Good morning and welcome to today’s review! I have my last coffee from Looking Homeward to share with you this morning and this time it’s a Peruvian selection, so grab your cup and let’s have a taste!
Purchase this coffee directly for $13.50/250g (8.8oz)
Other reviews in this series: Rwanda Gatare Washing Station | Colombia Nelly Viveros
LOOKING HOMEWARD COFFEE JUANITO VILLASANTE
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 in California. 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.” I love Looking Homeward’s colorful bags and this morning’s bag feels classic in a midcentury modern way to me. It’s cool to see someone doing something different on the branding side, for sure!
This morning’s coffee from Looking Homeward is their Juanito Villasante, which is a washed coffee from Peru that was imported by Red Fox Coffee Merchants, a favorite of Looking Homeward and many other roasters, too. Just to give you a heads up, Looking Homeward has this coffee on offer as a single origin espresso, too, so you will see both listed on their website right now. The one they sent me is the regular roast, not the espresso version. If it were me, I’d just buy both! This coffee is a Bourbon and Caturra mix and Juanito’s farm is called Finca San Jose and is located in the Puno region of Peru. In the early days of Juanito’s coffee farming, he would walk 4 hours each way to pick up supplies from the nearest shop, so I can only imagine Puno is rough and remote terrain, a challenge for Peruvian coffee farmers to get their coffee through the supply chain and another reason people like Red Fox, who source these coffees, are so important for us to be able to taste them and for the farmers to be able to get their coffee to market. Looking Homeward gives us flavor notes of, “candied fig, caramel, almond.”
I used my standard pourover method to brew this coffee, using a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin with a Kalita 155 filter. I pulse pour the water through a Melodrip to minimize agitation of the coffee bed. I forgot to hit my timer with this coffee, but it seemed to run a little long compared to most of my brews that hit the 3:15-3:40 mark.
The first aroma that hit me from the Trinity brew vessel was maple syrup. I don’t know that I got actual maple notes, but that was the first thought that flashed through my mind when the aroma got to my brain… warm maple syrup pouring over a stack of pancakes. Not a bad introduction to a coffee! In the cool cup, the aroma is sweet caramel and maybe there is actually a little hint of maple syrup, for real, although maybe my brain is playing tricks on me now that I’m thinking about that flavor/aroma.
OK, this is love at first sip.
This is a light-heavy or medium-light bodied (I hope my nomenclature makes sense to you, dear readers! I mean it’s on the heavy side of the “light” spectrum or on the light side of the “medium” range, for me). That beautiful caramel sweetness drapes over my palate like a silk sheet, followed by some apple notes and brightness. Apples are associated with malic acid, which is commonly found in coffee, and for me, malic acidity is a soft, crisp high note that often comes with some actual apple flavor notes. It’s that bright, fresh, crispness you get biting into an apple and I love that in coffees. This seems to be a common trait in Peruvian coffees, at least in my experience tasting them. I’m getting a little bit of a sweet, baked crust (think pie crust or pastry) note from this coffee, too, and just the slightest hint of baking spices, more in the aftertaste but a tiny bit in the sip, too. The things that strike me about this coffee is how clean and balanced and structured it is. It seems delicate on my palate, with the flavors being apparent, but not bold. At the risk of greatly underselling this coffee, I’d go so far as to call it “mild” but in all the best ways, like a mild tobacco in a cigar from the Dominican Republic as opposed to something in your face and sharper and bolder from Cuba. This coffee leans into the sweetness but is not cloying and feels light on my palate. Those apple/malic notes perfectly balance the caramel tones in this coffee. To me, this is a simple cup, but I’m enjoying it immensely and it’s stimulating all the right neurons for me at this place and time! Even though it’s delicate, it’s not subtle. I feel like this would make a nice afternoon cup and these are also the coffees I love in the summertime when it’s hot outside, with that crisp apple acidity offering a little bit of thirst-quenching, which I don’t normally associate with coffee (i.e. if I’m thirsty I’m not going to grab coffee to drink).
Looking Homeward is enthustiastic about this coffee on their website, and I wholeheartedly agree. I would like to try the espresso version of this coffee, now, because I’m curious how a different roast affects the flavors. I really love this Juanito Villasante selection! YUM!