Let’s make another stop in South America with a fresh Colombian coffee from our friends at Mylo Coffee Co. in Little Rock, Arkansas! Happy Monday!
Purchase this coffee directly for $14.50/8oz
MYLO COFFEE CO. COLOMBIA LOS NARANJOS
Mylo Coffee Co. is a mainstay in the Hillcrest neighborhood of Little Rock, Arkansas, serving up awesome food and coffee. Before opening their current full menu cafe, Stephanos and Monica Mylonas started out as many do with a stall serving baked goods at the local farmers market. It didn’t take long for them to develop a big following and the cafe, with in-house roasting, was the next step. I’ve had Mylo coffee a few times before via the MyCoffeePub subscription, but they didn’t have a site and shipping for readers to buy their coffee outside of Little Rock. Mylo Coffee Co. recently reached out to me to tell me all that has changed, and share some of their new coffees with me. The Sitio do Campo from Brazil I reviewed a couple weeks ago was great, so I’m excited to try this Colombian selection with you this morning!
This morning’s coffee is a mix of Caturra, Castillo, Colombia and Tabi varietals grown by multiple smallholder farmers around the town of San Agustín in the Huila department of Colombia. The average coffee farm in this part of Colombia is about 2.5 hectares and growing altitude is 1750-1950masl. This is a washed coffee, as you’d expect from Colombia, and Mylo gives us a description of, “balanced and sweet, caramel, apple, green grape, lemon.” I’m using my standard pourover setup of a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin dripper with all but the middle three holes in the filter holder blocked out. My grinder is a Knock Aergrind.
Taking my first sips, this is a medium-bodied coffee with a lot of presence on my palate. So often, Colombian coffees feel like they drill into my palate and tastebuds, sending flavor deep under the surface, and this coffee lives up to that expectation. I’m getting a syrupy sweetness in the low end with a little molasses and some lightly caramelized sugars. There is a lot of red apple sweetness, like apple juice, in this coffee for me, but also some high notes and more acidity that I associate with green apples. Throughout the sip I’m getting a lemon acidity that complements both the sweetness and the fruits in this cup very nicely. The lemon flavors really hit the sides of my tongue and in some sips, the lemon is hanging out backstage and at other times it really comes crashing forward and embraces all the other flavors in a big, sweet lemon candy hug. At the end of the sip the very back of my tongue and throat have a lemon candy residue clinging to them and that carries through the long aftertaste into the next sip, too.
This is a sweet, balanced, extremely inviting coffee. I really enjoy drinking this Los Naranjos selection because it’s so approachable, but also has a good amount of complexity. For me, the complexity in this coffee is more about the “textures” and layers of flavors and how they interact rather than the amount of different notes. On face value, this coffee reads as being pretty straightforward and simple, but letting it cool down and open up rewards me with a lot of interaction between the various flavor notes and the structure and layering of them is what gives me something to think about and play with in terms of sip size, how long I hold it in my mouth before swallowing, etc. This is a really great coffee and another exceptional roasting job from Mylo Coffee Co!