The Tour de France may be over, but that won’t keep us coffee drinking cyclists from putting our two loves together! Perhaps nobody does this to a greater degree than Broom Wagon Coffee, who is July’s featured MyCoffeePub subscription roaster. Let’s check out a fresh Brazilian from them!
Purchase this coffee directly for $16/12oz
MYCOFFEEPUB JULY 2019: BROOM WAGON COFFEE BRAZIL, CHAPADA DE MINAS, PRIMAVERA
MyCoffeePub is a monthly coffee subscription that I’ve been participating in for years now. Around the third week of every month, an unannounced package arrives on my doorstep and I get the fun of opening it up and seeing what coffee MCP sent me. I love the surprise and in several years of working with MyCoffeePub, they’ve never sent me a bad coffee. In fact, their picks are often quite different from what I would gravitate toward from the same roaster if I was choosing a coffee for myself, so I like that I get to try coffees I sometimes normally wouldn’t. They pick from really well known roasters like PT’s, who were featured in June, and smaller or less well known roasters like Broom Wagon Coffee this month.
I’ve reviewed 3-4 other Broom Wagon coffees over the last couple years and I always enjoy what they put out. Broom Wagon Coffee started as a roasting operation in Charleston, South Carolina by Jeremias Paul and his wife, Rachel, and I noticed they now have a cafe location in Charleston, too! Broom Wagon is named after a cycling tradition where the “broom wagon” would pick up riders who had been dropped off the back and who had cracked, “sweeping up” any stragglers and making sure they made it to the finish line. The cycling tie-in doesn’t stop there, either! Broom Wagon has great bags, most of which are designed around the colorful cycling jerseys of professional bicyling. For example, this morning’s green bag is a call out to the Tour de France’s green jersey, which is worn by the points leader (usually a talented sprinter) during that race. During the Tour, there is a secondary points competition where riders are awarded points for high finishes in a stage and during intermediate sprints during each stage. The points leader wears a green jersey, while the race’s overall leader is in yellow. The green jersey is more or less a sprinter’s competition and it adds a lot of excitement to the race as top sprinters hurl themselves at 40+ MPH toward the finish line to grab those points.
The current Broom Wagon coffee wearing the green jersey bag is a Brazialian coffee from Fazenda Primavera. Primavera is owned by Ricardo Tavares and is located in Minas Gerais with elevations between 1000-1050 masl. Ricardo has labored to make his farm an example of the best specialty coffee production in Brazil and it’s apparently a sight to see. Ally Coffee, an importer of specialty coffees in the USA, has a great write up on Ricardo and his farm here. This particular coffee is Yellow Catuai variety that is a pulped natural, often referred to as a “honey” coffee. Pulped naturals are coffees that are picked and sorted, then the cherries are ruptured and most of the skins and goopy pulp inside the fruit are removed. Unlike a washed coffee, where all of this pulp is removed, or a natural where the cherries are dried intact with the coffee beans still inside, pulped naturals are an “in between” where the coffee beans are dried with some amount of pulp and mucilage still clinging to them. This creates a clean coffee like a washed process, but imparts more fruity notes like a natural. Broom Wagon gives us flavor notes of, “orange, chocolate, caramel” for this coffee.
I’m 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 a Kalita 155 filter. My grinder is a Knock Aergrind and I pulse pour through a Melodrip to minimize agitation of the coffee bed during brewing. I used a 30 second bloom on this coffee and it brewed fast, coming in at 2:45 total, including the bloom.
Taking a sip, this is coffee is on the heavier side of medium and it has a nice, silky mouthfeel. This is definitely a coffee worth letting cool down. The more it cools for me, the more it opens up, and I’m really enjoying it at a lukewarm temperature that is only slightly warm on my palate. In the sip there’s a caramel sweetness to the base that also reappears in the finish and aftertaste. Mid-sip I am getting a hint of orange that balances the caramel sweetness out nicely and adds some high notes. In the second half of the sip I get a bit of an orange juice vibe from this coffee, more fresh squeezed than the concentrate variety from the grocery store. The orange notes don’t hit me over the head in this cup, but I’m fine with that. In the first half of the sip the orange has a bit of an orange-and-chocolate character to it, and I get a little cocoa bitterness in the second half of the sip that I think works great in the context of this cup and adds another layer of dimension to the flavors. This is a nice, easy drinking, easy to enjoy coffee that would work great with sweeteners or dairy if that’s your jam. Brazilian coffees aren’t known to be the most complex because of fair weather and relatively low growing altitudes, but it’s coffees like this that remind me why they are so popular… this Primavera from Broom Wagon is delicious, familiar and inviting, so there’s nothing unlikeable in it for me! And, as always, if I was picking a Broom Wagon coffee for myself, I probably would’ve gravitated toward either their natural or washed Ethiopians right now, so I love that MyCoffeePub sent me this Brazilian, which I would’ve missed if I’d been left to my own devices.