Good morning and welcome to today’s review of a new-to-me roaster, Hometown Coffee Roasters. This is my first taste of coffee roasted in New Hampshire, so we’re adding another state to the list right before the end of the year!
Purchase this coffee for $15/12oz (use code “HOLIDAY” to save 25%)
HOMETOWN COFFEE ROASTERS BURUNDI RIMIRO
Pat yourselves on the backs, dear readers, because we’re closing out 2019 with a new state for the list: New Hampshire! This is my first review from that small New England state and this morning we are looking at a coffee from Burundi, courtesy of Hometown Coffee Roasters in Manchester, NH. Manchester is a city of about 112,000 people that is just about straight west of Portsmouth (which I have visited for a quick business trip) and is about 53 miles N-NW from Boston. Hometown doesn’t have much info about themselves on their website and I couldn’t find any independent articles about them, but doing a little Instastalking I was able to put together that they got their start around mid-2017 or so and they’ve gone through a branding and logo change since. They have a modern, but still informative and inviting aesthetic on their bags and I like their clean design.
Since Hometown seems to be a company that is more focused on their coffee than on themselves, let’s do the same and check out this morning’s coffee, their Burundi Rimiro. This coffee is from the Ruhororo Commune in the Ngozi Province of Buyenzi, Burundi. Like much of the coffee from Burundi, it’s Bourbon varietal and this is a washed coffee grown around 1558masl. Hometown calls this a “medium-light” coffee and recommends pourover or French press methods for it. They give us tasting notes of “grapefruit, peach” and say this coffee is, “Balanced and bright with notes of grapefruit, rhubarb and peach.”
I’m using my typical pourover setup for this coffee, consisting of a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin dripper with Kalita 155 filter. I use a Knock Aergrind for the tough part and pour my water through a Melodrip, which minimizes the coffee bed agitation during brewing. This coffee got a 30 second bloom and, including the bloom, brewed in about 4:15 total.
The aroma from this coffee is pretty subtle and I’m not picking up a ton to talk about. Taking a sip, this is a medium to medium-light bodied coffee that is bright, sweet and vibrant. I’m getting a honey note to the sweetness with a bit of caramel body and roundness, too. Quickly following this sweetness there is a lot of fruit going on in this cup, too. There is definitely a citrus acidity to the cup, but also a cooler, “smoother” brightness that I would associate more with apples and pears, so probably a malic acidity to this coffee, too. Grapefruit is definitely here, but it’s a light, sweet grapefruit flavor that has very little of the pithiness or bite to it that I often associate with the grapefruity notes of a Kenyan SL-28 variety coffee. Peach and, to my palate, more apricot are prevalent in this coffee, too. There is a peach-like sweetness and flavor, but it’s finished with a bite of tartness, and that always brings up apricot, for me. This coffee finishes sweet with a lot of peach in the end and a clean aftertaste with hints of peach, apricot and grapeferuit going into the next sip. I found myself taking lots of sips without much time in between of this coffee, especially as it opened up when it cooled.
This is a great cup! It’s bright and vibrant but also nicely balanced. The fruitiness is really pleasant and while it’s a bright coffee, it doesn’t read as “acidic,” even though it’s acids that create those fruity notes in most cases. This is a very inviting coffee with nice fruit notes to enjoy, but it’s also not overly complex or fussy…. this is an easy drinker, maybe even a gulper based on the way I took my cups down! A very nice introduction for me to Hometown Coffee Roasters, I will say!