What better way to celebrate Monday than with a new roaster for KC Coffee Geek readers? Check out this women-focused roaster from Berkeley, California! Slurp…
Purchase this coffee for $12/8oz (free shipping on orders over $20)
CAFENATED COFFEE CO. PURE
I discovered Cafenated Coffee Co. on Instagram recently and immediately fell in love with their cute cat logo. I am highly allergic, so their bags and merch are about as close as I can get to a cat, and maybe that’s why I love the logo so much! Cafenated strives to work directly with women’s coffee farms and cooperatives in Central and South America, as well as Africa. Their goal is to cut out as many middlemen as possible (which is significant in the coffee supply chain), allowing the women who grow and harvest these coffees a bigger portion of the profit for their families and enriching the communities they live in. Cafenated coffees are roasted in small batches in Berkeley, California.
Cafenated sent me a couple of their coffees and this morning’s review is of their Pure, a light roasted coffee from Guatemala. All of Cafenated’s coffees have names, like Pure, Bliss, Euphoria, Serenity, etc. This is different, but it does make finding a particular origin or type of blend a little more challenging for visitors to their website. Pure is sourced from FECCEG in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, found in the western highlands. It’s the coldest city in Guatemala, which can make for interesting coffees. FECCEG is La Federación Comercializadora de Café Especial de Guatemala, a cooperative consisting of 1,943 small farmers, 529 of them being women. [ref]http://www.interamericancoffee.com/guatemala-fto-fecceg/[/ref] This particular coffee is a lot of women’s coffee grown around 1100-1400masl and it consists of Caturra, Catuai and Catimor varieties. This is a washed coffee and Cafenated considers this a “light roast.” They give us tasting notes of “green apple, caramel and nougat.”
I’m using my standard pourover setup of a Trinity Origin dripper with Kalita 155 filter. I use a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water and I did the first half of the pourover straight out of a kettle with the second half through a Melodrip to control the water more (for no particular reason other than that I am experimenting). My brew took about 3:30 including a 40 second bloom. Grinder is a Knock Aergrind.
Green apple definitely comes through right in the front of the sip. This is a medium bodied coffee and the green apple is first and foremost in the flavors. Apple notes come from malic acid, the same kind of acid found in apples, and I’m getting some citrus acidity in there, too (from citric acid). The citrus is reading as sweet orange, maybe even blood orange, which adds brightness as well as sweetness and plays well with the green apple notes. Underlying and balancing all this fruit is a light caramel sweetness that is just what I like in Guatemalan coffees. It gives a clean, sweet base for all that fruit to work off of, but also keeps the cup from being too bright or harsh. The orange and apple notes reach their peak around mid-sip and carry strong into the finish, which is sweet. I get lingering notes of orange on my palate in the aftertaste, but also a lot of caramel and hints of milk chocolate.
This is a nice cup. For me, there are really two basic flavor profiles of coffee from Guatemala, light, bright, fruity cups that are thinner in body and more complex and sweet caramel sugar bombs that have lower perceived acidity and are like drinking liquid caramel. Cafenated’s Pure gives me a bit of both, with some complexity from the acid profile and a nice mix of crisp, refreshing apple acidity and flavor notes and this lovely citrus that I am really enjoying. Even with some pretty bright fruit notes, it stays well anchored and, in my opinion, leans more toward sweet than light and bright, which I really enjoy in a Guatemalan coffee. A nice introduction to Cafenated’s lineup! YUM!