Good morning and welcome to today’s review, checking out Lord Windsor Coffee for the first time with one of their Ethiopian offerings! Slurp…
Purchase this coffee directly for $11/6oz or $22/12oz
LORD WINDSOR COFFEE ETHIOPIA GUJI QIRTIRA GOYO
Last month I made it to Long Beach, California for a work trip and got up one cool morning to make the 20-minute walk over to Lord Windsor Coffee. I had “heard of” Lord Windsor and had followed them on Instagram for a long time, but really didn’t know much about them other than they have a good reputation. The cafe was medium-sized and quite open, and I was really the first person in there. The espresso was good and I left with two 6oz bags of coffee, including this morning’s Ethiopian. Their website is super-sparse in both the “about” section as well as containing any info about their coffees, so I had to do some independent research on this one! I learned that Lord Windsor Coffee was started by Wade and Lindsay Windsor in Long Beach in 2012 and has a quality over quantity ethos. According to an article about their wonderful packaging on Sprudge, Lord Windsor intentionally doesn’t put much info on their bags in an effort to spur conversation between customers and staff.
This morning’s coffee is a presumably washed coffee from Qirtira Goyo in Guji. Qirtira Goyo is a village in the Hambela Wamena Zone and coffee grows around 1900-2200masl there. Lord Windsor gives us tasting notes on the label of, “raspberry, tangerine, wildflower honey.” I used my usual pourover setup 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 Knock Aergrind is set between 8-9 and this coffee got a 30 second bloom and ran really slow at 5:30, which is about 2 minutes longer than the average coffee I brew this way, but it tasted fantastic still! I pulse pour my pourovers through a Melodrip to keep coffee bed agitation to a minimum.
The aroma from this coffee as it brewed was beautifully floral with a lot of jasmine and citrus notes. Taking a sip, this is a medium-bodied coffee and the florals and citrus are every bit as evident in the flavor as they were in the aroma. The first flavor to hit my tongue is that jasmine and it sticks with this coffee all the way into the finish and aftertaste. This is easily the most floral coffee I’ve tasted in a long time! Right behind that wall of jasmine I’m getting tangerine. Raspberry is definitely in here, too, but it’s quite subtle compared to the intense floral and citrus notes. The tangerine is sweet and juicy, not sharp-edged like some citrus notes can be. There’s a honey-like sweetness to the base of this coffee. Throughout each sip I’m getting a little hint of coriander, too. This coffee finishes slightly sweet and leaves a coating of tangerine and jasmine on my tongue that lasts as long as I can manage to wait between sips.
This coffee is freakin’ good! It’s so fresh-tasting and light, yet the flavors are intense and super well-defined. Even though florals and tangerine are the big players in this cup, it remains balanced and juicy at the same time and I just LOVE this coffee! A must-buy purchase, if you ask me! As a side note, my bag was roasted 7/3, I bought it about 2 weeks off-roast and made my initial notes, and I just brewed up one last cup this morning on 8/27 and it’s every bit as good in its flavors, which I know will make some people crazy! LOL What a coffee!