Good morning and welcome to today’s review of Rob Beans San Miguel Escobar Co-op coffee from Guatemala. This is my first taste of Rob’s… errr… beans, so let’s just get right in there! 🙂
Purchase this coffee directly for $20/12oz
ROB BEANS SAN MIGUEL ESCOBAR CO-OP GUATEMALA
Rob of Rob Beans is a mystery man. His website is all about the coffee he roasts and contains nary a hint of who he may be! We know from the label that read, “ROB BEANS ROAST-ED BY ROB IN A GARAGE IN GLENDALE CALIFORNIA” that these coffee beans are roasted by Rob in a home-based business in Glendale, part of the Los Angeles metro area. According to his listing for this morning’s coffee, Rob says, “This farm started it all for me. After I visited this farm on a vacation in 2017, I knew I wanted to come home and start roasting.” So, Rob is relatively new to the roasting game and he has a total of five coffees he is currently offering on his site with Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Ethiopia all on the docket.
This morning’s coffee is Rob’s selection from the San Miguel Escobar cooperative in Guatemala. Before the establishment of this co-op, area coffee farmer were making 7-10 cents per pound of coffee. The cooperative was established in 2005 and since then, more than 30 farmers have joined. The co-op separates coffees into microlots from each farm, most of which are in the Antigua, Guatemala area. Rob offers this coffee as either a “medium” or a “dark” roast and judging solely by looks, I assume he sent me the medium version. Visually, I’d call it a “dark medium” but there is no oil sheen or pools of oil on the surface of the coffee, so it was dropped out of the roaster before second crack started, for sure.
I’m using my standard pourover method for this coffee, which is 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 a Knock Aergrind and I pulse pour through a Melodrip to minimize agitation of the coffee bed during brewing. This coffee got a 40 second bloom and the total brew time, bloom included, came in at 3:15.
The aroma from this cup is pure caramel sweetness, particularly welcome on a chilly early Fall morning. Super warm and inviting. Taking a sip, this is a medium-heavy bodied coffee with lots of that same caramel sweetness dominating the cup. There is a little fruit to find from this roast, too, but it’s pretty mellow. I’m getting some apple sweetness and cool malic acidity and maybe a little bit of peach/apricot in the second half of the sip. The fruitiness is mostly the sweetness I associate with these fruits, rather than the acidity, but there is a little bit of tartness I would attribute to an apricot. The second half of the sip has some nice cocoa notes and there is a hint of roast in the finish along with flavors reminding me of Fruit Stripe gum of all things! This coffee has a sweet finish and a peachy, apple-y aftertaste with a sprinkling of baking spices added in, giving it a bit of a fruit pie vibe in the aftertaste for me.
Of course, you can imagine this coffee was begging for the espresso machine, too, and with all my travel of late I didn’t have a lot of time to spend with it as ‘spro, but I got pretty lucky with this Guat from Rob Beans. I ended up pulling some shots with 19.1g in, 40-41g out in 26-27 seconds and they were great! Nice balanced, very creamy texture with dairy mouthfeel and some dairy flavors, too. I was getting a lot of sweetness offset by lemon acidity, some green apple malic acidity, a bit of tart cherry and some hoppiness in the finish and aftertaste. A bit of the baking spices in the second half of the sip and the aftertaste like I was getting from the brewed coffee, too.
For the equipment nerds, I use a Gaggia Classic that I’ve blind-tuned to 9 bars of pressure. I’ve replaced the shower screen and shower screen holder with an IMS precision screen and brass screen holder. Portafilter is an aftermarket bottomless with Decent Espresso 20g precision basket and matched 1st gen DE calibrated tamper, which I believe is 58.5mm in diameter and calibrated to 25lbs of pressure. I grind with an amazing Orphan Espresso Pharos 2.0, I do a WDT stir with a BPlus stirring tool, groom with an OCD knockoff, then tamp and pull the shot.
