Good morning and welcome to today’s review. We’ve finally done it, dear readers! Alaska is getting on the KC Coffee Geek map this morning! I’m checking out a Congolese coffee from Steamdot, so without further ado let’s dive right in!
Purchase this coffee for $18/12oz
Sprudge Buildouts of Summer article on SteamDot
STEAMDOT REBUILD WOMEN’S HOPE
One of my goals with KC Coffee Geek was eventually to get all 50 states on the map and Alaska has been quite elusive. I’ve reached out to about 10 roasters in Alaska and it was just recently that the one that looked like the best bet for specialty coffee of the type I want to write about and you want to read about replied, and that’s SteamDot. SteamDot was founded in 2009 in Anchorage, Alaska. Their first location was in a big red shed in Anchorage’s historic rail yards, across the street from where the locomotives park. In their own works, “We could feel the ground shake when they rumbled to life. We fell in love with the play on words between billowing steam from trains and espresso machines, and the dot on the map where our beginnings took root.” What I love about this is this same “red dot” is now on our KC Coffee Geek map! Serendipity!
SteamDot say they were the first “third wave” espresso and coffee shop in Alaska and they distribute their beans to other cofee shops all over Alaska now. Like most third wave shops, they feature espresso and drip coffee in the form of pourovers, as well as siphon. Their goal is to source, roast and present the best beans possible, roasting to maximize the terroir of the coffees in their lineup. They also do barista training on-site and are active SCA members and do barista events like throwdowns. Today, they’ve grown to three cafés in Anchorage plus their roastery.
This morning’s coffee is SteamDot’s Rebuild Women’s Hope from Congo. This is a Bourbon variety that is a washed/wet processed coffee and it’s grown by Marcelline Budza on Idjwi Island in Congo’s Lake Kivu. Congo is a large country smack in the middle of Africa. Lake Kivu is a large lake on its eastern side that forms the border with Rwanda. Idjwi Island is a large island in the middle of Lake Kivu and Marcelline founded Rebuild Women’s Hope on Idjwi Island in 2013. Her vision is “to place women at the center of the integral development of her community,” and, “building the hope of women is building the hope of the entire nation.” Marcelline is a pioneer of gender equality in a country that traditionally puts less value on women. Most of the smallholder farmers contributing to this lot are women and women also work in the two washing stations used by the program on Idjwi Island. The island is very remote and has little infrastructure, so this project has also improved that to the point where coffee no longer has to be smuggled via boat to other countries for export! RWH has 1800 members today! SteamDot gives us tasting notes of, “Raisin, Baking Spices, Orange” for this coffee.
I’m using my standard pourover method with this coffee, which is a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin dripper with Kalita 155 filter. I pulse pour through a Melodrip to minimize agitation of the coffee during brewing. This coffee got a 30 second bloom and came in for a slightly fast total of 2:53, but it tasted great so I didn’t mess with it. As espresso, I’ve been using 18g in an IMS 16/20g basket, ground quite fine. I’ve been opening up the E61 valve on my Quick Mill Carola to pre-wet the coffee, which takes close to a minute (I know, this is weird… I’m experimenting) to fully wet the entire puck, then running the pump for 20 seconds or so to get yields around 28-30g of coffee in the cup. Strange, but it tastes pretty good, to me!
This is my first experience with this coffee as a pourover. I’ve actually been playing with most of the bag on my espresso machine, experimenting with long pre-wetting cycles and trying for classic ristretto style pulls. As espresso, it’s bright, sweet and lemony and as a short pull it’s intense and full of lemon candy and dark chocolate flavors. As a filter coffee, the aroma from the cup is giving me raisin and brown sugar hints. Taking a sip this is a medium bodied coffee with a lot of sweetness and citrus right up front, and I’m getting a raisiny overtone throughout the sip. The base of this coffee has a light brown sugar or light caramel sweetness to it. Coming in fast, right behind that sweetness is a wall of orange that hits my palate. I’m getting some orange juice concentrate in the first few sips but as my palate gets used to the flavor, it’s becoming more of a fresh-squeezed orange juice note… lighter, not as sugary. The raisin from the aroma is here as an overtone and there’s a little of the tartness (maybe not the right word?) that comes with raisin. Raisins are sweet, but they have that little bit of bite to them, too. I’m getting some of that here. For my palate, though, this coffee is an absolute orange bomb and that fresh squeezed orange juice hit rides right to the finish, which is sweet but also leaves a dry feeling on my palate after the coffee is out of my mouth. The aftertaste is orange, of course, but also something that reminds me some of tomato, a bit of tobacco of all things after about a minute, coming from the roast, and some nutmeg and cinnamon hints are in there, too. As the cup continues to cool I’m finding a bit of that sweet lemon that I found to be the dominant flavor in the espresso I was pulling with this coffee. All in, this is a nice coffee. It’s sweet and very easy drinking, but also has enough complexity for us coffee geeks to parse out. The flavors here really work nicely together and this coffee has a lot of structure. The orange is really apparent in the flavor and has an exuberant, “wake up and get at the day!” quality to it that I really love!