June’s MyCoffeePub.com subscription coffee landed on my doorstep a couple days ago and we have a delicious-sounding organic Guatemalan selection from the excellent folks at Kickapoo Coffee Roasters in Wisconsin. Without further ado…
Purchase this coffee directly for $16.50/12oz
MY COFFEE PUB JUNE 2018: KICKAPOO COFFEE ROASTERS ORGANIC GUATEMALA CONCEPCION
Third week of the month… that magical time when my favorite mystery package arrives on my doorstep from my MyCoffeePub.com subscription. This month, I was delighted to see a Guatemalan selection from Kickapoo Coffee Roasters in Wisconsin! The coffee pickers at MCP can do no wrong in my book, as I’ve been working with them for a couple years now and have yet to receive a single coffee I haven’t thoroughly enjoyed. They do a great job mixing well known roasters like Kickapoo in with small upstarts, and the added bonus of the little surprise of not knowing what the coffee will be until I open the package is the icing on the cake!
This month’s roaster, Kickapoo Coffee Roasters, got their start in the little town of Viroqua, Wisconsin, in the western side of the state about 45 minutes from La Crosse, around 2005. Kickapoo were wholesale roasters until they opened their first cafe in Milwaukee in 2015 and then in 2017 they opened a location in their hometown of Viroqua. I am mainly familiar with Kickapoo’s coffees from being served them on the rare occasions I make it to Mars Cafe in Des Moines, IA when I’m visiting family. Their espresso is always on point. MCP featured a Congo from Kickapoo back in April 2017 (reviewed here), so it has been a while for me!
This morning’s coffee is Kickapoo’s organic Concepcion from Guatemala. About 97% of Kickapoo’s coffees in a given year are certified organic, so that is obviously important to them and nice added benefit for their sourcing for us. Also of great importance to Kickapoo is their relationship and promotion of the farmers who grow their coffees. Through the month of June, they’ve been donating $1/pound sold of this coffee for relief from Volcan de Fuego’s eruption in Guatemala earlier this month. It was the dealiest eruption in Guatemala since 1929 and a lot of coffee grows around this volcano, so helping these people is good to do, first and foremost, but also helps our hobby/addiction! This coffee is a mix of Caturra, Bourbon, Pache Verde and Catuai grown around 1500-2000masl and harvested between Januart-April of this year, so it’s as fresh as it gets. It’s grown and processed by Mayan farmers of the CEDECH Cooperative near Concepción Huista in Huehuetenango. It’s dry fermented, then washed, and Kickapoo considers coffees from this co-op to be some of the best from the Huehuetenango region.
For brewing, I am using a Trinity Origin brewer with Kalita 155 filter, and I have all but three of the filter holder holes blocked with the silicone blockers. I’m using a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water and a Knock Aergrind grinder. This dense bean brewed really fast, but, man, it tastes great, so I’m not fussing with it!
I’m greeted by a medium-light bodied coffee with a lot of bright fruitiness right up front in the sip. I get hints of berries throughout the sip with little hints of flavors that, if I was drinking this blinded, would make me think it’s maybe a natural process coffee, even though it is definitely washed. There is a light caramel sweetness to this coffee that gives it enough of a bottom end to balance the bright fruit acids, and this coffee has a lot going on in that spectrum. I get lots of lemon in each sip and it’s bright and juicy, making me take bigger and more frequent sips. The lemon is nicely round and sweet, not to the point where I would consider it “lemon candy” but it’s not like sucking on a lemon slice, either! LOL Lemon zest… the essence of lemon without harshness or too much sweetness. It’s a really clean and refreshing flavor note, for me. As the cup cools, that lemon predominates the flavor and I get less of that hint of natural process/berries I mentioned earlier, although that does come back in the sweet finish of this cup as well as in the aftertaste. On the subject of aftertaste, if I go a couple minutes between sips (really hard to do with this one), I get a peppery spiciness on my palate, too, that I don’t get anywhere in the coffee itself. Also in the cooling cup, I get a bit of an apricot vibe in the sweetness up front in each sip. That lemon gives a bit of tartness and there is definitely the smooth sweetness of stone fruits like peaches in here, although it’s subtle. But, when I get that hard-to-describe-but-I-know-it-when-I-taste-it stone fruit vibe and it’s accompanied by acidity and/or tartness, it immediately reads as apricot to my brain. This is a fantastic coffee!