With the craziness of the holidays and some travel AND being sick for the last week, KC Coffee Geek is back up and running, thanks for your patience! This morning I have a great offering from Cafenated Coffee Co., so without further ado…
Purchase this coffee directly for $12/8oz
Other reviews in this series: Pure (Guatemala)
CAFENATED SERENITY
Cafenated Coffee Co. is a Berkeley, California-based coffee roaster specializing in roasting coffees from women’s farm cooperatives (or co-ops with a high percentage of women) in Central America, South America and Africa. Cafenated wants to change the underrepresented, underpaid and under appreciated status of females in the coffee supply chain, which is a noble and worthy cause.
This morning’s coffee is Serenity, a medium-roasted coffee from the Gashonga sector, Rusizi district of Rwanda’s Western Province. Coffee grows around 1600-1800masl there and this is a washed Red Bourbon variety. Cafenated’s bag says, “Floral and sweet aroma. Enjoy it during gatherings” and they elaborate on the website that this is a “calm and light” coffee with flavors of “orange, hazelnut, citrus, floral.”
I used my standard pourover setup for this coffee, a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin dripper with Kalita 155 filter. I am using a Melodrip to control the agitation in the coffee bed and so I do a 44g bloom followed by 30-second pulses through the Melodrip, letting the water get to just above the coffee bed with each pulse. I made some adjustments to my grinder, for some reason (why screw with a good thing?) and barely tightened it up, but this coffee ran super-long at 7:00 total for the brew. I can’t believe that little tweak (I changed my Knock Aergrind less than one full step) had that big of a difference because my coffees usually run 3:45-4:00 at the longest. Given there’s a cat in Cafenated’s logo and you know what curiosity does to them, I decided to let it ride and go ahead and review this cup anyway…
I’m getting a decent amount of florals in the aroma and they are really inviting. Forgive me, I’ve never taken the time to smell lots of flowers and stay current in my floral descriptors, but the flowers I am smelling coming from this cup are awesome and I get them in the cup, too. There’s definitely a little jasmine in there because I have been sick and drinking jasmine green tea recently and so that one is definitely noticeable. Taking a sip, this is a medium-light bodied coffee and I get a nice mix of soft orange and floral notes right in the front of the sip. I’m getting some of that jasmine as well as some roses in this cup, and there’s a nice caramel base of sweetness anchoring this coffee. Toward the middle of the sip I’m getting some nice roasted nuts notes, as well as some bitterness I was not getting in my more standard cups of this coffee. I think this bitterness is definitely a product of the long brew time, but that brew time also magnified all these other flavors, too, so I’m happy with the compromise. This coffee finishes slightly sweet and the very long aftertaste has some nice perfumed qualities to it that are hard to describe but pleasant, nonetheless.
I really enjoy Cafenated’s Serenity and it’s a good name for this coffee! The amount of florals in this coffee are pretty crazy and, while this morning’s cup was way off on brewing parameters, it came out tasting unique, complex and delicious even thought the bitterness was a little ramped up. I got all of these same flavors from this coffee in my more standard brew-time cups, too, though, so you don’t have to take Serenity to the boundaries of the brewing universe to coax a nice cup of coffee out of it! A solid win from a company whose mission I really appreciate. Excellent!