Good morning and welcome to today’s review! I’m starting the week off with Buckley Blend from Anchor House Coffee Roasters in Washington. Thanks for joining me!
Purchase this coffee directly for $16/16oz
ANCHOR HOUSE COFFEE ROASTERS BUCKLEY BLEND
Anchor House Coffee Roasters appear to have gotten their start in Buckley, Washington in the summer of 2019. Buckley is east of Tacoma and sits near Mt. Rainier, the iconic mountain that make such a beautiful background for Seattle’s skyline. Their Buckley Blend is obviously an homage to the town where Anchor House set up shop and they say, “This coffee is our representation of the hard-working community we’re part of. It is a versatile coffee for any brew method, but bridges the gap between specialty coffee and the nostalgic cup of coffee our Dads drank in the morning.”
This is a medium roast blend with beans in it from Brazil, Colombia and Ethiopia that are a mix of processes (my guess is washed coffees from Brazil and Colombia and natural process from Ethiopia). Anchor House gives tasting notes of, “blueberry, dark chocolate, molasses cookie.” I’m using my standard pourover setup for this coffee, which is a Trinity Origin dripper with Kalita 155 filter and a Knock Aergrind grinder. I’m using a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water and I pulse pour through a Melodrip to minimize agitation of the coffee bed during brewing.
The aroma from this coffee is of darkly caramelized sugar. Taking a sip, this is a medium bodied coffee that is exactly what I would expect of a blend… balanced, sweet, approachable, easy to drink. Words like this is why coffee roasters invented blending! On the front end of the sip I’m getting some caramel notes in the low end, as well as a lot of red apple and some apple juice sweetness and malic acidity. Acidity brings high notes to coffee, dimension to the cup, interest, and balance to the sweetness that comes out in roasting, so acidity in coffee is a good thing most of the time. Malic acid is found in apples, pears, grapes and other fruits and it usually gives me heavy apple vibes, personally. In the second half of the sip toward the finish, I was getting some nice blueberry notes, but they were fleeting and my palate attenuated to them pretty quickly. Blueberry was certainly here in the mix, though, for about 5-6 sips before I lost it. Around the mid-sip and into the finish I get some semi-sweet chocolate notes and there is darker chocolate in the finish and especially aftertaste. This coffee finishes sweet and, surprisingly to me, there is really no roast note to talk about here.
Anchor House’s Buckly Blend is all I can ask for from a blend. The point of most blends is to try to take the best qualities of various single origin coffees and put them together to either complement or contrast each other’s flavors. Most specialty roasters use a signature blend as the “house coffee”… something that works well on a drip machine and holds up as it waits for the next customer who wants a cup to go. Like I said before, they are usually well-behaved, pretty straightforward, drinkable, approachable and familiar. Anchor House even says, not in so many words, that this is their gateway coffee between the traditional American cup of Joe and specialty coffee and I agree. I can’t imagine too many “regular American coffee drinkers” who wouldn’t like this if it were served to them, but at the same time, a seasoned veteran like me finds plenty to enjoy here, too. Bravo to Anchor House, this is a daily drinker if I ever tasted one, and for all the right reasons!