Good morning and welcome to today’s review, and to Friday! Yay! This morning I have the undeniable cutest coffee in the world, peaberry! Take us away, SteamDot!
Purchase this coffee directly for $18/12oz
Other reviews in this series: Rebuild Women’s Hope (Congo) | Finca Los Lesquines Lot #44 (Honduras)
STEAMDOT GAKURARI PEABERRY
SteamDot is a specialty coffee roaster and cafe that was founded in Anchorage, Alaska in 2009. The name is a play on the big red shed they first occupied in the historic rail yards across from the parking area for locomotives. SteamDot says, “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.” SteamDot has grown to three cafes in Anchorage, plus the roastery, and they’re the first “dot” on the KC Coffee Geek map for Alaskan coffee roasters, too!
This morning, I’m taking a taste of SteamDot’s Gakurari Peaberry. This coffee is a lot built from the work of 500 smallholder farmers who are members of the Gatunyo-Kigio Farmers Cooperative Society. In Kenya, most coffee farmers are smallholders with very small plots. As such, the common practice there is that coffee farmers join co-ops like Gatunyo-Kigio who also usually own their own “factories.” Kenyan coffee factories are not behemoths belching dark smoke into the sky, it’s just the name given to the place where coffee is collected, sorted, broken down into lots, then processed to remove the cherries from the seeds inside… what we call coffee beans. Gakurari is one factory owned by this co-op. Gakurari is in Muran’ga County and coffee grows around 1650masl there. This is a washed coffee that was processed in the “Kenyan” process of a long fermentation cycle followed by multiple types of drying regimen. Peaberry coffee beans, which I think are the cutest of all coffee beans, are a genetic mutation where only one seed grows in the coffee cherry instead of two. When two seeds (beans) grow in a normal coffee cherry, that’s the cause of the characteristic round on one side, flat on the other shape of a coffee bean. As they grow together, the part pressed up against the other bean is flat. Peaberries have nothing to push against, so they take on this characteristic soccer ball or American football shape.
Traditionally, Kenyan coffee producers separate coffee by size, with AA being the biggest, followed by AB, and etc. Peaberries are also separated and it was once thought that they are extra sweet becuase one bean gets all the love from the coffee cherry, but this isn’t the case. They are cute, though! SteamDot gives us tasting notes of, “Mandarin orange, caramel, savory” for this coffee.
I’m brewing this morning’s coffee with my usual pourover setup of a 1:16 ratio of 352g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin dripper with Kalita 155 filter. My grinder is a Knock Aergrind and I use a Melodrip to control my kettle pours and minimize agitation of the coffee bed. This coffee got a 30 second bloom and went for a total of 3:30 including the bloom.
I feel like I haven’t tasted Kenyan coffee in forever! The aroma is, well, Kenyan! It’s coffee, of course, and there’s a dense sweetness in the nose, but there’s a hint of savory here, too, that sort of tomato-like aroma or flavor that isn’t uncommon in Kenyan coffee. Taking a sip, this is a medium-heavy bodied coffee with a lot of presence on my palate and a slick mouthfeel like an oatmeal stout. In the flavor, there is orange here for sure. On the low end, I’m getting a medium to dark caramel sweetness with that slight bitterness that comes from a dark caramelized sugar. Right in the front of the sip I’m getting blood orange and concentrated orange juice notes that sit across my tongue like my wife’s weighted blanket. In the mid sip I am getting some savory tones… combine acidity of the citrus notes with the savory flavor and that’s where it starts tasting tomatoey. My first few sips had hints of straight up tomato juice and I attenuated some, but there is a decent amount to be pulled out of this coffee if I leave it in my mouth for a few seconds before sending it down my throat. I know tomato always sounds weird in coffee, but it’s delicious and I love it in Kenyan coffees. This coffee finishes sweet but has that nice burnt sugar bitterness quite strong in the second half of the sip, too. For me, this flavor offers balance to all the sweetness and a lot of dimension and interest to this coffee. The aftertaste has loads of orange lingering on my palate with some cocoa-like notes and a nice smoky note in the long finish like someone in the neighborhood might be burning leaves outside on a crisp Autumn night.
I’m loving this coffee and that first sip told me I’d be a fan. Kenyan coffees can be bracing, very bright, full of citrus and somewhat in-your-face. I think SteamDot have taken the roast into a little more developed territory where the citrus is muted a tad, but that brings out so many great other flavors in this coffee. I’ll bet they’re walking a tightrope with this peaberry, though, because a bit more roast would probably put it too far in that direction for me. As it stands, this coffee has big presence on my palate and a very inviting mouthfeel. The coffee also has a lot of structure… each flavor is very well defined, to my palate, and it’s like walking around a house where every room has its own distinct theme, yet the whole works well together. This coffee isn’t a tomato bomb, but that savory component is nice, and the citrus is just delicious. Gakurari produced about 200 bags (the big 60kg ones) of coffee in this season, so I am thankful SteamDot got some! Don’t pass on this coffee!