Embrace Coffee Roasting Mexico La Yerba

Good morning and welcome to today’s review where I get to try my first coffee from a new-to-me roaster, Embrace Coffee Roasting. For some reason I’ve been craving a coffee from Mexico lately and this is exactly what I got from Embrace, so let’s check this out!

Embrace Coffee Roasting

Purchase this coffee for $15/12oz (340g)


EMBRACE COFFEE ROASTING MEXICO LA YERBA

Embrace Coffee Roasters is a one-man operation based in Seattle, Washington. Scoping Embrace’s Instagram, it looks like the first post for the company popped up about a year ago. Embrace’s founder/owner/roaster/packer/shipper/deliverer has a history in coffee going back to 2013 with Joe Coffee Company in Philadelphia and New York, Regard Coffee Roasters in British Columbia and most recently in Seattle. He is roasting out of Conduit Coffee in Seattle and was nice enough to send a couple of coffees my way to share with you, dear readers!

This morning’s coffee is Embrace’s Mexico La Yerba. This is a coffee lot from all female producers in La Yerba, Nayarit, Mexico. This community grows two of my favorite things, coffee and avocadoes! This is a natural process coffee, grown at a pretty low (relatively) 956masl and it’s Caturra, Mundo Nova and Bourbon varieties. Embrace says we can expect, “a sweet and rich aroma of gummy bears. After brewing this coffee, expect to taste semi-sweet dark chocolate as a base with a juicy, small stonefruit finish – think plums and apricots.” Soundsa awesome!

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 with Kalita 155 filter. Grinder is a Knock Aergrind and I pulse pour through a Melodrip to minimize agitation during brewing. This coffee got a 35 second bloom and a total brew time of 3:30.

The aroma on this coffee is big and sweet with tons of caramel in it for me. During brewing I was getting a lot of that “natural” aroma from it, which is hard for me to describe well, but comes with every natural I’ve ever brewed… fruity, a little fermenty, and this one had a little spiciness or peppery note to it, too. Taking a sip, I’m surprised by a big, heavy, full body with a slick, oatmeal stout-like mouthfeel to the coffee. This coffee is one of the heaviest bodied coffees I’ve had in a while and it’s borderline chewy! Taking a sip I’m getting the caramel the aroma promised, and lots of it. Falling in quickly behind all that sweetness I’m getting a lot of “red fruits”… there’s some really ripe strawberry here for me, plums for sure, too. In the mid sip there’s a hint of tartness, like you’d get from the skin of a plum, and that also gives me an apricot vibe, too. This coffee is sweet throughout and the finish is no exception. I do get a little bit of a drying sensation on my tongue in the aftertaste, a little like drinking black tea, and there is actually quite a bit of black tea in the aftertaste with a hint of that black peppery tone I got from the aroma, too.

I love this coffee! The heavy mouthfeel is a dream, the complexity gives me a lot to think about when I’m drinking it and I love the mix of flavors this cup has to offer. For such a low altitude coffee, this is really a big surprise and I can’t recommend it enough!