I’m a little late to the table with this one, but let’s check out new coffee from new-to-KC Coffee Geek roaster, 3-19 Coffee, courtesy of February’s MyCoffeePub.com subscription. Slurp!
Purchase this coffee directly for $15 for 10/oz
MYCOFFEEPUB.COM FEBRUARY 2019: 3-19 COFFEE FAZENDA SERRINHA
MyCoffeePub’s February selection landed on my doorstep right as I was kicking off a head and chest cold that had me unable to smell or taste anything for over 3 weeks! So this bag of 3-19 Coffee, which I was very excited about because it’s a new-to-me roaster, just sat there, patiently waiting for me until I could finally break it open and enjoy the goodness within. Ack! If you don’t know, MyCoffeePub is a subscription service that is super simple. Pay your monthly subscription and you get a surprise coffee every month! So easy, and the surprise is something I really love! I’ve been working with MyCoffeePub for about 3 years now, and I’ve yet to have a bad selection from them and they’ve led me to discover a lot of new roasters and visit some well-known ones, too. It’s a perfect gift for any coffee lover, too!
3-19 coffee started around 2016, founded by Chris Dollries and Mike Weaver. The company was founded on three passions of coffee, art and community. They have a cafe in the Mission District in San Francisco, as well as plans for cafes in Cincinnati and Cleveland, Ohio, of all places. The name is something I really like, because 3-19 was named after the birthdays of Mike and Chris’s wives, who were both March 19th babies. And, in an interesting twist of coincidence, I was also born on March 19th, so this really is the brand for me, I guess! LOL
The coffee MyCoffeePub’s crew selected for the February drop is 3-19’s Fazenda Serrinha, a natural process coffee from Brazil. Fazenda Serrinha was planted in 2003, but is owned by José Maria de Oliveira and his family, who’ve worked coffee for generations. This is a Rainforest Alliance Certified coffee grown around 1200masl in Minas Gerais, Brazil and it is Red Bourbon variety. Natural coffees are hand picked and sorted (coffee is a cherry with two seeds inside and these seeds are roasted and what we call coffee “beans”) and then kept whole and laid out on mesh beds to slowly dry, like big raisins. Natural coffees tend to be fruity and have nice sweetness and body, all effects that come from the seeds soaking up sugars and other compounds as the fruit of the cherry breaks down around them. 3-19 gives us flavor notes of “berry, floral.”
I’m using my standard pourover setup this morning. That’s a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin dripper with Kalita 155 filter. My grinder is a Knock Aergrind and I’m using a Melodrip to control my pours, using a pulse pour method. Including a 40 second bloom, this coffee brewed at 3:30 total.
I’m getting a pleasant, light aroma from this cup of some cherry and apple. Taking a sip, this is a medium-heavy bodied coffee with a creamy mouthfeel. It’s slick, like an oatmeal stout. Right up front in the sip I’m getting apple juice sweetness and crisp apple notes as well as a hint of cherry. These flavors really coat my palate because of the body of this coffee and they leave a residue of sweetness behind that I really enjoy. There’s a lightly caramelized sugar sweetness to the cup that does really well with these apple notes. This is a bit of a caramel apple coffee, and that’s certainly a nice combination! If I hold the coffee in my mouth a bit longer, I do get some berry notes… maybe a hint of strawberry and a little raspberry. The berry notes in a Brazilian natural are, in my experience, always a lot more subtle than their Ethiopian cousins, which can sometimes be like getting hit over the head with a berry mallet (in a good way). Brazilian coffees are, as a rule, generally modest and tasty, but not super complex, largely because coffee has it pretty easy in Brazil, and it’s usually challenging climates that produce more complex cups. That being said, this is a really nice cup and I couldn’t be happier with this coffee. It’s sweet and perfectly balanced and incredibly easy to drink, so what more is there? The coffee leaves a pleasant, long-lasting aftertaste reminiscent of apple pie on my palate and this is joy to drink all the way down to room temperature. What an awesome intro to this roaster!
