S&W Craft Roasting Colombia Finca Los Pedregales Organic

It has been a while since I’ve been able to share S&W Craft Roasting coffee with you, one of my all-time favorite roasters, so without further ado, let’s dive into this organic coffee from Colombia!

S&W Craft Roasting

Purchase this coffee directly for $15.65/lb

Great article about Elver Paya and Finca Los Pedregales

S&W CRAFT ROASTING COLOMBIA FINCA LOS PEDREGALES ORGANIC

One wouldn’t think the small town of 523 people of Coatesville, Indiana, about an hour west of Indianapolis, is where you’d find some of the most dedicated coffee roasters around, but as I continue writing KC Coffee Geek, I am constantly reminded that geography, proximity to big cities, etc, means nothing when it comes to coffee sourcing and roasting here in the USA. For years, Nick and Charlie from S&W Craft Roasting in tiny Coatesville, IN have been sending me awesome coffee and I think their brand, more than any I’ve run into, really embodies the old “Midwest modesty” adage! S&W’s website is far from fancy, and their black bags with a gold branding sticker and label stating some details about the coffee would be best described as “functional.” All that said, though, S&W is one of those brands that puts everything into their coffee, and I can really appreciate that. Sometimes when I see a really high-dollar coffee and it is being shipped in packaging that probably cost $5-$10 to have made, it makes me wish I could forego the fancy presentation and just get what I paid for in coffee instead of packaging and marketing! I understand that side of the business and I’m a sucker for nice packaging myself, but whenever I’ve turned people on to S&W Craft Roasting over the years I hear two comments back, every time: 1) I can’t believe their prices and 2) Man, you were right, their coffee is awesome!

I got a nice email from Nick when he sent this coffee, too, and they’ve been up to some big improvements around the S&W world headquarters in Coatesville. They picked up an optical bean sorter, which saves them the time of hand sorting through every lot of coffee they receive, a major time saver (not to mention headache and neck ache reliever!). Nick bought some land with a barn and they are moving the roasting operation into this new expanded space. They picked up a destoner and weigh/fill machine to speed up processes, too, and that may allow them to hire some local folks to help out instead of doing absolutely everything themselves. I don’t know if they’ve started using their new machine yet, but they are picking up a new Coffeed roasted from Poland, too, which is basically like an old school Probat UG, but with all the new features that make it plug and play with software controls and spares them the time of retrofitting 60 year old machines with new tech. All of this is super exciting and it’s always great to see my favorite roasters growing over the years!

Oh, shoot, we need to talk about coffee still! This morning’s coffee from S&W is their Los Pedregales, an organic Colombian. I didn’t realize this until Nick told me, but this is the first Colombian coffee they’ve liked enough to offer to their customers, so here is the inaugural Colombian selection from these seasoned roasters! S&W says this is, “an exceptionally clean, very bright, round-bodied coffee with floral, citrus and red grape tones, malic and tartaric acidity, and a crisp finish.” This is a medium-light “city” roast level. Finca Los Pedregales is a 10 hectare farm owned by Elver Paya outside of Gaitania in the department (like a state here in the USA) of Tolima, east of Cali. This is a washed coffee lot consisting of Caturra, Colombia and the new-to-me F8 varietals that get a 24 hour dry fermentation following by washing. Coffee grows around 1800masl at Los Pedregales. It’s a certified organic farm with lots of native hardwood shade and about 4 hectares is natural growth forest. Elver grew up farming in this remote part of Colombia that is still very tied to the land and environment through the indigenous practices of the people living there. In fact, he inherited his family’s 5 hectare farm and married the literal girl next door, whose family had their own 5 hectares, and that’s how Los Pedregales grew to its current size!

I’m using my standard pourover method for this coffee, 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 for grinding duties and a Melodrip to control my pulse pours as much as possible. With a 30 second bloom, this coffee was coming in at a total drip time of 3:35.

Taking a sip, I am greeted by a beautiful coffee with a medium body and a silky mouthfeel. There is light caramel sweetness right up front that is quickly washed over by a tropical fruitiness that is bright, but sweet in its own right. I’m finding this to be a tough coffee to drink slowly and think about because that juiciness to the fruit component of this coffee really just has me wanting to gulp each sip down faster and faster. Trying to parse the fruits out some more, I am getting a distinct peach and apricot note (which I know aren’t “tropical” but they are there)… the peach a sweet brightness that is always hard to describe but is unmistakeably, well, peachy… and then this blends into something similar with a little bit more brightness and slight tartness to it, which I always associate with apricot. If I hold each sip in my mouth for a few seconds I get this nice “attack” of acidity around my cheeks and sides of my tongue and this is the “juiciness” I associate with this coffee that wants me to take bigger and bigger gulps. This part of the sip is where the “tropical” comes into it for me. It’s sweet, but slightly tart and acidic and that speaks “pineapple” to me. The actual flavor of pineapple isn’t super strong in this coffee, but that feeling of eating pineapple is here in spades. This coffee finishes slightly sweet on my palate but does leave just a bit of dryness on my tongue between sips. If I can make myself wait longer between sips there is something slightly herbal and spicy happening, too, just adding a little more to the complexity of this cup.

This is a delicious coffee! It’s sweet and tart and complex, but also very easy drinking. Nick and Charlie have really done a great job pulling a lot of interesting flavors out of this coffee and it’s an easy drinker. The fruitiness and the caramel base are nicely balanced and as a big fan of Colombian coffee, this one is awesome! At S&W’s famously low prices for coffee, it’s a steal, and a pound of this won’t last you very long, so get after it before it’s gone!