Good morning and welcome to today’s review! It won’t stop snowing and being cold here in Kansas City so I’m happily tucked into World Domination HQ with a Costa Rican coffee from Daysol Coffee Lab. Let’s check this out and hopefully you’re a lot warmer than I am right now! Also, please excuse the water on the label in my photo… my roof was dripping!
Purchase this coffee directly for $15/12oz.
Other reviews in this series: Ethiopia Organic Limu Tega & Tula
DAYSOL COFFEE LAB COSTA RICA LA TRINIDAD
Daysol Coffee Lab is Bert Davis and Peter Solis, who’ve mishmashed some words with their names to come up with this concept of Daysol. There’s more to it than that, so you should check out their website for a better explanation. It’s always better to hear someone’s story from their own mouth! Bert Davis’s previous roasting company was called Ki Roasters, who I reviewed about two years ago now. Bert was kicking out some great coffees from his base in Littleton, CO. In May 2019, Bert and his family moved to Birmingham, Alabama and that’s where he teamed up with Peter to form Daysol. I’ve tried one of the other coffees Bert sent me, the Tega & Tula from Ethiopia (link above to the review) and it was everything I’ve come to expect from his roaster, so I’m excited to try this morning’s coffee and share it with you, too!
This morning’s coffee is Daysol’s Costa Rica La Trinidad. Bert describes this coffee as, “a smooth cup with a tart citric acidity; chocolate, red grape, and lemongrass notes.” This is a lot of Caturra, Catimor, Villa Sarchi and Sarchimor varieties grown by several smallholder farmers in the Tarrazu region of Costa Rica. Altitude is around 1500-1900masl there and this is a washed coffee. I’m using my standard pourover setup of a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin dripper with a Kalita 155 filter. My grinder is a Knock Aergrind and I pulse pour through a Melodrip to minimize agitation of the coffee bed during brewing. Things were running really slow with a more dense Ethiopian coffee when I brewed last, so I made some adjustments to my grind setting before brewing this cup and this one ran fast, but the flavors are great, so I’m not worried. With a 30 second bloom, this coffee came in at 2:37, which is fast… I generally try to aim for 3:00-3:30 but if it tastes good, I don’t worry about it.
The aroma from this cup has a good amount of grape juice to it for me and I even found that in the bag fragrance from the whole beans. Making good use of my new thermometer, I’m getting my first sip in at 117F, still a little warm, and I’m greeted by a light-bodied cup with a lot of “red fruit” sweetness in it for me. At 110F I can already taste more (temperature DOES matter, a LOT, if you’re trying to taste when you’re drinking coffee… I hope I’m not too annoying with the temp measurements, but I have a point to prove!) and the body has consolidated into a more syrupy medium just from losing 7 degrees. There’s a light honeyed sweetness anchoring this coffee, followed quite quickly in the sip by red grape juice sweetness and tartness that I would relate more to tropical fruit notes than to the citrus Daysol mention in their descriptor. There is citrus here, but I’m getting that more in the second half of the sip, finish and aftertaste. No particular tropical fruit flavor is jumping out at me, but there is a hint of pineapple and the bit of tartness I’m getting reminds me of the sweet-tart character of pineapple, too. Knowing there is Villa Sarchi variety in the mix I’m looking hard for that balsamic vinegar note that can accompany that coffee type and I’m picking up whispers of it, but nothing I would probably notice if I wasn’t thinking so hard about trying to find that flavor. The acidity and bright notes in the cup have citrus tones, for sure, and I’m getting quite a bit of lemon and a bit of orange or tangerine here. Maybe more blood orange than anything else. As the cup continues to cool I’m picking up a little bit of a savory note in the finish. The finish of this coffee is sweet and the aftertaste has that pineapple-y tartness, lemon candy and some reminders of a good quality single origin dark chocolate bar, as well as some of that red grape juice flavor.
This is a nice coffee and, again, Bert reminds me why I enjoyed his Ki coffee so much and am now quickly becoming a Daysol fanboy! This is a complex coffee with a lot going on in the cup. It’s pretty well structured, so if you have the discipline to let it cool to 110F and then start tasting, and keep it going to close to room temp, it comes with distinct rewards! If I speed up my sips and don’t think too much, this is an easy-drinking, sweet cup that is light and refreshing and makes a good start to the morning work, so the complexity isn’t overbearing and doesn’t come at the cost of drinkability, which is sometimes the tradeoff in coffee. A knockout Costa Rican coffee from one of the most interesting coffee growing and processing regions, in my opinion! Daysol Coffee Lab rocks!