Good morning and welcome to today’s review. I’m looking at a new-to-me roaster, Anchor House Coffee Roasters, for the first time, and it’s a Friday, so let’s celebrate!
Purchase this coffee directly for $16/16oz
ANCHOR HOUSE COFFEE ROASTERS HONDURAS FAIRTRADE ORGANIC
Anchor House Coffee Roasters appear to be a brand new roasting company based in Buckley, Washington, which is east of Tacoma and close to Mt. Rainier. They posted to Instagram for the first time in August 2019 and just yesterday announced their website was fully operational for ordering their coffees, so this is a new company! Their website shows their enthusiasm for the supply chain in coffee from plants to farms to processors and on down the line, but they’re mostly into the idea of coffee as a vehicle for relationships.There are a lot of photos of a cool old house on their website and talk of community, service and relationships, but I can’t tell if that house is a physical coffee shop in Buckley or if maybe that’s a plan for the future, or what. I’m not sure, but I’ll keep my eyes peeled to see where this new roaster is going with everything! They sent me a few coffees to check out and the first one I grabbed is their Fair Trade organic selection from Honduras.
It’s far from me to tell roasters and retailers what to put on their websites, but as KC Coffee Geek, you know I want to know as much as I can about each coffee that is sent to me, so I’d love to see Anchor House putting more information about the farms, growing regions, etc their coffees are coming from, and this seems like it would be consistent with their mission and values. What I do know from their site is that this coffee is Fair Trade and organic, and it’s a washed coffee from somewhere in Honduras. This is a medium roast (and just visually, grinding with my handgrinder and taking a few sips I’d place this on the darker side of the medium range) and Anchor House recommends V60, Chemex or French Press for this coffee. They give us tasting notes of, “Apple, lemon, peanut butter, dark chocolate candy – smooth and sweet. It sweetens further as it cools.”
I’m using my standard pourover method, which is a flat bottomed dripper than the cone-shaped V60 or Chemex Anchor House recommends. I’m using a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin with Kalita 155 filter. My grinder is a Knock Aergrind and I pulse pour the brew water through a Melodrip to minimize 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.
Taking a sip, this is a medium-heavy bodied coffee with a lot of presence on my palate. I’m getting some dark caramelization in the sweetness of the base of this cup with a decent amount of roast coming through. In the mid-sip I’m getting a lot of red apple flavors and sweetness and that malic acidity offsets the sugary sweetness in this cup to give it nice balance. In the cooling cup there is a bit of lemon candy acidity here, too, and that adds some nice dimension and structure to the cup. This is definitely an easy drinking coffee. I’ve gotten a couple hits of this really particular flavor with some sips and it is taking me a minute to figure out what that flavor note is, but it’s a coffee candy of some kind. I think it’s those coffee Nips candies, which I probably haven’t had in 10+ years, but I think that’s what I’m getting! In the cool cup I’m also getting a little bit of a floral note, not quite roses, but very similar to that. But mostly, minus these seemingly random flashes of flavor hints, this is a super sweet, almost sugary coffee with just enough apple/malic and lemon/citric acidity to give it interest and balance. I could see this coffee being a crowd-pleaser in a cafe and with the roast notes and these developed sugar flavors this would go over well with the cream and sugar crowd, for sure. This is a super accessible, inviting, easy drinker that could easily be a daily coffee. It straddles the fence between a light enough roast that I am still getting origin character from the cup, but there are a lot of the developed sugars and flavors I’d associate with a darker roast, too, without the burnt/roast-dominant notes that come with most dark roasts. A great, accessible, easy coffee!