MyCoffeePub’s May subsrcription dropped about a week ago and it’s Tinker Coffee Co.’s current selection from Rwanda, so let’s check this coffee out!
Purchase this coffee directly for $14/12oz or $5/4oz or $93/5lbs
MYCOFFEEPUB MAY 2019: TINKER COFFEE CO. RWANDA DUKUNDE KAWA
Tinker Coffee Co. was co-founded in 2014 by Jeff Johnson and Stephen Hall and the company was on the forefront of the specialty coffee movement in Indianapolis when they got their start. It has been a couple years since I’ve gotten to enjoy anything from Tinker, although I’ve reviewed about 10 of their coffees over the years, so I was happy to see them back in the mix with this month’s MyCoffeePub subscription drop. MyCoffeePub is great. Sign up, receive a bag of coffee every month, and as an added bonus, it’s a surprise! No surveys to fill out, no worrying about whether you’re locking yourself into “chocolatey” profiles or what you’re going to do if “fruity” isn’t quite doing it for you and you want to change it up… With MyCoffeePub, you get what you get and their team does a fantastic job of selecting really good coffees. I’ve been collaborating with MCP for well over three years now, at least, and I haven’t had one coffee in my subscription that I didn’t enjoy.
As I headed over to Tinker’s website to get the details on this month’s selection, their Dukunde Kawa from Rwanda, I noticed they have finally outgrown their original roasting spot in Indianapolis and will be completing a big move and build out to a new space that has 10,000 square feet and will feature their new roaster, a big Loring! My first taste of Tinker coffee was back in May 2015, so I got my hands on some of their pretty early coffee, so I love seeing their growth!
Now, on to the coffee… this morning’s coffee is from the Musasa region of Rwanda, which is a small part of the country that’s smack dab in the middle of Rwanda. Dukunde Kawa is the producer of this coffee and like a lot of other African countries, the model in Rwanda is that smallholder farmers work together in cooperatives, pooling their harvests into larger lots. Dukunde Kawa started in 2003 with 300 growers and is over 2000 strong now, with 80% or more of their membership being women. This particular lot of coffee that Tinker is offering is one of Dukunde Kawa’s coffees that is 100% grown by women farmers, which is cool to see.The co-op won a sustainability award from the Specialty Coffee Association of America in 2012. This coffee is a Bourbon variety grown over 2000 meters above sea level and it’s a washed coffee. Tinker gives us tasting notes that sound awesome, “Like a classic root beer, this lot showcases deep complexity and sweetness reminiscent of sarsaparilla and cinnamon sugar. We also tasted notes of melon and jasmine in the cup, making this coffee versatile enough for batch brewing and pourovers alike.”
I’m using my standard pourover setup for this coffee, which is a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin dripper with a Kalita 155 filter. I’m using a Knock Aergrind and I also pour through a Melodrip to control my pulse pouring. I did a 30 second bloom and then this coffee brewed at just under 3:00 total including the bloom.
I’m getting a lot of marshmallow from the aroma, like sticking my head in a bag of marshmallows and breathing deep (although I’ve never done that, I imagine this is what I’d smell! LOL). Taking a sip, they weren’t kidding about the root beer! Of course, when it comes to flavors and suggestion, the mind is extremely convinceable, so I don’t know if I would’ve pulled this flavor as root beer on my own, but holy smokes, as I taste it now while writing it’s extremely apparent! Backing up a bit, this is a medium-bodied coffee with a creamy texture on my palate. Root beer is all over each sip, giving a really sweet base to this cup. I mean, this really tastes like root beer that was left out for a while and lost its carbonation. It’s crazy! In the aftertaste, there is still a ton of root beer and a lot of cinnamon undertones with it, too. Along with gobs of root beer, I’m picking up a little floral undertone in the mid sip and there is some nice, gentle, brightness to the cup that I definitely can agree with Tinker’s “melon” call out for. This bright note is clean and clear and crisp and cool, but it’s not apple. It almost has a citrus-like component to it, but it falls short of citrus. I get a hint of honeydew melon along with it, so I like that as a descriptor. This coffee finishes sweet with a ton of root beer and LOTS of cinnamon in the aftertaste. We drink a lot of Zevia root beer here at World Domination Headquarters and I’m getting a lot of those same flavors in this aftertaste. In the long aftertaste I get a bit of dryness on my tongue between sips.
This is a great coffee and what an awesome choice from the MyCoffeePub folks! The flavors in this coffee are quite unique, at least to me. I can’t say I’ve ever tasted root beer notes like this in coffee before. This is quite complex, but the flavors are really familiar and so the drinkability remains high, for me. Especially as my cup cooled off, I found myself taking big, frequent sips, so this is a bit of a chugger for me! Totally unique as coffee goes with familiar, pleasant, flavors… a totally killer coffee and is it any wonder that Tinker is in the midst of a huge expansion when they select and roast coffees like this Dukunde Kawa from Rwanda?
Side note: I started this coffee off as espresso, as I wanted to get into the bag and I had just finished up my bag of Cacophany’s Experimental Espresso that I reviewed yesterday, so I figured I’d give it a rip. It’s not bad, but it’s a totally different animal as espresso. I’ve been pulling pretty long shots, starting with 19g in the portafilter and getting 40-42g of cofee in the cup at around 27 seconds. I could play with it more, but with this coffee being sooooo good as a pourover, I don’t see the sense. It’s a lot brighter as espresso and there is a lot of lemony sweetness in the cup, but it’s borderline bracing and I wasn’t pulling any of this root beer goodness out of it. The folks at Tinker commented on my Instagram photo of my espresso pull with this coffee saying it’s a challenging coffee as espresso, so stick with pourovers on this one and you will be very happy!