Let’s start this week off with a new-to-KC Coffee Geek roaster, Cody Coffee Roaster, from Wyoming! It’s Monday, so let’s get right to slurping!
Purchase this coffee directly for $14/16oz
CODY COFFEE ROASTER THE CUTOFF (HONDURAS DARK ROAST)
One of the things I love most about running KC Coffee Geek is the discovery of coffee roasters in the most unexpected, out of the way places. Cody is town of about 10,000 people tucked way up in northwest Wyoming and, you know it, they have a coffee roaster! Owner Jesse Renfors was a stay at home dad with restaurant business experience, as well as a coffee lover. Looking for a new hobby, he picked up a secondhand peanut roaster and tried his hand at it. As is the case with many coffee roasting businesses, Jesse started sharing with friends and family, then found himself on his bike making deliveries around town and, eventually, built the Roast Coach out of a camper converted into a mobile coffee shop. In 2016, Jesse expanded to a stationary location and the Trip Advisor reviews are great. Freshly roasted coffee and crepes near Yellowstone? Sign me up!
Jesse sent me quite a bit of coffee, so I decided to start my discovery with The Cutoff, a dark roast Honduran coffee. There’s not a lot of info about the coffees Jesse selects for his roasting, but the website does say that all Cody Coffee Roaster coffees are fair trade and organic. This coffee was named after the Cutoff Pass and Jesse says this is, “smoky, dark and delectable. The flavors in The Cutoff Roast are the Wyoming mountains in a cup. With traces of smoky pine, charred cocoa and dark chocolate…”
I am using my standard pourover method for this coffee: Trinity Origin with Kalita 155 filter and all the blockers in place to block all the filter holes in the Origin except for the middle three. I’m using a Knock Aergrind grinder and a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water. This coffee took about 2:45 to brew after a 45 second bloom.
No doubt, this is a dark roast. The beans are dark and oily and soft, approaching the “French roast” level. As we’ve discovered, the darker a coffee is roasted the more it becomes about the roast and less about the origin characteristics of the beans themselves, but dark roasts remain super popular with American coffee drinkers and it’s a wise move, in my opinion, for a coffee roaster to have a darker roasted option for those customers. True to style, The Cutoff is smoky, chocolatey, sweet (yet dry at the same time from the smokiness/slight char from the roast) and has no fruit nuances to speak of. There is a caramel sweetness to the low end of the cup and that carries over into the finish and aftertaste. With the milk chocolate notes I’m getting from this cup it reminded me of a liquid version of a chocolate caramel candy. For all its sweetness (dark roasts are all about the caramelization of the sugars in the beans), this coffee isn’t cloying or overly sweet, either, thanks to a slightly dry finish and aftertaste that is smoky and a bit ashy. I even get hints of roasted grains that are familiar to me from some beers like dry stouts and porters. I don’t have any dairy in the house right now, but I’m sure this coffee holds up well to a splash of cream and is a good vehicle for sugar, too. I mean, that IS one of the reasons people like dark roasts so much when they do! I tried pulling shots of this as espresso and I got insane amounts of crema from it. I couldn’t quite get this to dial in the way I wanted it to taste. I got close to a traditional Roman shot but this Honduran bean was still leaving too much charcoal and ash notes in the flavors for me to really recommend it as ‘spro. It was right there, but I just couldn’t quite get it to work as espresso.
Overall, I’m enjoying this coffee for what it is. Trying to compare this to a lightly roasted Honduran bean with lots of origin character remaining is impossible… it’s apples and oranges. But, in the context of a dark roast, this is great! It’s very enjoyable, sweet, familiar, there’s nothing at all offensive about it. This could easily be a daily drinker for any dark roast fan and at $14/lb it’s a steal.