Good morning and welcome to today’s review. It’s day whatever of sheltering-at-home for Covid-19 and we need something else to talk about, so how about coffee?! LOL This morning I’m taking a taste of my first coffee (I think) from Timor, courtesy of Rob Beans. Let’s dive in!
Purchase this coffee directly from Rob for $20/12oz
ROB BEANS TIMOR
Oh, and before we jump into this coffee, let me address the date-on-bag thing I’m sure some readers wonder about. Coffee comes in at totally unpredictable rates and times and sometimes I have the capacity to do a lot of reviews in a week and other times I can barely get one out. I am a fan of freezing samples, so sometimes the bag date looks pretty old, but I’m sampling the coffee in a fresh state. When I get a new bag of coffee I take a decent portion out and freeze it properly for when I’m ready for my official review. Anyway… The last time I wrote about Rob Beans (Roasted By Rob in a Garage in Glendale, CA), I called him a man of mystery because his site was all about the coffee and not about himself at all, which was cool, but I always think it’s cool, too, to know a little about the person/people behind the company. Maybe a coincidence, or maybe in response to my review, Rob has added a “Who is Rob?” page to his website. Rob was an East Coaster until he moved to California in 2013 and his day job is being a freelance art director in the advertising industry. Rob’s entry into coffee was through cold brew, and trying all sorts of locally roasted coffees to see how they would fare brewed that way. In a reversal of all things normal, Rob flew to Guatemala and did a farm origin trip, then came back and launched Rob Beans, officially, on January 1, 2019.
Rob contacted me recently, quite excited about this new coffee he is roasting from Timor. This coffee is a washed coffee from East Timor, Indonesia, grown in various regions at 800-1600masl. The coffee was produced by Cooperativa Cafe Timor (CCT) and this lot is Bourbon and Timor Hybrid varieties grown in the Ainaro, Ermera and Lequisa regions of East Timor. This is fair trade and organic and Rob says this coffee has, “Earthy deep coffee flavor, typical to the Indonesian region and very delicious.” CCT was established in 1994 and obtained fair trade certification in 2001. Most of the farmers who work with CCT have less than a hectare of land. Some of the coffee in East Timor dates back 400 years, planted by Portuguese colonists, but the region has had problems with leaf rust and a lot of coffee has been replanted with a rust-resistant variety developed there called “Hibrido de Timor” or Timor Hydrid. Coffee grows all over the place in the huge island chain of Indonesia, but everything I’ve had has come from Sumatra, on the western end of the archipelago, Java and Sulawesi.
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 is a Knock Aergrind (and, pro tip I just figure out this morning… If you have one and the grounds catcher is a little hard to pull off, it’s because the o-ring is dry. Wipe a microscopic amount of mineral oil or some other food safe lube around that o-ring (I mean a TINY amount) and it will feel like a new grinder) and I pulse pour through a Melodrip to minimize agitation of the brew bed. This coffee was a quick one and got a 30 second bloom with a total brew time of 2:50.
The aroma from this coffee is giving me a lot of bread crust, of all things. Maybe a hint of cocoa, but definitely crusty bread. Taking a sip, this is a medium+ bodied coffee with a lot going on, all of which tastes somewhat “foreign” to my palate. Oh, and I’m also trying to new approach to describing body… I’ve always used light, light-medium, medium, medium-heavy, heavy, but that struck me as confusing, so I’m going to use a +/- system for a while and see how that goes. Getting back to the coffee, Indos are always a little intimidating for me because I don’t drink a lot of them, so my vocabulary isn’t as developed as it is for other regions I drink a lot more of, and they can have some very different flavors going on, which is probably more true of wet hulled coffees from the region than washed ones like this one. This coffee is sweet and bright and reads like a Guatemalan to me now that the cup is cooling and opening up. There is a light honey sweetness to it, followed by an interesting brightness/fruitiness/acidity component that is quite unlike anything I’ve tasted recently. I’m getting something apple-like (so, there are malic acids in this coffee) and a bit of citrus, too, but without the harder edges of citric acid. I’m getting more of like an orange juice concentrate vibe from it, so citrus but sweet. This high note in the cup is definitely the main player in this coffee. I’m getting green apple notes throughout the sip and in the aftertaste I get hints of green apple Jolly Rancher. There’s a bit of orange juice concentrate here, too, although now that I hit on green apple that’s the main thing I’m tasting. Before I decided green apple, I feel like I was getting more citrus out of the cup. LOL This is the power of the mind and how much it influences flavor, and vice versa! This coffee is bright and fresh, but it’s super sweet, too. The finish is sweet with a lot of apple notes in it for me. It has a lingering aftertaste that eventually gets dry on my palate and has a hint of woodiness to it, but it’s not an incense cedar bomb like Indonesian coffees can be at times. The woodiness is subtle. I may be getting some hints of baking spices, too, like cinnamon, ginger, etc. Definitely cinnamon in the second half of the sip. That may be the woodiness I was getting. It’s more cinnamon-apple now, as opposed to wood, for me.
I’m all over the place this morning, but that’s how coffee tasting goes sometimes! This coffee is fun to drink because I feel like it changes a lot as it goes through its cooling. I’m always an advocate of tasting coffee at cooler temps, anyway, but they usually hit sort of a “sweet spot” and don’t change a whole lot after that, but this coffee seems to keep developing as it cools. This coffee has a quality to it that I won’t call “juiciness” because that’s not the right word, but it’s similar in effect. “Juicy” coffees tend to hit the sides of your tongue and cheeks and incite salivation and a sense of wanting to drink more, faster. This coffee has that “I just want to chug a gallon of it right now” effect on me, but without the mouthfeel or salivation that I associate with what I would call a “juicy” coffee. This coffee is a gulper, for sure. It’s delicious, relatively simple but at the same time has some nice complexity if you want to ruminate on it. I see why Rob was excited about this coffee, it’s really, really good!