While Europe is in the grips of a terrible heat wave, let’s pay homage to our friends in Germany at The Barn for sending this cool Brazilian coffee my way. Slurp!
THE BARN NINHO D’ÁGUIA #1385 BRAZIL
My new friends at the Barn in Berlin, Germany, reached out recentlty to see if I wanted to try some of their favorite coffees from the summer and I couldn’t reply “yes” fast enough! Hopefully I didn’t come off uncool or not casual enough, but you know what? I don’t really care! I’m a simple man and when the Barn asks if I want to taste some coffee I say yes. LOL The Barn has been hitting home runs with fantastically sourced and roasted coffee since 2010, making a name for themselves that spans the globe. With several cafes in Berlin, the Barn gained international notoriety with their “no strollers” policy, but the fact is that they serve great coffee and food and that should be the focus of writing about them!
The first coffee I grabbed out of the box from the Barn is their Ninho D’Águia #1385. The Barn seem to rotate coffees in and out of their lineup regularly, so while it’s not listed as a current offering and it could be sold out, it could also just be out of the current rotation and perhaps it will make another appearance soon. This is a microlot from Brazil, so it could go either way and I’m sure an email shot their way would be answered with the right information. Digging back through their social media, Ninho D’Águia is a coffee produced by Clayton Barrossa and his farm of the same name, which is located in Alto Caparaó, Brazil in the Minas Gerais coffee growing region of the country. Clayton’s farm sits on the downslope of the Pico da Bandeira national park and enjoys altitudes not common in Brazil. Although this is the first I’ve heard of Clayton and Ninho D’Águia, he apparently enjoys quite a reputation, particularly for his natural processed coffees, and this is a microlot that the Barn has been roasting since Spring. This lot, #1385, is a lot of Red Catuai variety coffee roasted as “filter roast” by the Barn. It looks really light with that characteristic red hue lightly roasted naturals tend to take on. This is, again, a natural coffee, meaning the coffee cherries are picked and sorted and then laid out on elevated mesh beds to slowly dry and break down in the sun, like big raisins. This type of processing tends to impart more body, sweetness and fruity notes to the coffee, but can sometimes come at the cost of ferment notes that not everyone likes (I’m a weirdo and ferment not only doesn’t bother me, but the funkier the better!).
For this coffee I am using my standard pourover setup of a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin brewer. I have all but the middle 3 holes blocked in the filter holder and I’m using Kalita 155 filters. Grinder is a Knock Aergrind. I did a 31.5g bloom for 30 seconds and then the total time, including the bloom, for the brew was 3:17.
The aroma from the cup reminds me of sweet, creamy milk chocolate which is surprising considering how fruity the fragrance from the dry grounds were and how light this roast looks. Taking a sip I get more brightness and this is clearly going to be a more complex cup than I thought as well as more subtle in that complexity. The sweet base of this coffee is milk chocolate for me with a creamy, dairy-like mouthfeel. As the fruit comes in there is a red berry flavor that comes in and settles nicely with the chocolate/dairy vibe I’m getting from this coffee. Trying to break that “red berry” note down is a little tough… there is a little strawberry to it, almost more in the mouthfeel than the flavor itself as it leaves a little dryness on my palate like a not-quite-ripe strawberry does. There’s a hint of raspberry, but just a hint. I’m getting some pecan in the mid-sip and into the finish, which is a little on the dry side and leaves some strawberry and chocolate on my palate for the long aftertaste. For a natural process coffee, there is virtually no ferment notes in it for me, so I imagine this is part of the mystique and popularity of Clayton’s natural processing. What a fantastic cup! My only regret is that you can’t just jump to the Barn’s site and buy it right now, but shoot them an email and see if it’s coming back into rotation… you may get lucky!