What better way to take care of a case of the Mondays than with a nice medium roast from our friends at Cody Coffee Roaster? This morning I’m looking at their Signal Peak, a single origin Colombian. Slurp!
Purchase this coffee directly for $14/16oz
Other reviews in this series: The Cutoff (Honduras, dark roast)
CODY COFFEE ROASTER SIGNAL PEAK (COLOMBIA)
Small batch roasted coffee and a crepe shop in a town of 10,000 tucked way up in the northwest corner of Wyoming’s mountains? Sure, why not?! Nothing surprises me about where you can find good coffee here in the USA anymore, and I love discovering new roasters in out-of-the-way places like Cody Coffee Roaster in Cody, Wyoming. Jesse Renfors opened up at his current location in 2016 and his coffee and crepe shop has earned nothing but awesome reviews on Trip Advisor since. I enjoyed The Cutoff, a dark roast Honduran coffee, so I am excited to rip into Signal Peak, a medium roast Colombian, this morning. I’ve already been pulling shots of espresso with Signal Peak for the past few days and enjoying those quite a bit!
My main suggestion to Jesse is to bulk up some of the information about the coffees themselves on the Cody Coffee Roaster website for nerds like me. The page for Signal Peak doesn’t give any detail about where this coffee comes from other than that Cody Coffee uses fair trade and organic coffees. The site says, “This medium Colombian is sharp and to the point. Bold and substantial with notes of sugar cane and star anise…” I’m brewing this coffee with my standard pourover setup of a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee and 352g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin brewer with all but the center three holes blocked out. This brewer uses the small Kalita 155 filters and my grinder is a Knock Aergrind.
Jesse considers this a medium roast and my bag showed some splotches of oil on the surface of some of the beans, but it wasn’t the close-to-French-roast level like I found on their dark roast. I get some roasty notes as well as darkly caramelized sugar from the aroma in the cup. Taking my first few sips, this still reads as a “dark roast” to my palate, but there is a little more character to it than I found in the dark roasted Honduran I previously reviewed, and it’s less ashy. Right up front there is a lot of dark caramel sweetness and some green apple and light citrus acidity peeks through in the midsip and carries into the aftertaste, too. I wouldn’t say there is grapefruit in this cup, but the higher notes have a bit of a bitterness that comes through, too, that reminds me of grapefruit pith. It’s actually a nice balance to the sweetness of the cup and gives it some dimension, too. Throughout drinking this cup I am getting little flashes of spices here and there, but nothing ever lingers enough for me to really put my finger on the flavors I’m getting. This coffee has a slightly sweet finish and is really mellow and easy-drinking, especially as it cools. It has medium body and a smooth, almost slick mouthfeel like an oatmeal stout, for those beer drinkers who are reading. Especially in the cooling cup the roastiness in the flavors is pretty minimal and I don’t get any of that carbonized, ashy character I got from the realy dark roasted The Cutoff.
This is a nice, sweet, balanced pourover. There isn’t a ton of “origin character” to this coffee, but some apple and citrus notes sneak through to give this coffee a little bit of higher note dimension. It’s a nice drinker and I could see it appealing to the dark roast crowd without it being overly dark and roasty. Another brew method that I found really works great for this coffee is espresso. I spent the past handful of days pulling shots of this coffee on my Gaggia and they were great for a more traditional style of ‘spro. Lots of crema and body, nicely behaved coffee and reproducible shots were all things I was getting from Signal Peak. Pulling 1:2 shots (19g in and around 35-ish out) to 1:1.5 shots in around 30 seconds gave me flavors that reminded me of traditional Roman espresso with more sweetness, less ash and roast and more volume in the cup (as opposed to a tiny ristretto shot). All in all a nice, easy shot and I was pretty impressed by the performance I was getting from this coffee! Yum.
