Good morning and welcome to today’s review of Manzanita Roasting Co.’s Costa Rica that uses special, innovative anaerobic processing. Let’s dive into this coffee and explore a bit of the science behind this process!
Purchase this coffee directly for $18/12oz
Other reviews in this series: Ethiopia Abana Estate Anderacha Lot
MANZANITA ROASTING CO. COSTA RICA ANAEROBIC
Manzanita Roasting Co. got their start around 2014-2015 and they’ve been killing it ever since! Founded by Weston Nawrocki and his wife, Samantha, they source lots of cool coffees and roast them to perfection time after time. Weston is a classically trained chef and sommelier and Samantha grew up in the wine business, with her family operating Bernardo Winery in San Diego for over 125 years.Their prowess in food and wine definitely translates well to coffee. I’ve reviewed a lot of Manzanita coffee over the years and it’s always top notch.
This morning’s coffee is a bit unusual in that it is a Costa Rican selection that was anaerobically processed. Checking out the details of the selection first, this is Caturra variety grown by Luis Eduardo Campos at Finca Cordillera del Fuego. Coffee grows at 1600-1750masl in this part of Tarrazu, which is ground central for coffee growing in Costa Rica. Like a lot of Costa Rican coffee farmers, Luis is concerned about the environment and is a member of NAMA, whose goal it is to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Also like a lot of Costa Rican specialty coffee farmers, Luis is on the forefront of innovative processing methods. I don’t want to absolutely bury the lead on my tasting notes for this coffee, so I will post all the details about anaerobic processing at the end of the review… An interesting side note, I have had this coffee before, grown by the same farmer, in last year’s 2018 Devil’s Altar from Folk City Roasters. Reading my review, that was a more subtle roast of this coffee and I was not completely blown away by it’s uniqueness (although it was great and I enjoyed it) as I was with Manzanita’s treatment of this coffee.
I am using my standard pourover method for this coffee, consisting 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. I use a Knock Aergrind for the hard work and pulse pour through a Melodrip to minimize agitation of the coffee during brewing. This coffee got a 35 second bloom and the total brew time, including bloom, was 3:30. Manzanita gives us tasting notes of, “Cinnamon, fudge, caramelized apple pie” for this coffee.
Wow, what an aroma on this coffee! I have never smelled another coffee like this before! After brewing and still at hot temps, this coffee aroma is pure cinnamon with some other warming/baking spices in the mix. If I was doing a blinded aroma test I would never guess this smell belonged to a cup of coffee. I would probably be thinking some sort of herbal tea with loads of cinnamon, ginger, cardamom, etc in it, or something like chai. Even as the cup cools that intense spice doesn’t let up, but it gets some additional dairy-like notes and a more perfumy overtone, too, almost like potpourri. Taking a sip, this coffee is every bit as wild tasting as it smells. The initial flavors on my tongue hit me a lot like a natural coffee would, with images of super ripe red fruits and berries being conjured up. There is a healthy amount of fermentation notes in this cup, which I like and appreciate and are not a turn off for me. The cinnamon and spices I found in the aroma are here in force, too, especially in the second half of the sip. This coffee finishes sweet and leaves loads of cinnamon on my tongue and palate between sips. As the coffee cools to my preferred temperature, it doesn’t change much. That spicy aroma is still intense and full of cinnamon. There is a caramel sweetness that is more apparent in the base of the cup and the mouthfeel and body are more hearty. There is a red apple sweetness rounding out this cup that was less apparent at the warmer temps and the ferment notes are a little mellower in the cooling cup. With apple, caramel sweetness and that intense cinnamon in the mix you know this cup is starting to taste like liquid apple pie! The red fruit/berry notes in the hot cup take a back seat to this sweet apple note and gentle malic acidity, but the ferment is still pretty strong throughout the sip.
This coffee is BONKERS and I love it! It’s probably the weirdest coffee I’ve reviewed since that Funky Natural grown and processed by the Miersches in Nicaragua and roasted by Japan’s Golpie Coffee back in 2016. I like weird, though, and there is nothing in this cup that is a turnoff for me. I’ll bet if I gave this coffee to novices they would guess it’s some sort of apple spice flavored coffee. Perfect transition from summer to fall, with these flavors! I think the limiting factor for this coffee is probably the ferment notes. Again, I like funky, fermenty coffees but I know they don’t appeal to everyone. This is the first Manzanita Roasting Co. I wouldn’t just flat-out recommend as an instant buy to any coffee drinker just because it is so unusual, but that’s also why I love it so much and that doesn’t mean it isn’t a fantastic coffee. It’s just unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in coffee before, so a cup like that has to come with some qualifiers when recommending it. Fantastic!
And now, some science! Anaerobic processing seems to have come out of Costa Rica or at least Central or South America first. A normal “washed” coffee is picked and sorted and then run through a depulper which ruptures the skins of the coffee cherries and removes some of the sticky mucilage that surrounds the seeds inside. These seeds are what we call coffee “beans.” To further remove more of that sticky mucilage, washed coffees are placed in a fermentation tank where microbes start to eat the sugars and this happens in full open air. Anaerobic means “oxygen-free” so it uses sealed stainless steel tanks for fermentation instead of open tanks. After depulping, the seeds are chucked into one of these sealed stainless steel containers, then the separated mucilage is tightly packed into the tank until it covers the coffee seeds/beans and fills most of the space up. Like with wine, there are local microbes all over the skins of the fruit, so it doesn’t take long for them to start partying and eating up those sugars. As they do this, they also chew up the oxygen in the tank and since it gets sealed up, the environment becomes oxygen-free. Anaerobic processing gives the processor a lot of control over sugar content, temperature, pressure, pH levels and more. This processing typically lasts 18-23 hours, with pH levels being closely monitored around the 15 hour mark. The trick is to keep the process going but to stop it once the microbes start producing alcohol (although that could be interesting, maybe!).
The pressure in the tank forces a lot of flavor-related compounds produced during this process into the coffee seeds and these flavors will be apparent after roasting and the coffee is brewed. Cinnamon notes appears to be a common thread with anaerobic coffees and, boy, was it ever with this Manzanita Costa Rican! The author of one article I read on this subject said, “Recent anaerobic coffees I’ve tasted have had incredibly precise and immediately identifiable flavor notes like gingerbread, cinnamon, licorice, bubble gum, or poached pear. The flavor tends to be singular, highly expressive and uncommon.” Again, very true of this coffee!