Good morning and welcome to today’s review! The world is still in lockdown as we try to slow the spread of Covid-19 and I have a local coffee to share with you from Cacophony Coffee Roasters based right here in Kansas City. Let’s get to it!
Contact Thad directly via email to inquire about what is currently available at thdcrsn@gmail.com
Other reviews in this series: Amoureaux de la Nuit espresso/dark roast
CACOPHONY COFFEE ROASTERS INDONESIAN SULAWESI TORAJA GR.1 ORGANIC RANTEKARUA ESTATE
Cacophony Coffee Roasters is the brainchild of Thad Carson, a Kansas City-based mountain biker and wildman. Thad has been roasting coffee commercially since 2018 and his cool little trailer can be found around town most weekends and at bike events (well, not during social distancing times, but things will go back to normal) where he serves coffee and local 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.
This morning’s coffee is a mouthful: Indonesian Sulawesi Toraja Gr. 1 Organic Rantekarua Estate and my bag was roasted on 3/6. I’ve been storing my beans in my new favorite thing, Craig Lyn Studio Bean Cellars, and, yes, I am a nerd and I also like stuff, so it doesn’t take much to part me from my money. They really do work nicely and are handy, though, especially for the espresso machine.
Thad couldn’t tell me too much about this coffee, but I did some investigative work and I know he orders quite a bit from Burman Coffee Traders. I found a listing for this coffee, sold out now, on their website and I assume this is the one. I could be wrong as Rantekarua Estate is a sizable operation and in addition to wet-hulled coffees characteristic of Indonesia, they also produce washed coffees. I’m sure this is wet-hulled, though, just based on taste. Let’s unpack what all the words in this coffee’s name mean and learn a little about Indonesia and the coffee business there, first.
Indonesia is a massive chain of islands found between SE Asia and Australia. Sulawesi is one of the islands, and it’s huge and is sort of like 4 peninsulas coming off a central landmass. It’s all panhandle (if you’re a Crime in Sports or Small Town Murder podcast fan you know what I’m talking about)! Tana Toraja is a regency (probably the equivalent of a state here in the USA) found between West Sulawesi and South Sulawesi, so that gives us our first three words in the coffee’s name. Rantekarua Estate is located near Bittuang and the farm was originally established by the Dutch company, Van Dijk, then nationalized when Indonesia gained independence in 1945. It became overgrown forest until 1987, when it was purchased and rehabilitated into coffee growing land. The estate is 1200 hectares in total, with 700 planted for coffee. They grow different varieties here and the bag I have from Cacophony has some normal sized beans, some small-ish ones, and some that are so tiny and cute they look like teeny weeny little reproductions of coffee beans for dollhouses! I’m not kidding, there are some REALLY tiny beans in the mix here. Coffee grows around 1400-1700masl here and this area is remote, rough and rocky.
This is most likely a wet-hulled coffee, which is a cofee process mostly only found in this part of the world. In wet-hulling, the cherries are ruptured and the coffee is fermented, washed, soaked and usually while it’s still pretty green the parchment is removed, then it’s dried. In traditional washing processes, the parchment is left on, which adds a layer of protection to the coffee while it dries out. Coffee beans are basically little sponges and wet-hulled coffees have gotten a bad rap in the past because they may get laid out on driveways, yards, etc to dry out, then while still pretty wet chucked into burlap sacks to be sold quickly to the next middleman, then the next, and the next, etc while the moist beans are getting funkier and funkier in the bag. Indonesian coffees can be weird and have all sorts of off flavors that coffee snobs give them a pass for because of wet-hulling, but that they would be absolutely horrified by if a washed or natural from any other part of the world had. In the second wave of coffee, your classic roasters like Peet’s and Starbucks got around the weirdness of wet-hulling by blasting these coffees into incinerated territory and masking any off flavors to begin with. Of course, wet-hulling can be done more carefully, too, as is the case of Rantekarua Estate, and these coffees can be roasted light, like in the case of Cacophony’s bag here. Burman says this coffee is best in the light-medium range and that it is, “low acidity, thick and creamy, with some soft fruit tones.”
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. My grinder for pourovers is a Knock Aergrind. I pulse pour through a Melodrip to minimize agitation of the coffee bed during brewing. This coffee got a 40 second bloom and the total brew time was a snappy 2:45.
The aroma from this coffee is sweet and frustrating! There’s something here that is so familiar, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. It’s striking me as sort of a bread crust note, but, man, there’s something that my mind wants to connect to this aroma that it just can’t. Stupid brain! LOL I’m getting hints of distinctly “Indonesian” coffee smells that, again, doesn’t help you dear readers much… a savory aroma, not unlike the tomato notes I get from time to time in Kenyan coffees. Taking a sip, this is a medium-bodied coffee with a lot going on right off the bat.
Up front I’m getting some of that savory note, which reminds me a lot of the tomato note I mentioned before (acidity + savoriness), but less tomatoey, if that makes any sense. There is a honey like sweetness to the cup balanced by some nice, soft, round acidity that, again, I’m having trouble nailing down. I don’t know if this coffee is just eluding my ability to connect flavors or if it’s because I don’t drink a ton of Indonesian coffees that I’m having trouble, but I feel like a novice trying to describe what I’m tasting. The acidity here is more vegetable-like than fruity, again, I keep coming back to that acidity I associate with tomatoes, only without the actual tomato flavor that comes with them. Tomatoes are mostly citric, malic and ascorbic acid. Minus the vitamin C, citric and malic are both very common in coffee. Citric acids are found in citrus fruits, of course, so we’re talking orange, lemon, lime, grapefruit while malic acid is found in apples, pears and things like that. I’m getting the brightness of citrus with that cool, less sharp malic character. There is some wood to be found here, not uncommon in Indonesian coffees. A little Spanish cedar (I know that from my cigar humidor) and some incense cedar (from good quality woodcase pencils) can be found in the cup and there is a slightly dry finish that reminds me of that dry feeling my palate gets when chewing on a toothpick or a popsicle stick for a while. In the aftertaste I’m getting some of that bread crust note I picked up in the aroma. Maybe a little bit of graham cracker in there, too. As the cup cools to close to room temperature the acidity actually picks up a little bit and takes on more obvious citrus-ness for me. It’s a little more tomato-like at the same time, and I can’t nail down a specific citrus fruit, but it’s more citrusy and less appley as it cools, I can say that. A little blood orange, but it’s probably more of some obscure citrus fruit I’ve never tasted! LOL
I have to say, none of what I’m writing above sounds super appealing, but this is a good cup of coffee! There’s something… alien… about Indonesian coffees and they can be quite a bit different from other origins and it’s causing a struggle for me, but the bottom line is that this is a sweet coffee, very easy drinking, and it’s loaded with interesting subtlety for the most discerning coffee dork to spend loads of time trying to figure out. I’m looking forward to drinking the rest of this bag of coffee and really trying to learn from it and understand it more. It’s coffees like this that keep this interesting for me and I love that micro roasters like Cacophony are willing to tackle them and share them with us!