After a duo of very tasty African coffees from Denver’s Queen City Collective Coffee, I’m heading to Colombia on this fine morning! Slurp!
Purchase this coffee directly for $13.75/280g (around 10oz)
Other reviews in this series: Ethiopia Kochore Tore | Rwanda Hingakawa
QUEEN CITY COLLECTIVE COLOMBIA LOS VENTEÑOS
It has been a lot of fun discovering Denver, CO roaster, Queen City Collective Coffee, through their selections. The two African coffees I reviewed earlier were fantastic, and now we’re switching gears completely and checking out a coffee from half a world away in Colombia. Read more about Queen City Collective Coffee on their website and in my previous reviews listed above. They have big things in the works in Denver and I hope the best for their future success!
This morning I’m taking a look at Queen City’s Los Ventaños, a coffee grown near La Unión in the coffee-rich Nariño department (like a state here in the USA) of Colombia. Nariño occupies the southwestern corner of Colombia, with the Pacific ocean to its west and Ecuador to its south. La Unión is in the south-central portion of Nariño, a stone’s throw from Ecuador. This coffee is the product of a collaboration of 16 farmers in the region organized by Herbert Peñaloza (here’s an excellent interview). He started a consulting company that also sources coffees from Colombia called La Real Expedición Botánica with the intent of improving growing practices and processing techniques. Herbert’s ultimate goal is to make farming a more stable livelihood for the communities he works with by making their end product better and more valuable.
This particular coffee is a washed mix of Castillo, CR-95 and Caturra grown around 1450-1900masl in Nariño. It was dry mass fermented for 36 hours, which Queen City Collective Coffee’s site says produced a, “clean, sweet and balanced cup.” They also say this coffee reminds them of, “milk chocolate and yellow apple.” 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 with Kalita 185 filter.
Taking my first sip, it’s clear to me that this is going to be the type of bright, aggressive Colombian coffee that I love! For me, this coffee straddles the border between light and medium, leaning toward light, as far as body and mouthfeel go. Actually, I’m going to make a decision and call it light, but for such a thin-bodied cup it packs a lot of punch and flavor and I enjoy the contradiction. There is a lot of bright apple acidity and flavor in this cup, with some lemon notes in there, too. I think Queen City’s “yellow apple” descriptor is really good for this coffee… the apple notes in this cup are bright and crisp like a green apple but there is a sugary sweetness, too, more like a red apple. With yellow apples giving a bit of both, this is a perfect description for me. There is a healthy amount of lemon in the acidity in this cup, too. I get something like the apples taste in a fruit salad that I’ve squeezed a lemon into. This wonderful, bright, even aggressive acidity is definitely the star of the show in this coffee for me, although there is a honey sweetness that just balances this complex acidity enough to keep my palate from getting fatigued.
I really enjoy this coffee. These bright, loud, aggressive coffees are my favorite from Colombia. This coffee maintains enough balance to not fall apart, but it’s really all about that apple and lemon acidity for me. I’m going to try this as a cold brew and I think it will have enough acidity to keep it from being too flat. Yum!