Looking Homeward Coffee Glimpse (espresso)

Good morning and welcome to today’s review of Glimpse, an espresso blend from Looking Homeward Coffee.

Looking Homeward Coffee

Purchase Glimpse directly from LH for $13/250g (about 8.8oz)

Other reviews in this series: Rwanda Gatare Washing Station | Colombia Nelly Viveros | Peru Juanito Villasante

LOOKING HOMEWARD COFFEE GLIMPSE

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. For such a young company, I’ve been pleased by the other three coffees they sent (links to those reviews are above!) and I also love their bags. Visual aesthetics are important to coffee as it’s the bag that first attracts someone to the coffee inside and so many new roasters start with something super simple and then re-brand as they mature. I like that Looking Homeward has what I would consider to be a complete aesthetic already, and it doesn’t seem like they’ve only paid attention to the branding at the expense of the coffee, either. 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.”

This morning’s coffee is Looking Homeward’s Glimpse, which is an espresso blend. In addition to the cool patterns and colorful motifs on their bags, LH has a unique info panel on the front, and Glimpse’s reads, “This coffee is a GLIMPSE… was produced by MANY PEOPLE… processed as WET/NATURAL… imported by MANY PEOPLE.” The current iteration of Glimpse is a blend of their other current offerings and, in this case, it’s the following coffees:

• Brazil – natural/dry process – Yellow Catuai varietal – Fazenda Serrinha in Minas Gerais, Brazil – produced by Jose Maria de Oliveira
• Peru – washed/wet process – Bourbon varietal – Finca San Jose in Puno, Peru – produced by Juanito Villasante
• Colombia – washed/wet process – Caturra varietal – Los Corales in Nariño, Colombia – produced by Nelly Viveros

Looking Homeward gives us flavor notes of, “Dark chocolate, peach, caramel” for this coffee. I was struck by how light the roast looks in the bag and this played out in my hand-powered grinder, an Orphan Espresso Pharos. This is one of few espressos I’ve run across in the year or so I’ve had a Pharos that I have to sort of psych myself up to grind! LOL The Pharos doesn’t make any lighter roasts easy, but this one was particularly tough and if it wasn’t so embarassing I would’ve video’d myself one morning doing my routine to turn these beans into ground coffee! Quite a sight, I can assure you!

On the rest of the equipment front, in addition to an OE Pharos (I upgraded mine to the 2.0 version and it’s a truly amazing grinder, I am using a Gaggia Classic that I’ve blind-tuned to 9 bars. I’ve swapped the aluminum shower screen holder for a brass one, added a silicone head gasket and replaced the stock screen with a precision IMS screen. Rounding things out, I use an aftermarket naked portafilter with a 20g Decent Expresso precision basket and their version 1 calibrated tamper that is matched to the 58.5mm diameter of the basket and tamps at 25lbs of pressure. For this coffee, I was placing a dry Aeropress filter on top of the groomed coffee bed to calm down the channeling and spitting.

In addition to being tough to grind because of the light roast, this proved to be a tough coffee for me to pull to my normal parameters, but still tasty despite the challenges. I usually start with a 1:2 ratio of 19 or 20g of coffee, going for a 38-40-ish gram output in 25-30 seconds. From there I’ll make adjustments to the recipe and for darker coffees I tend to like a closer ratio more in the 1:1.5 range or so while lighter coffees I often seem to run a little over the 1:2 range. I had to tigten up my burrs a lot for this coffee and it still was running a bit fast, and even with the Aeropress filter, getting a little rowdy with channeling and spitters, which I have had very little trouble with using this setup. This morning I thought maybe I had over-corrected and gone too fine and was forcing the channeling to happen with too fine of a grind, so I loosened it back to the range I use for most other espressos and it ran out 52g of espresso with a 19g starting yield in 25 seconds, so that wasn’t it at all. This is just a tricky coffee, for my setup, and lighter espresso do tend to be harder to work with, in my experience.

All that being said, I really enjoy this coffee! On average I’ve been using 20g in the portafilter and getting 40-45g of espresso in 27 seconds. This has been giving me a nice cup. On the texture and mouthfeel side of things, Glimpse is on the light body, being thin and a little aqueous with a relatively small and easy to dissipate crema. This is not a thick, chewy, stand-your-spoon-up-in-it espresso like you can pull with a darker roast, the light roast of Glimpse making it more challenging to pull more stuff out of it in that short amount of time the water is given. The flavors are great, though, and I have been getting a lot of lemon candy acidity, hints of rose, cranberry and a dark, single origin chocolate finish. Yum! Even this morning’s weird 19g to 52g yield in 25 seconds was worth drinking and I wasn’t about to dump it! LOL One thing I did notice is how fast a 250g (8.8oz) bag of espresso disappears. Especially with a coffee that is challenging to pull, there is going to be a decent number of wasted shots dialing it in and experimenting with the recipe and while the extra 3.4 ounces of a 12 ounce bag doesn’t sound like much, it is! I generally love the smaller size format because they’re less expensive, usually, meaning you can spread your budget out to a couple different coffees more easily, but for espresso, it’s a little nerve-wracking! Will I have enough coffee to actually enjoy once it’s dialed in?! A real nail-biter!

Looking Homeward’s Glimpse is a nice, modern espresso. PIDs and variable pressure and all that on some fancier machines than my Classic would probably help tame this coffee quite a bit, and a good grinder is an absolute must for this espresso, but it’s worth the effort. It’s bright, but balanced and enjoyable. If you’re looking for a short, ristretto, super dark, chewy, roasty traditional Italian espresso, this isn’t for you, but if your tastes run toward a more “modern,” “third wave” style of espresso, you’ll find a lot to like in Glimpse!