and mouthfeel more than flavor to offset and balance all that sweetness. If I wait a longer time between sips, my palate gets a nice bitterness coating it, not unlike the bitterness in beer from hops, and then I also start getting A LOT more incense and perfumes washing up into my nose. I guess I just had to wait for it!

This is a great dark roast from a roaster I would never have found on my own in a million years. This is the adventure and discovery offered by subscriptions like Polecat, especially when Deric plans to focus on “Asia,” which is as diverse of a coffee scene as you can have. Between just China, Japan and Korea there must be thousands of roasters, and that doesn’t even take into account all the other countries and cities in Asia. I’m really excited to see this progress and I hope the best for Deric and his Polecat subscription!