Good morning and welcome to today’s review… I’m trying Bespoken Coffee Roasters for the first time with their Octavio Herrera from Guatemala. Let’s check it out!
Purchase this coffee directly for $18/12oz
A Short Interview with Collin Schneider
Daily Coffee News article about Bespoken and Tried & True
BESPOKEN COFFEE ROASTERS GUATEMALA OCTAVIO HERRERA
Instagram remains one of my favorite ways to discover new roasters (although the algorithm changes from a couple years ago are still a major bummer) and that’s exactly how I found Bespoken Coffee Roasters. After following them for a long time on the ‘gram I reached out recently and was rewarded with a few of their current offerings. In this morning’s darkness I randomly pulled the first bag out my hand touched and it’s this Guatemalan coffee, Octavio Herrera. Bespoken Coffee Roasters was started by Collin and Ann Schneider around 2014, who later went on to open Tried & True Coffee Company, a cafe, with some partners (hence, the companies are separate “sister companies” but still more or less owned by the same folks). Bespoken and Tried & True are both located in Corvallis, Oregon, home of Oregon State University, and T&T has grown to two locations there now. The second cafe also serves as the roasting facility for Bespoken. Straight from their website:
Tailors employ patience, precision and skill to perfectly fit a garment to their client. We believe coffee deserves the same attention. By accepting that each coffee is inherently unique, we can focus on the characteristics that make it so.
The result:
Tailor-made coffee, expressly for you.Love, BCR
I’ve linked above to a couple articles I was able to find, one from Daily Coffee News and the other from Lionheart Coffee, where Bespoken was guest roaster for a time, so check those out to learn more about Bespoken, Tried & True, and what makes these businesses tick. In an effort to bury fewer leads, let’s jump into this morning’s coffee!
Today’s coffee is grown by the Herrera family at Finca La Esperanza in the Huehuetenango department of Guatemala. The Herreras own several farms in Huehue and this lot is a separation of their Caturra harvest from the other varieties they grow. This same coffee is also being used as the Latin American component of Bespoken’s Forecast blend. As expected from Guatemala, this is a washed coffee and it grows around 1650masl. Bespoken says, “It’s bright and citrusy while still being incredibly sweet. It’s an incredibly versatile coffee that we love on both espresso and filter.” My sample was 4oz of this coffee, so rather than risking losing a bunch to the dialing-in process for espresso, I enjoyed this coffee strictly through a filter.
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. Grinder is Knock Aergrind and I do pulse pours through a Melodrip to minimize agitation during brewing. This coffee is nice and fresh and had a lot of blooming to do, which I let go for about 45 seconds. Total brew time with that bloom came in at 3:00.
Bespoken gives us tasting notes on their website of, “Creamy and candy sweet with cherry, blackberry, citrus and milk chocolate.” Sounds awesome! The aroma from the brewer/serving vessel, after it has cooled a bit, has a lot of cherry in it, something I don’t usually get in the aroma as much as the flavor when I’m sipping. Taking my first sip from a cooled-down cup (the best way to taste those nuances is to let your coffee cool down quite a lot… hot coffee shuts down your flavor perception), I’m getting a lot of complexity with cherry, citrus and milk chocolate notes that I can’t wait to investigate further. This is a really balanced coffee and I’m getting a lot of chocolate throughout the sip. In the front of the sip I’m getting some tart cherry and semi-sweet chocolate that has just a hint of bitterness to add balance and dimension and that also keeps this coffee from being too cloyingly sweet. In the mid sip I get a big wash of citrus that hits me somewhere between orange and tangerine as far as flavor, perception of acidity or sharpness, and sweetness. That citrus is really juicy, which to me, means it really hits the sides of my tongue and cheeks and seems to feel “wet” and cause salivation. Juicy coffees tend to be gulpers for me and I always have to restrain myself from just chugging them down. Juicy coffees also seem to come with that physical sensation of wetness/salivation that I think encourages more and more sips, so we can kiss the rest of this 4 oz of beans I have left goodbye! LOL
This is a medium bodied coffee, for me, and has a bit of a dairy/creamy mouthfeel that is slightly slick, too. The orange-tangerine acidity brings its own sweetness to the table and has perfect balance with that slight bitterness in the early sip’s chocolate component. This citrus note to the cup is sweet, more like orange juice than eating an orange, so although citric acid is an acid, it offers a lot of sweetness, from my perception, to this coffee. This coffee finishes sweet and rolls into a milk chocolate aftertaste that carries into the next sip.
I’m really enjoying this coffee, even as it cools to about room temperature at this point. It’s a hard coffee to not just gulp down, but definitely let it sit for 5 minutes or so after brewing before you even take your first sip. This coffee has a lot of physical presence on my palate, from the body and weight of it to that juiciness, and that “physicality” to this coffee is something somewhat unique that I’m really digging. The flavors are great and this is a nicely balanced cup. I really enjoy that shot of semi-sweet chocolate up front because that slight bitterness is really important to the overall character of this coffee and I think adds a lot of complexity and balance. This is quite a complex coffee in a lot of ways, so there’s a lot here for us coffee geeks, but at the same time you could shut all of that out of your mind and just enjoy this coffee as a morning sipper, too. For my first experience with Bespoken Coffee Roasters, this Octavio Herrera is certainly setting the bar high and I can’t wait to dig into their other coffees and share those with you in the coming days. YUM!