Good morning and welcome to today’s review! I have an Elida Estate coffee from my good friends at Manzanita Roasting Co. that if it tastes as good as it smells, I’ll be in for a treat. Let’s find out!
Purchase this coffee directly for $23/12oz
Other reviews in this series: Costa Rica Luis Eduardo Campos Anaerobic | Ethiopia Anderacha Natural Microlot
MANZANITA ROASTING CO. PANAMA ELIDA ESTATE CATUAI NATURAL
Manzanita Roasting Co., founded by Weston and Samantha Nawrocki in 2015, has become one of my favorite roasters. I’ve had a ton of their coffee and it’s always fantastic. Weston is a classically trained chef and sommelier and Samantha grew up around the wine business, with her family owning Bernardo Winery in the San Diego area for 125+ years. That sort of food and drink experience translates to coffee, as you can imagine! My mind is still reeling from the Costa Rican anaerobic process coffee I reviewed a couple weeks ago (link above), which was super tasty, but also one of the wildest coffees I’ve ever had!
This morning’s coffee is just as special, if in different ways. It’s a lot of Catuai variety grown by the famed Lamastus family at Elida Estate in Panama. The Lamastus family are more or less singlehandedly responsible for making the Gesha variety so popular (and worth so much $$$) today, and the quality of coffee from Elida Estate is legendary. In the words of Manzanita, “Elida Estate literally has the best coffee in the world right now, period. They grow badass Catuai coffee in Panama that rivals the best Ethiopian Geshas.” Elida Estate is located in Boquete, Panama and they grow coffee at altitudes ranging from 1670-1950masl. This is a natural process coffee, meaning it is picked and sorted, then the coffee cherries are dried whole on raised beds, slowly breaking down like big raisins. This imparts fruitiness, sweetness and body to the seeds inside, what we call coffee “beans.” Elida Estate is surrounded by national park land and coffee is shade grown there. They are excellent stewards of their land, the environment, and their people, taking as much care in those areas as with their coffee growing.
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 a Kalita 155 filter. My grinder is a Knock Aergrind set between 5-6 on the dial (on mine) and I pulse pour through a Melodrip to limit agitation of the coffee bed during brewing. This coffee got a 30 second bloom and brewed for a total of 3:37.
The dry fragrance of these coffee beans is “classic natural” for me, with “red fruit” and plenty of berries. The dry grounds were filled with berry jam notes. Taking a sip, this is a medium-heavy to heavy bodied coffee with a slick mouthfeel that reminds me of cream (which is funny because I just looked at the descriptors on the website, which I haven’t seen until writing this sentence, and the tasting notes are, “Candied red fruit, caramel, cream”… I love these little validations I get for my palate!).
Central American naturals are often more subtle and a little more restrained in the fruits and berries notes than Ethiopian naturals, for example, but there is nothing restrained about this Elida Estate. In the front of the sip there is a ton of sweetness in the base that I think is accentuated by the heavy body of this coffee, and those “red fruits” come rushing is right behind the light caramel sweetness. What are “red fruits?” Great question! I’m getting strawberry for sure and some red apple fruitiness. Apple, for me, as a flavor note in coffee is usually going to contain a lot of sweetness, like apple juice, as well as offer some brightness to the cup as malic acid. Malic acid is associated with apples, especially, but also fruits like pears, and in coffee it gives a crisp, round brightness to the cup that offers lots of balance to all the sweetness. I’m getting some grape soda in the second half of the sip and some light hints of ferment that are a little estery, too. Esters are chemicals that give flavors like banana, and this coffee has no banana in it, but I’m getting some estery notes that make the suggestion of banana. The ferment notes are pretty light in this cup. Based on my experience with 10 being the funkiest Funky Natural and 0 being no ferment at all I’d place this cup around a 2-3. I like and enjoy ferment notes in natural coffees, but to some drinkers (consequently, people who don’t like naturals, LOL), they can taste like rotting fruit or garbage. Even the absolute funkiest naturals I’ve had just taste cool and weird to me, so I’m lucky in the taste bud/brain connection department! The grape soda note in the second half of the sip gets more apparent in the cooling cup, and the coffee seems to condense and consolidate as it cools, getting even heavier on my palate and more dense in mouthfeel. All coffees deserve a cool drinking temperature as your taste buds shut off with hot drinks and foods and this one is barely lukewarm and bordering on room temp right now and it’s killer. The finish is sweet with a hint of actual dairy cream to it. I guess I would call this a tiny bit of a lactic note (again, another acid, with all these acids I’ve mentioned offering nice flavors, not heartburn, to coffee drinkers) that for me reads as that hint of tartness that’s found in most dairy. The aftertaste has some tart apple in it for me as well as just slightly overripe (like, eat them today or throw them out because they’ll be bad tomorrow) strawberries. Aftertaste is relatively mild for me but does linger between sips, if you can actually manage to wait any time between them!
All in all, this is a stellar coffee! Elida Estate is a legendary status farm for a reason, and Weston is adept at pulling all the best stuff out of his coffees. He has a killer palate and this bodes well for us coffee geeks! This is a fantastically enjoyable coffee to drink, feeling as good on my palate as it tastes. It’s a pretty straightforward cup, not overly complex, and it has a lot of structure to it, so the individual flavors really stand out for me and don’t have to be parsed out with a lot of concentration. This makes this coffee very easy drinking and super inviting and accessible. Another winner!