Dialed in a new espresso from my old friends in San Diego, Manzanita Roasting Co. This one is super tasty, so read all about it below!
Purchase this coffee directly for $16/12oz.
MANZANITA ROASTING CO. KEVOTE ESPRESSO
I feel like it was just recently when I got my first taste of Manzanita Roasting Co. coffee, but time has a funny way of getting blurry over the years, doesn’t it? It was actually March 2016 when I posted my first review from this roasting company that got its start at the very end of 2015. Manzanita was founded by Weston and Samantha Nawrocki. Weston’s background is as a classically trained chef and sommelier while Samantha is involved with Bernardo Winery, which has been in her family for something like 125 years! The couple borrowed some space on the winery property, which is in the San Diego, CA area, and started roasting coffee with what I would only call immediate success. In 2017, Thrillist named them one of “The 21 Best Coffee Roasters in the Country” and I’ve had a lot of coffee from Weston and Samantha and it’s always killer. They recently sent me 4 of their current selections and I started this rainy, dreary Kansas City morning off by dialing in their latest seasonal espresso, Kevote Espresso.
This is a Kenyan coffee, and most coffee in Kenya is grown by smallholder farmers with very small plots of land. These farmers mostly work together in cooperative societies that gives allows them to combine their coffee into larger lots as well as take advantage of the “factories” owned by the society. These coffee factories are central locations where coffee is processed and combined into larger lots. In Kenya, most coffee is still separated into lots based on the size of the beans. Bean size means nothing when it comes to quality, but one nice thing for roasters is that having a lot of coffee that is all consistently sized is that it will probably roast a little more evenly. In the Kenyan system, the largest size is AA, followed by AB, and so on. One of the Kenyan sizes is “PB” or “peaberry,” and that’s what this selection from Manzanita is. Peaberries are a mutation in which only one seed, instead of the usual two, is found inside the coffee cherry. For a long time people mistakenly said that because only one seed was getting all the nutrition from that cherry, that the peaberry tasted sweeter and better in every way, but this is not really true. Peaberries tend to be pretty small and instead of having that characteristic dome on one side, flat on one side coffee bean shape, they are round or more American football-shaped. They’re cute as hell! Normal coffee beans get that shape from having two of them inside the coffee cherry, so as they grow, the sides of the seeds (beans) that are pressed up against each other become flat.
So, this coffee is a mix of some of the classic Kenyan varieties of SL-28, SL-34, Ruiru 11 and Batian. This is a washed coffee and the growing altitude is in the range of 1400-1600 meters above sea level. This coffee was grown and processed by the Kirurumwe or Kevote or Kibuti (all the same thing, apparently) Farmers Cooperative Society, which is located in Embu County. Manzanita says this coffee has “baking spices and creamy cranberry” notes and works well as a 1:2 ratio espresso. They have it on offer for $16/12oz, which is a pretty standard price for Kenyan coffee.
For the equipment dorks, I used my Gaggia Classic, which I have “blind tuned” to about 9 bars of pressure. It has been modded with an aftermarket naked portafilter, brass shower screen holder and an IMS precision shower screen. I replaced the stock gasket with a silicone one, too. I’m using a Decent Espresso 20g precision basket and their V1 tamper, which is matched to perfectly fit the 58.4mm diameter of the basket and is also calibrated to a 25lb tamping weight. I use a BPlus WDT tool to stir the grounds in the portafilter and a knockoff OCD-style grooming tool to flatten the surface out before tamping. My grinder is an Orphan Espresso Pharos that I modded to the 2.0 version.
It took me three shots to get dialed in. I was previously drinking the wonderful Messenger Coffee. Co.’s “espresso” (I think this is what they used to call the Modern Italian) and when I switch to a new ‘spro I always let it ride and hope that the new coffee will work with the current Pharos settings. No such luck, I had an overflowing macchiato demitasse in about 15 seconds. The Pharos is a stepless grinder and I adjusted it about 80 degrees tighter. This shot was 19g of coffee in and in 32 seconds I only got 17.4g out. I opened the grind up about 30 degrees back and got a nice 19g in, 42.3g out in 30 seconds, so it’s well in the ballpark. I got a nice, even flow watching the bottom of the naked portafilter and no spitters, so it didn’t look like I had any channeling.
This shot was great! Kenyan coffee can be tricky for espresso, in my experience, especially as a single origin where the roaster has not used anything to balance it out in the blend. A SO Kenyan espresso can be white hot and searingly intense, so it’s another testament to Manzanita’s roasting skill and quality control that this Kevote is so nicely behaved. This shot has a nice, luscious crema as you can probably see in the photo. Taking my first sip, cranberry is for sure the first note I get. It’s bright, for sure, but not out of balance and not obnoxiously so. There is a good amount of bittersweet or dark chocolate in the cup for me, too. This is a thick, syrupy espresso that is intense, but in a balanced way. It isn’t too bright, but it is definitely a kick to the palate in all the right ways! In addition to cranberry I was getting a bit of a tart cherry vibe from this espresso. If I waited about a minute between sips I had a pleasant, creamy, dairy-like aftertaste on my palate that I very much enjoyed.
I don’t do much milk, so this review is purely about Manzanita’s Kevote Espresso in its unadulterated form. It’s delicious and if you’re a home espresso-head that worries about the intensity and frequent out-of-balanceness that you can get from Kenyan SOE’s, do not worry about it with this one. Instabuy!
