Good morning and welcome to today’s review and the weekend! I’m checking out a new-to-me roaster, Looking Homeward Coffee, for the first time with their fresh Rwandan selection. Slurp!
Purchase this coffee directly for $14/250g (8.8oz)
LOOKING HOMEWARD COFFEE GATARE WASHING STATION
Looking Homeward Coffee is a roasting operation based in Seattle, Washington. Their About page says the company got its start in a cafe in Sacramento, CA where their unnamed Director of Coffee worked. In 2014, this shadowy figure (just FYI, I know who he is, but since names aren’t shared on their website, I don’t know if it’s cool to let out or not, so he’ll remain the Director of Coffee until otherwise advised! LOL) began roasting coffee and in 2018 moved to Seattle, where he has continued this work. According to their site, “Looking Homeward is an idea focused around finding the place you belong,” further adding, “For our customers our goal is to be a roasting company with quality you can trust and transparency to purchase coffee from sources that can be trusted to do things the correct way.” Peeping the LH Instagram, it looks like the first post announcing, “Roasting soon in the PNW” was posted on April 1, 2019, so the company in its current form is pretty new. The website is slick and I love the graphic aesthetics of the coffee bags. Each one is different and they feature brightly colored patterns, bold motifs and have a pop art aesthetic in some cases. Very different, very lovely! This morning’s Rwandan coffee gets a nice geometric pattern of muted “Miami” colors and I really dig it.
As part of their transparency directive, LH has a nice amount of information on their website and labels about their coffee. This morning’s coffee is Bourbon variety grown by multiple smallholder farmers who work through the Gatare Washing Station in Nyamsheke, Rwanda. This is a washed coffee procured by Red Fox Coffee Merchants. Gatare is one of the oldest washing stations in Rwanda, starting in 2003, and Red Fox has been importing coffee from them since 2016. Looking Homeward gives us tasting notes of, “Stone fruit, muscovado sugar, date.”
I’m using my standard pourover setup 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. My 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 30 second bloom and the total brew time, including the bloom, was 3:15.
The beans in the bag have a fragrance that is 100% raisin for me, although not a ton of raisin comes through in the flavors. The aroma from the brewed cup keeps a lot of the raisin I was getting in the dry fragrance and adds some brown sugar. Taking a sip, this is a medium-light bodied coffee that lands a little toward the lighter side of medium. I’m getting some nice citrus tones right in the front of the sip. There is a honey sweetness here contrasted and complemented at the same time by an orange juice feel to this citrus acidity.
Note: as the cup cooled, I found this “orange juice” and “citrus” fruit/acidity note to change a lot and morph into apricot flavors and tartness as well as loads of peach. Just wanted to let you know, this isn’t really an orange-forward coffee at all, but sometimes it takes my palate a bit of drinking to sort it all out!
I’m getting orange juice sweetness but also some blood orange citric acid and tartness which is lovely. The raisin from the aroma is here in the flavor, too, hiding under that citrus umbrella. That fruity component may have some apricot notes to it, too. I’m not getting much apricot flavor, per se, but the bit of tartness in the high end of this coffee suggests that same sweetness-tartness balance I get from a dried apricot. There’s a little bit of actual apricot flavor in the second half of the sip and finish, and as the cup cools and I’m writing about apricot, this fruity component is tasting less and less “orange” and more and more apricot. As the cup is cooling it feels like the coffee is consolidating a little and getting heavier in mouthfeel. What I was initially tasting as “orangey” and citrusy is now fully developed into peach and apricot, with full-on peach juice notes hitting my tongue in the early sip and getting a little more apricot with some tartness in the mid sip and second half of the sip. So good! I don’t know that I’ve ever had a coffee transform quite this much while I was drinking it, but it started off nice and just gets better and better as it runs toward room temperature, so no complaints from me! This cup finishes sweet and leaves a light aftertaste on my palate, suggesting hints of raisins, stone fruits and a bit of cream or dairy that I’m probably conjuring from that bit of tartness in the flavors. The aftertaste has a bit of a peaches and cream vibe.
Man, this is a wonderful coffee! I keep getting these insanely nice first tastes of all these new roasters who’ve been sending me coffee and I have to say I’m extremely spoiled! This is a phenomenal coffee and it’s roasted very nicely, which bodes well for the other two coffees Looking Homeward fired my way! Stay tuned!