Open Seas Coffee Roasters Colombia Tio Conejo

Good morning and welcome to today’s review. I’m checking out another Colombian coffee from Open Seas Cofffee Roasters, so let’s get right into it!

Open Seas Coffee Roasters

Purchase this coffee directly for $15.50/12oz

Other reviews in this series: Colombia Finca Monteblanco

Cafe Tio Conejo website (English and Spanish)

YouTube video about Cafe Tio Conejo Finca

OPEN SEAS COFFEE ROASTERS COLOMBIA TIO CONEJO

Open Seas Coffee roasters was founded by Bryce Roszell in Stevensville, Maryland (east and across the Chesapeake Bay from Anapolis) about three years ago. Bryce got into coffee while living in Laos and locating Open Seas on an island certainly informed the name of his roastery! I reviewed Open Seas’ Finca Monteblanco recently and loved it, but this tiny lot of coffee was sold out by the time my review posted. I’m checking out another Colombian coffee from Open Seas this morning, their Tio Conejo.

The farm, Cafe Tio Conejo, is a family based operation run by Ivanov and Angela Castellanos. It’s located in northwest Colombia, in the department (think of it like a state) of Caldas. Manizales is the capital of the department and it’s located about equidistant from Medellin to the north, Bogota to the east and slightly further away, Cali to the south. Ivanov is Colombian by birth and was working at a veterinarian in the USA until 2010, when he decided to return to his home country and get into the coffee business! This morning’s coffee is a lot of Caturra that grows at 1600-2000masl. This is a washed coffee and being a small farm, Ivanov has a lot of control of the ripeness of the cherries when being harvested, pre-fermentation and fermentation during the washing process, etc. I think it shows in the cup! Open Seas thinks highly of this coffee as espresso, recommending a 1:1.5 ratio when extracting it, so I/m trying it out both as a filter coffee and espresso.

Taking a sip, this is a medium bodied coffee that is bright and sweet, just the way I like Colombian coffees. At temperatures that are warmer than I usually drink coffee at, I’m getting a nice graham cracker flavor in the second half of the sip, finish and aftertaste. As the cup cools to my usual evaluation temperature, it opens up and is brighter and more acidic. There is a caramel base that gives this coffee a lot of sugary sweetness. The high notes in this coffee are very “tropical.” I can’t tell you the last time I ate a papaya, so I can’t speak to Open Seas’ descriptor here, but I am getting tropical fruit sweetness that reminds me of the character of mango without really getting the actual flavor of that fruit. I’m also getting a bit of a pineapple feel, also without really getting pineapple in the flavor itself. Pineapple, for me, is sweet but also has a little bite to it from the acids in it. This coffee doesn’t bite at all, but it has that tropical-esque acidity locked in with the fruity sweetness. I’m getting a little light raisin in the flavors here, too. This coffee finishes sweet and I lost most of that graham cracker I was getting at warmer temps, but there is a hint of baking spices in the aftertaste and a little bit of sweet cracker/pie crust… something sweet and baked. If I can wait a while between sips, which is a struggle, I’m getting some dark caramel notes and brown sugar on my palate. Maybe more like a dark butter toffee, even.

As a filter coffee, this is a super easy drinker. It’s balanced, structured and has a lot of clarity, and it’s a warming and delicious coffee. It’s sweet and sugary but fruity at the same time, and that buttery toffee-like aftertaste is absolutely killer!

ESPRESSO

This was a bit of a tricky coffee for me to dial in. I ended up preferring the shots I made in closer to a 1:2 ratio with a faster extraction, with my favorite being 19g of coffee in, 34.8g out in 25 seconds. I pulled a 1:1.5 with 19g to start and a 30 second extraction and it was quite sour as well as a bit salty for my palate, but I didn’t pull tons of shots and I also will VERY much acknowledge as systematic as my process is, there is PLENTY of space for user error when making espresso! My best shot (or the one I preferred the most) was syrupy and heavy with a lot of sugary sweetness and it amplified the tropical notes I found in the filter extraction a ton. Pineapple, that other unidentified tropical fruit I was getting, almond. Very good, very “third wave” and bright and intense, so for me this is a very modern shot, not a traditional, caramel/chocolate Italian-style pull. I really enjoyed it, but like a lot of lighter roast single origin coffees, not the easiest thing to tame and extract!

For you equipment and process nerds:

• Gaggia Classic
  • Blind tuned to 9 bars
  • Brass shower screen holder and IMS precision showed screen
  • Silicone gasket
• Aftermarket portafilter
  • Decent Espresso 20g precision basket
• Decent Espresso 58.5mm precision tamper calibrated to 25lbs of pressure
• Orphan Espresso Pharos 2.0
• Process:
  • Grind
  • Dump into portafilter
  • WDT stir with BPlus tool
  • OCD style tool to groom
  • Tamp
  • Place Aeropress filter on top of coffee bed
  • Pull shot