Good morning and welcome to today’s review of Looking Homeward Coffee’s Juanito Villasante. I recently reviewed this coffee in its pourover/filter form, and LH was kind enough to send me the espresso version to share with you today. Slurp!
Purchase this coffee for $13.50/250g (8.8oz)
Other reviews in this series: Rwanda Gatare Station | Colombia Nelly Viveros | Peru Juanito Villasante (filter version) | Glimpse espresso blend
LOOKING HOMEWARD COFFEE PERU JUANITO VILLASANTE SINGLE ORIGIN ESPRESSO
Looking Homeward Coffee is based in Seattle, Washington and got their start earlier this year from the company’s current base of operations, although they look to have started roasting in 2018 in California. 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’ve really enjoyed all the coffee Looking Homeward has sent me, and I love their approach to their bag aesthetics and like that they have such a fleshed-out identity for such a young company. Good stuff!
A while back, I posted a review of Looking Homeward’s selection from Peru by producer, Juanito Villasante. That review can be found here. Since then, Looking Homeward started roasting this coffee a little differently as a single origin espresso, and they know I’m an espresso fiend, so they sent the espresso version of this same coffee as well as their Glimpse espresso blend to me to try out. I reviewed Glimpse here, which uses this Peruvian coffee as part of the blend, and found it tough to dial in and get to behave right. Usually blends are easier to tame, but this very light roast had me challenged, although I pulled some nice coffee with it! As a filter coffee, I loved the Juanito Villasante, finding it to have a light caramel sweetness with lots of crisp apple notes and acidity. I found it delicate and mild in all the best ways.
For their espresso version, this coffee looks to have a bit more of a developed roast and, visually, appears just a little darker than the filter version of this coffee. I was going to take a side-by-side photo but you can’t really tell enough of a difference with that, so I passed. Before I get ahead of myself any further, this morning’s coffee is a washed Bourbon and Caturra lot from Juanito Villasante’s Finca San Jose in Puno, Peru. You can read a little more about Juanito here. For espresso, Looking Homeward recommends 21g of coffee in the portafilter and 32g out in 28 seconds. This is about a 1:1.5 extraction, which is usually in the range that I like, personally. I didn’t read this parameter until now, when I have maybe one dose left in the bag! My shots were coming in more in the 20g in, 37-38g out in 25-27 seconds zone… closer to a 1:1.9 ratio. This is pretty nerdy stuff, but in essence Looking Homeward’s recipe would end up giving you more contact between the water and the grounds, probably resulting in a bit higher of an extraction than what I was pulling, but I wasn’t too far off. Looking Homeward gives us tasting notes of, “Candied fig, caramel, almond” for this single origin espresso.
Surprisingly, I found this single origin to behave better on my equipment than the Glimpse blend did, which is usually the opposite, but the Glimpse was roasted lighter as it was damn near impossible to grind in my Orphan Espresso Pharos 2.0 grinder, while the Juanito Villasante was a little easier. Still a workout, but noticeably softer in the grinder, and my setup seems more challenged by lighter roasts than darker roasts, which is probably the same for all home espresso nerds.
Quick rundown of my equipment: I’m using a Gaggia Classic that I’ve blind-tuned to 9 bars of pressure. I’ve replaced the shower screen holder with a brass one and added a silicone gasket. The shower screen I’ve replaced with an IMS precision screen. I use an aftermarket naked portafilter with a Decent Espresso 20g basket and Decent Espresso 1st generation 25lb calibrated precision tamper that matches their 58.5mm basket diameter. As far as process, I do a WDT stir of the espresso in the basket, level by tapping the portafilter, then I tamp and use an Aeropress filter on top of the coffee bed to help prevent channeling, which is more important for lighter coffees like this, in my opinion, since the finer grind invites the water to do bad things!
For me, overall, my shots have a nice tropical vibe to them. I am getting a lot of citrus, especially orange and grapefruit with some hints of lemon candy. There is some grapefruit pithiness to the mouthfeel, which tends to feel like it’s tightening my pores in my mouth (but not like astringency, which is bad… this is good). I am getting both sweetness and acidity/tartness that I associate with tropical fruits like pineapple, although I don’t know that I was getting overt tropical flavors out of this espresso, per se. There is a good amount of cocoa in this coffee for me, and the finish and aftertaste reminded me of a fruity, high quality single origin chocolate bar. This espresso has a medium body but is slightly syrupy, to me, and my shots had a thin layer of crema, but it was resolute and stuck around even after very vigorous stirring, so while the crema was thin, it was pretty. The pictures below show the coffee pre-stirring. This experiment of getting to try this coffee out as the filter and espresso version both really shows me how versatile a high-quality coffee can be, especially in the right hands when it is being roasted. I loved this coffee both ways, so if you have a home espresso setup, I’d order one of each so you can do the same and see which one you like better!
