Let’s get through hump day with a Costa Rican coffee from Lone Oak Coffee. It has been about a year since we last checked out anything from this roaster, so I’m excited! Slurp!
Purchase this coffee directly for $18.75/12oz
Daily Coffee News article from 2016
LONE OAK COFFEE COSTA RICA SAN ANTONIO
Lone Oak Coffee was started around 2015 by Sam Kayser, and it originally operated out of Hopscotch Coffee and Records in Winchester, Virginia. Winchester is tucked into the Shenandoah Valley about 75 miles east of Washington, DC. In 2016, Sam moved Lone Oak Coffee out of the Hopscotch space and into dedicated digs to let him put down roots and branch out more… ahem. Sorry, too on the nose? Lone Oak grew from a 15×15 foot space into 2100 sqaure feet at that time, which can only feel great. I’ve linked to an article about Lone Oak Coffee from Daily Coffee News a couple years ago. Dedicated KC Coffee Geek readers will remember that I reviewed a couple Lone Oak coffees back in August 2017 and it looks like the company has moved away from the kraft paper bags to black bags with different labeling in the meantime.
This morning I am checking out a Costa Rican coffee labeled, “San Antonio.” Checking out the Lone Oak website I am a bit bummed out by the lack of information available there about this coffee, which simply states that this is a medium roast with flavors of, “Milk chocolate, brown sugar, mild acidity, heavy body.” Based on the look and fragrance of the beans in the bag, I’m assuming this is a washed coffee. Doing some online searching, it’s tough to find anything about San Antonio coffee from Costa Rica. It’s likely a microlot of a particular farm separated out from a cooperative that the farmer sells his coffee to and where it would normally be sorted and added to other lots and sold. That’s my guess, at least, and of course I think about this stuff because I am KC Coffee Geek, emphasis on geek. But, not everybody cares about details when it comes to coffee and I have faith that Lone Oak Coffee know what their customers want and don’t want in terms of information!
I’m using my trusty standard pourover method of a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin with a Kalita 155 filter. Grinder is a Knock Aergrind.
This coffee smells great from the bag to the brewing aroma to the aroma in the cup, with promises of lots of sweetness to come. Taking a sip I call this a medium-heavy body and it’s sweet and mellow right out of the gate. This is a syrupy coffee with lots of brown sugar and hints of molasses in the sweet base for me. I’m getting a hint of coriander in the mid sip and there is a bit of acidity here, too, really as a balance to the sweetness of the cup and not a major player in the flavors, for the most part. I’m picking up on some orange juice notes and a bit of sweet red apple malic acidity, too. But, as I said, this is a sweet, mellow coffee and the acidity adds some dimension and interest, as well as balance, but it isn’t the main player in this coffee. In the late sip I’m getting some nice caramel flavors if I hold the coffee in my mouth and agitate it a little. The finish is a just a touch dry and the aftertaste has some orange juice and a hint of spices for me, as well as that coating of sweetness on my palate. Yum!
This is a really nice, easy going coffee and could easily be a daily drinker. The complexity is low (not necessarily a bad thing), it’s sweet, balanced, delicious, full of familiar and pleasant flavors. I could see this easily being a “gateway” coffee for someone who is used to commodity coffee and dipping their toe into specialty coffee. I could easily see a casual coffee drinker referring to this coffee as “rich” and “smooth” and “low acid…” all those nebulous qualities people have been trained to say about coffee by ads in magazines and on TV! But, this really IS a smooth, mellow, very enjoyable cup with all the flavor components complementing one another just right. Very good!