Good morning, and welcome to today’s review! I’m having a taste of Anchor Hourse Coffee Roasters’ Brazilian natural to start the day off, so let’s get to slurping!
Purchase this coffee for $16/16oz
ANCHOR HOUSE COFFEE ROASTERS BRAZIL PORTA ROSSA
Anchor House is a new roasting operation located in Buckley, Washington, east of Tacoma and in the shadow of Mt. Rainier. They got their start around the end of summer 2019 and sent me some samples to try out in October. I wrote this review a few months ago and in a weird series of events, never posted it! This coffee is still available from Anchor House, so let’s see what I thought…
This morning’s coffee is Porta Rossa, a natural process coffee from Brazil that Anchor House calls a medium roast. They say this coffee is, “easy on the mouth, but strong enough to stand up through pulled espresso if so desired” and give us tasting notes of, “sweet prunes, berry, cinnamon, Mexican chocolate, walnut.” This is a natural coffee, which means it is picked and sorted, then dried with the coffee cherry whole and intact like a big raisin. This tends to impart fruity notes, body and sweetness to coffees. This coffee visually looks to be on the darker side of medium for me, although there is no visible oil on the surface so it was dropped out of the roaster before hitting second crack, for sure. It grinds super easy in my Knock Aergrind, but Brazilian coffees tend to be a softer bean in the first place.
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 Kalita 155 filter. I pour through a Melodrip to minimize agitation and this coffee took a total of 3:45 to brew, including a 30-second bloom. Anchor House states a 1:14 ratio works well for this coffee and to let it cool to evolve the flavor and sweetness, advice I fully get behind!
I’m getting a lot of chocolate from the aroma with just a hint of roastiness. Taking a sip, I’m getting a lot of caramel sweetness and milk chocolate. There is a bit of berry-like acidity in the cup, but I wouldn’t try to nail down a specific berry. This acidity hits the sides of my tongue and back of my throat and it adds dimension and brightness to this coffee so it’s not just a sugar bomb. I wish I had a full bag of this coffee to play with as espresso because I’m sure it works nicely that way, too. There is a bit of nuttiness in this coffee, leaning toward walnut. I’m getting a creaminess and a hint of dairy from this coffee, I think because of that acidity and sweetness together. There is a hint of roast to the cup, but it’s not a dominant flavor and it works fine here. I’m getting apple juice in the sweetness and some malic acidity, associated with apples and pears among other fruits. This coffee has a refreshing, “coolness” to it because of that. This coffee finishes sweet and I get some roast, apple, chocolate and walnut in the aftertaste. This is a super easy drinking coffee that would probably hold up to a hit of milk well, too. I would definitely rank this as a crowd-pleaser and I’m enjoying it very much!