We’ve made it to the second half of the week! Smooth sailing from here on out, especially with coffees like this natural geisha from Loyal Coffee! Slurp…
Sprudge Build Outs of Summer article
Colorado Springs Independent article
LOYAL COFFEE COLOMBIA LA RIVERA
Just like the best sandwiches are always the ones someone else makes for you, the best coffee always comes as a thoughtful gift. In the last year, the university I work with formed an Alliance club, run by students, that promotes a healthy, safe, environment for people of all races, genders, sexualities, etc. I have been working closely with them on some projects, one of which took the better part of a year to see come to fruition, and the club hooked me up with a bag of this coffee from Loyal. One of the club officers is from Colorado, and I’ve seen Loyal stickers on her computer, water bottles, etc, so maybe she’s from Colorado Springs, where Loyal is located. Anyway, to have students do this is really thoughtful and I think it makes the coffee taste even better! Loyal Coffee opened in Colorado Springs in 2016 as a partnership between six baristas who wanted to put as much emphasis on community as coffee (and cocktails and food, which they also serve). I’ve linked a bunch of articles above if you want to dig deeper into the Loyal Coffee story.
The coffee my students bought is a small bag (probably 4 oz) of Loyal’s Colombia La Rivera. I tried really hard to dig up info on this coffee and I couldn’t find a mention of it on Loyal’s Instagram, and they’ve surely sold out of it so it’s not listed on their website anymore. I’ve also noticed in the last year, maybe, that Google doesn’t seem to find archived pages very well anymore, so I didn’t get lucky with an archived listing for this coffee. Shucks! Some more deep diving led me to a few random listings for a Finca La Rivera from Colombia, but one was a short post from a Hong Kong based roaster and the other a listing from Seoul, Korea, that was mostly in Korean, and you know how well Google Translate can often work! LOL Coffee Graffiti, in Seoul, though, does have enough of their listing in English that, if this is the same Finca La Rivera, tells me that the farm is in the Santa Rosa area of Colombia and grows geisha around 1750masl. This particular listing was for a white honey process geisha, which fits the theme of this Loyal offering being a natural. The great majority of coffee in Colombia is washed, so farms that will do honeys and naturals tend to specialize in those things.
Loyal’s bag suggests flavors of “green grape, strawberry, fruit punch, floral.” The two cups I’ve had so far have been quite different. This morning’s cup I made using my current grind settings on my Knock Aergrind and it came in fast at 2:45 total, with a 35 second bloom. The first cup I made, which I think was a better cup, had a tighter grind and a lot of coffees were taking 3:30-4:00 to brew. Either way, I used the same setup of a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin dripper with a Kalita 155 filter and I do pulse pours through a Melodrip.
It has been about a week since my first cup of this coffee, so I’ll focus on what I taste with this one, although the other one had grape sweetness, huge, silky body, a lot of watermelon notes. It was awesome, not that this morning’s cup isn’t, too. The aroma has some light florals with a nice caramel sweetness note, for me. The dry fragrance on the beans in the grinder certainly betrays that these are natural process, with lots of strawberry notes. There is definitely a subtle grape soda note throughout the sip that I find more pronounced in the finish and aftertaste. I drink a fair amount of Zevia Grape pop and so I’m a bit of an expert! LOL There is a little bit of strawberry in the early sip that builds in the mid sip. It’s fresh and cool tasting and delicious. I’m not getting the crazy amounts of watermelon from this cup that I did from the longer brew time cup I made last week, but in this morning’s coffee I’m getting a bit of watermelon and especially more watermelon rind, which has a little bit of an astringency with it that gives this coffee a slightly dry finish and mouthfeel. That fruit punch descriptor from the bag isn’t something I would’ve pulled out myself, but with that in mind I’m tasting that Hi-C canned fruit punch that was ubiquitous when I was a kid all over this coffee now! I haven’t tasted that stuff in 20+ years, but here it is! This is a really interesting coffee with a lot of complexity that is fun to drink. Loyal is sold out of it, apparently, but the three coffees I’ve had from them have all been great, so I wouldn’t hesitate to pick up any of their current offerings and give them a shot!