Cacophony Coffee Roasters Amoureaux de la Nuit

Good morning and welcome to today’s review, which will hopefully be a nice diversion while you are likely in isolation/social distancing/quarantine during this Covid-19 pandemic! I’m taking a look at Cacophony Coffee Roaster’s Amoureaux de la Nuit, a darker roast blend for espresso, roasted right here in Kansas City!

Cacophony Coffee Roasters

Contact Thad directly via email to inquire about what is currently available at thdcrsn@gmail.com

CACOPHONY COFFEE ROASTERS AMOUREAUX DE LA NUIT

Cacophony Coffee Roasters is a one-man operation run by Thad Carson and a self-proclaimed micro-roaster. Thad is located here in the Kansas City metro area and he has been roasting coffee commercially since 2018. Sadly we haven’t met in person yet and so I haven’t gotten Thad’s full story, but one thing I do know is that he loves mountain bikes and is big in the MTB scene. He also has a cool little trailer that can be found around town most weekends and at bike events where he serves coffee and some local small business pastries like Hana’s donuts. Locally, Cacophony coffee can be purchased at Velo+, Epic Bike, One Star Bike and Ottawa Bikes, and if you email Thad he will gladly tell you what he has available and will ship it out. As you can imagine, as a small roaster, he is able to stay flexible with his coffee offerings and so the rotation changes quickly.

Thad sent me two coffees to try out recently, and the first one I wanted to tear into is his dark roast, Amoureaux de la Nuit (translates to Lover of the Night), which Thad recommends as espresso. This is a blend of Nicaraguan, Guatemalan and Colombian coffees and that’s all I know about their provenance. I think Thad gets a decent amount of his coffee from Burman Coffee Traders in Wisconsin, and they seem to have pretty good offerings aimed at smaller roasters. I assume these are all washed coffees in the blend, but otherwise I can’t tell you anything more about the coffees themselves. As far as the roast level goes, it’s dark, but not anything close to a French or Italian roast. There is a little oil to be seen on the surface of some of the beans, so I’m guessing it got dropped out of the roaster right as second crack was starting to happen, but that’s just a guess based on visual inspection. It’s not a traditional dark roast, dripping with oils and scorchedness, though!

My bag was roasted on 3/6/2020 and I think Thad dropped it off on 3/10. Most espresso does best once it has 7-10 days of age on it as a rule of thumb. I think I started pulling shots around day 6 off roast and it was still a little gassy and needed more time to settle down. Today is 3/18 and it’s pulling great. I decided to get all fancy-pants recently and bought some Craig Lyn bean cellars and dosed 18g doses of Amoureaux de la Nuit into them and so far they seem to work as expected.

I think you could pull a pretty good ristretto (a 1:1-ish ratio shot, so, for example, pulling 18g of espresso when you start with 18g in the portafilter) with this and a couple of my shots have gotten close to that, but I’m digging this coffee in the close-to-normale range (traditionally considered to be closer to a 1:2 ratio, so like 18g in, 36g out). For me, doing true ristretti without having a mess of channeling and other issues, I need to add pre-wetting to the mix, and that’s a lot of variables I didn’t want to mess with for this review, so I kept the grind relatively loose and got nice pulls that way.

For equipment, I’m using a Quick Mill Carola Evo that I have set at 92-94C degrees, stock factory pressure, and that has an aftermarket IMS screen and Cafelat silicone gasket. I use an aftermarket bottomless portafilter and an IMS competition precision basket rated for 16/20g (not sure why IMS uses such a large range on their sizing). For this coffee, 18g in the 16/20 basket is just right. Anything above that would be too much coffee for that basket. For a grinder, I’m using an Orphan Espresso Pharos that I upgraded myself to the 2.0 model. For process, I pray the beans with a few sprays of water to keep the static minimal, grind, dose into the portafilter, use a BPlus La Pavoni WDT tool to distribute, tap to distribute to the edges where my funnel was sitting, groom a little with my finger, finish the grooming with an OCD-style tool, then tamp with a 58.55 25lb calibrated Decent Espresso tamper. It seems to work OK! LOL This is the home espresso life.

The photos and video in this review show my shot from this morning, which was 18.2g in, 34.9g out in 25 seconds and that’s where most of my best shots have been landing around. Pulled this way, Amoureaux de la Nuit leans toward being a traditional ‘spro without any of the problems of traditional Italian espresso. Flavors are solidly in the chocolate/caramel/nuts category, which is just fine for me. The body of the shot is great… full, slightly syrupy, dense, heavy. The crema on this coffee is a dream, although that really doesn’t add anything good to espresso other than looks. And it looks awesome! I get a ton of dark chocolate out of this coffee with some dark caramel sweetness. As you can imagine, there is a good amount of bitterness to a concentrated coffee drink like espresso, as coffee is inherently bitter, but this espresso has nice balance. There are some roasty notes in the finish, but this doesn’t drink like a super-roasty, overly dark or burned coffee. It’s just right for a traditional-leaning coffee. I get a lot of roasted nuts out of the cup, too, nothing specific, like almond or pecan, but this is a nutty coffee, which works perfectly with chocolate and caramel tones. It finishes sweet and roasty with some tiny hints of fruit, and I swear something in this coffee reminds me of mint… not like a mint flavor, but there is a mint-like mouthfeel in the immediate finish and aftertaste… that pore-opening wintergreen sort of feeling of coolness.

Amoureaux de la Nuit is right in my espresso wheelhouse. I spent age 12-18 living in Rome and so that super-traditional Roman coffee bar espresso that you can find 10 times on every city block is what I cut my espresso teeth on and it’s near and dear to my heart. If the Romans pulled this espresso in their coffee bars, it’d be perfection! LOL Amoureax de la Nuit is a traditional-style espresso.. dark, minimal fruit, choc/caramel/nuts, without being over roasted. It’s perfect the way it is and my hat’s off to Thad for this blend and his roasting of it! YUM! And it’s super well-behaved. I am not a milky guy, but I assume this coffee rocks in milk drinks, especially smaller ones like cortados and macchiatos.