Good morning and welcome to today’s review! I was on a bit of vacation last week so I’m excited to get back into posting reviews for you with this fresh Colombian from Looking Homeward Coffee!
Purchase this coffee directly for $14/250g (8.8oz)
Other reviews in this series: Rwanda Gatare Washing Station
LOOKING HOMEWARD COFFEE COLOMBIA NELLY VIVEROS
Looking Homeward Coffee is based in Seattle, Washington and got their start earlier this year (at least that’s when their Instagram started), although they look to have started roasting in 2018. Regardless, for such a young company I am surprised by the excellence of their coffee and what looks to me like fully realized branding and aesthetics. 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.” Personally I love their graphics on their bags and the pop art-like patterns and colors. This morning’s coffee bag features yellow, orange and blue stripes, polka dots and solids and it’s different from anything else I’ve seen, so I really enjoy it!
This morning’s coffee is Looking Homeward’s Nelly Viveros. This is a washed Caturra produced by Nelly Viveros at Finca Los Corales in the Nariño department of Colombia and it was imported by Red Fox Coffee Merchants. LH gives us tasting notes of, “Jasmine, milk chocolate, honey.”
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 the agitation of the coffee bed during brewing. I bloomed this coffee for 30 seconds and the total brew time, including the bloom, was 3:15.
I’m getting some brown sugar notes and some light honey in the aroma from this cup. Taking a sip, this is a medium-light bodied coffee with honey sweetness right up front. This coffee sorts of lands straight on my tongue and then the flavors slowly spread out across to the edges of my tongue and toward my cheeks, so it has a nice and interesting physical presence on my palate. This is a sweet cup, with the high notes in this coffee coming through not really until the second half of the sip and into the finish and aftertaste. Those high notes are some floral notes (maybe jasmine, maybe something else… I’m weak on my floral descriptors most of the time, sorry, dear readers!) as well as some light tropicals and a hint of strawberry. In the second half of the sip and into the finish I am definitely picking up strawberry, and I’m getting some creamy, dairy notes in the finish with this, too, almost like strawberry milk. There is a little bit of a “tropical fruit” vibe here, too, but it’s hard to pin anything specific down. It’s not mango or papaya or pineapple, specifically, but there is a bit of tropical sweetness and that slight bite that comes with the acidity from those fruits. There is definitely milk chocolate in this cup, coming in more in the mid-sip and through the finish, and it returns in the aftertaste. This is a nice cup! It’s sweet for days but still retains a nice balance. It’s super approachable in its flavors and not overly complex, so it’s an easy drinker. I love this one!