On this day of reflective Memorial Day here in the USA, let’s take a look at a coffee that is as American as, well, America! Drink up!
Purchase this coffee for $19/lb
Article about the Arbuckles from Fee.org
Cowboy Coffee article from True West
ARBUCKLE’S ARIOSA COFFEE
Arbuckle’s Coffee is a coffee/tea/other stuff brand based in Tucson, Arizona and they market Arbuckle’s Ariosa Coffee as “the coffee that won the West.” According to their website, until about the 1860’s in the USA, most coffee was sold green and it was up to people on the frontier to roast it themselves in a pan over a campfire before they could drink it. In 1865, Charles and John Arbuckle, who were Pittsburgh grocers, patented a process for roasting coffee and then coating the beans in an egg and sugar glaze to seal in the flavor and aroma. Me being the history nerd I am, I did some Google Patent searching and couldn’t come up with this one, but I did find one patent for John Arbuckle for a coffee roaster that he filed in 1897 and was granted in 1903. In any case, the Arbuckle’s started packing their Ariosa Coffee (pronounced as Western as you can, “Air-ee-Oh-sa”) in one pound packages that were airtight and they were an immediate hit with the chuck wagon cooks ranging the frontier. Arbuckle’s grew to be the biggest coffee brand in the country for decades and the original company broke up by the 1930’s or so and was also associated with a brand of coffee called Yuban.
The Arbuckle’s used the back of their coffee bags for coupons for all sorts of other goods from handkerchiefs to wedding rings, and they also included a peppermint candy stick in every bag, which was apparently used to grind the coffee every morning. The modern Arbuckle’s brand still includes a peppermint stick made from organic beet juice in every Ariosa Coffee bag, but rest assured it is wrapped in plastic and does not impart any minty flavors to the coffee beans inside! And, appararently, the sugar and egg coating is no longer needed, either!
Arbuckle’s calls this coffee a “medium” roast of Central American coffees and says this blend has, “balanced acidity with a faint note of smokiness and a subtle chocolate finish.” This is where we are going to disagree some as the beans in my bag of Ariosa are easily into the “dark” range for me… they’re heavily coated in oil, so they made it well into second crack during roasting. Of course, terms like light, medium and dark are open to interpretation when it comes to coffee roasting, but as a specialty/”third wave” coffee guy, this is dark, no two ways about it. When ground, it looks like crushed Oreo’s. This Ariosa Coffee is in the “dark” to “French” roast range for me.
No matter, I can enjoy a dark roast with the best of them! I am using my standard pourover method of 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 as soft as this coffee is, I had trouble getting it to come in under a 4:00 total drip time even going pretty coarse.
As with all dark roasts, the amount of “origin character” in this coffee is minimal. As coffee is roasted, more and more sugar development occurs and the flavors move away from those that make the particular coffee unique toward being about the roast and sugars themselves. It’s like cooking a steak, to use an analogy. You could buy the best piece of meat available on the market, but if you leave it on the grill for long enough none of those characteristics will really shine. That being said, people, particularly Americans, seem to really enjoy the flavors of dark roasts when it comes to coffee, so just because the acidity and other unique characteristics are knocked down by heavy roasting doesn’t mean it’s all bad.
The aroma on this coffee is dark and roasty with hints of carbon. Taking a sip, this is a medium-heavy coffee as darker roasted coffees often are, and there is a lot of the same in the flavors. I would say there is little to no fruitiness or acidity to this cup. There are darkly caramelized to almost-burned sugars and lots of smoky roast notes dominating this coffee, which is typical for dark roasts, too. If I swish the coffee around in my mouth a bit and really dig, I do get some nutty notes in the background. There’s a bit of dark roasted peanuts in there as an accent. This coffee finishes a little on the dry side on my palate and has a smoky aftertaste carrying it into the next sip.
Overall, this isn’t a bad coffee by any stretch, as far as dark roasts go. I was a little skeptical of all the marketing around the Ariosa name and the Arbuckle’s brand, but as I learned about the Arbuckle’s, I enjoyed the story and the branding is, well, branding, but it’s not too crazy. The history of the Arbuckles is interesting and I’m a big fan of American history from the late 1800’s-early 1900’s, so these stories were right in my wheelhouse. Like most people who were successful during that time, the Arbuckles were hustlers, creating opportunities wherever they could find them, and that’s something we can all appreciate today, too! A tasty dark roast coffee is not the easiest thing in the world to produce, and Arbuckle’s has carried this tradition (minus the eggs and sugar!) along today.
