It’s Monday! Let’s drink espresso! Slurp!
Cacophony Coffee Roasters website
Cacophony Coffee Roasters Instagram
CACOPHONY COFFEE ROASTERS EXPERIMENTAL ESPRESSO
I was perusing Instagram the other day and ran into another new coffee roaster based here in Kansas City (SO many, and this is a good thing!). After a quick introduction, a day or two later I had a few bags of coffee sitting on my doorstep, delivered by roaster/owner, Thad Carson, by bike as he made his rounds. Unfortunately, we haven’t gotten to meet in person yet to have a chat, but what I can tell you is that Cacophony Coffee Roasters is a home-based micro-roasting operation that Thad started in 2018, and it looks like toward the end of the year based on his Instragram start date. There is a website for Cacophony but it’s mostly just a placeholder right now. I would contact Thad directly on his Instagram to ask about ordering, shipping, etc, and locals can find his coffee at Onestar Bicycles and Mansion Coffee. I think I remember seeing that Velo+ started stocking his coffee, too.
Thad is an avid cyclist and is tied in tightly to that community here in Kansas City, and he appears to also have a little camper that he does pop-ups out of all over town, generating enough of a following to blow through 35lbs of coffee in samples to interested people. One of the coffees Thad dropped off for me to try is simply labeled, “experimental espresso” and I have no idea what’s in the blend or what the experiment is, however, if I connect some dots from Cacophony’s IG it looks like Thad has been playing with some darker roasting profiles for his espressos and perhaps that’s the experiment he’s running. I did find a post from two weeks ago that says, “experimental espresso blend no. 2 came out quite good: 1 oz ristretto pull had flavors of sweet fig and cherry dark chocolate with a roasted almond finish” and that sounds an awful lot like the bag of coffee I’ve been enjoying, so that must be it. That being said, I don’t know the composition of the blend and I don’t want to delay posting my review, so I’ll just jump straight into it!
I pulled ristretto-style shots, just like Thad recommended, using 19g doses and hitting 20-22g or so in the 27-30 second range with each shot. A ristretto is essentially a “restrained” shot, or ground finer to provide even more resistance to the water such that your goal is to end up with about a 1:1 ratio of espresso, so about as much liquid in the cup as coffee grounds being used. A normale shot runs closer to 1:2, so if you start with 19g of coffee you’d be looking for an output of 38-40g in the cup when all is said and done. Ristrettos can be tough to pull but I had very little trouble dialing this coffee in and getting it to taste super good, and it behaved really nicely, too! This bag of espresso from Cacophony did not take long for me to work through and it was my daily drinker for a week and a half every morning.
A word on equipment… I’m using a Gaggia Classic that I’ve tuned to 9 bars of pressure. I’ve done some light modifications including replacing the aluminum shower screen holder with a brass one, the stock shower screen with a precision IMS screen, silicone portafilter gasket instead of the stock rubber one and I use an aftermarket bottomless portafilter with a 20g precision basket from Decent Espresso. I use their matched 58.4mm diameter precision tamper that is also calibrated to a 25lb tamping weight. My grinder is an Orphan Espresso Pharos that I upgraded to the 2.0 version. As far as process goes, I pulled all these shots the same way. After dosing the portafilter with 19.0g of coffee I did a “WDT” stir with a tool I bought from BPlus Coffee to break up any clumps and distribute everything nicely, then I groomed the puck with an OCD-style knockoff tool from Amazon. Tamped next, and finally, I’ve been using an idea that has been making the rounds recently, thanks to Scott Rao, and putting a dry Aeropress filter on top of the tamped coffee to help reduce channeling, and this seems to work great for the most part.
Super nerdy, I know, but this is KC Coffee Geek, so hopefully you aren’t surprised!
My ‘spros were a lot like Thad described in his Instagram post. Being ristretto pulls, I expected heavy, syrupy espresso with a big mouthfeel and that’s exactly what I got. The flavors lean more toward chocolate and darker notes, definitely not fruity, although I did get nice undertones of tart Michigan cherries and a pleasant lemony acidity in some shots that gave nice balance. The chocolate notes were where semisweet, Dutch process cocoa and dark single origin chocolate would meet on a Venn diagram and it was complex and a little dry and I enjoyed that. I don’t know if I could place “fig” myself, per se, but there was a sweet, dark dried fruitiness to every cup that certainly qualified as such, in retrospect. Soooo much of the espresso that I drink is the bright, “modern,” “West coast style,” “third wave” type that you pull with a long ratio (19g in, sometimes 40-45g out) and in the cup is bright, fruity, acid-forward and in many cases, borderline bracing, which I do enjoy, so this darker, super concentrated, thick made-for-ristretto espresso from Cacophony was a fun departure that tasted awesome and had a nice balance between the traditional Roman espresso I grew up on without any of the problems inherent to Italian mass market ‘spro.
As far as this experiment went for Cacophony, I would call it a total win and and I would not be upset if this was Cacophony’s flagship espresso offering because I would be happy to be able to get ahold of this anytime I need it!