Snowy Elk Coffee Co. The Angler (Colombia)

Good morning and welcome to today’s review where I’m tasting Snowy Elk Coffee Co.’s The Angler for the first time. This is a new-to-me coffee roasters, so let’s check it out!

Snowy Elk Coffee Co. 

Purchase this coffee for $14/12oz

Wyoming Tribune Eagle article


SNOWY ELK COFFEE CO. THE ANGLER (COLOMBIA)

Snowy Elk Coffee Co. was started in Cheyenne, Wyoming by Scott and Julie Gondzar in Jan. 2018. With a background in beer brewing, Scott developed a gluten intolerance and switched his palate and attention to detail to coffee instead. It looks like Snowy Elk took off fast, with a cafe and good distribution of their beans locally and across the country. In 2019, Snowy Elk took two bronze medals in the Golden Bean Awards for milk based espresso for their Morning Bugle and Base Camp blends, and a bronze for their decaf, Corpse Pose. The Snowy Elk gang are affiliated with the Roasters Guild, Specialty Coffee Associations, Barista Guild of America and the Coffee Technicians Guild. Even though the cafe is temporarily closed due to Covid-19, Snowy Elk is continuing to roast and ship coffee, and any orders over $45 ship free.

This morning I am trying out Snowy Elk’s The Angler, which is a dark roast Colombian coffee. This is a washed coffee, but beyond that, the website doesn’t provide additional sourcing and origin information. Snowy Elk says The Angler is, “A rich and dynamic roast, with a smooth sweetness and low acidity.”

I’m using my standard pourover setup for this coffee, which is a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin with Kalita 155 filter. I pulse pour through a Melodrip to minimize agitation during brewing. My grinder for pourovers is a Knock Aergrind. This coffee got a 30 second bloom and the total time for the brew, bloom included, was a quick 2:40. I also pulled this coffee as espresso and the parameters and results of that are at the end of the article.

Visually, it looks like this coffee rolled into and through second crack (the second set of sounds that coffee beans make while roasting… to be drinkable, in most people’s opinion, it has to get through first crack, and then there are usually a couple minutes between first and second where a lot of flavor development happens) as there is quite a bit of surface oil pooling on these beans. They have a beautiful uniform color and size and it LOOKS like a nicely done dark roast, for sure. I have a love-hate relationship with dark roast coffees created by the very nature of what a dark roast is. As coffee roasts, the lighter it is, the more of its individuality you will taste. So, lighter roasts tend to have more individual character, more of the flavors associated with various acids come through, etc. But these are also bright coffees, relatively speaking, and can come off as “acidic” to people, especially if their only prior experience has been mass produced coffee or darker roasts. As the roast proceeds, you start to burn off or cover up some of these “origin characteristics” and the flavors become more about the roast… caramelized sugars, smokiness, etc. So, inherently, at a certain point, dark roasts start to all taste a lot alike because the things that made those coffees unique, initially, are gone, and the flavors being enhanced are coming from the nuances of the roasting itself. It’s like if you had 4 cuts of beef. If you lightly cooked them to rare, let’s say, you’d get a different experience and different set of flavors than if you took them all to hockey puck doneness. At that point, they’re all going to be pretty much the same. So, the art of doing dark roasts, in my opinion, is to ride the line between the qualities people like in dark roasts while still keeping some origin characteristics. Dark roasts are very popular, especially in the USA, and I suspect it’s because the flavors are familiar to the type of coffee people are generally exposed to first here, as well as the fact that they are nice vehicles for cream and sugar. I’m convinced the USA has way more cream and sugar drinkers than coffee drinkers, but that’s an opinion for a different day!

In the cup, the aroma is giving off darkly caramelized sugars, a bit of cocoa and some roast notes. Taking a sip, this is medium+ bodied coffee, maybe even a heavy-, with a big presence on my palate. Up front I’m getting dark caramelized sugars and a lot of roastiness that sits like a smoky blanket over my palate. Underneath that blanket, though, I’m getting some citrus acidity barely peeking out and a nice bitterness (there is a good kind, and this is it!) that balances the sweetness in this cup. I really like this bitter note, it reminds me some of the herbal type of bitterness in Italian amaro or other similar aperitif liquers. This adds a really nice balance to the cup. The finish here is sweet and I’m getting a hint of orange and a buttery aftertaste that lingers for a long time that I’m not sure I’ve ever really noticed in coffee before. It’s reminding me of the butter on movie theatre popcorn for some reason.

I like this coffee, and it’s well done. It’s a dark enough roast that fans of dark roasts will love it, but there’s enough origin peeking through the roast notes to still give it some of its own character. It’s hard to have a roast this dark and still get some citrus notes and other non-roast, non-caramelized sugar tones coming through. I don’t drink coffee with cream or sugar, usually, so I have none in the house to experiment with, but I’ve never met a dark roast that didn’t take both like a champ and there’s nothing in this cup that would suggest otherwise for The Angler.

Long time readers know that if I get a chance, I’ll pull everything as espresso, especially if it’s a dark roast, and I got lucky with The Angler. I’m enjoying shooting videos of a particular Italian espresso I have on hand right now, and my grinder (Orphan Espresso Pharos, modified to the 2.0 version) is stepless and has no indexing marks, so once it’s dialed in for a coffee I’m not adjusting it to a new coffee. It turns out it’s right in the pocket for The Angler, too! I ran some shots with 18g doses, about 27-28g in the cup in 26 seconds. There’s nice crema here and the flavors are great… tons of nuttiness, leaning toward almond, a floral note on the edges that reminded me of rose, and lots of sweetness and balance. A traditional Roman-tasting shot without the bitterness of robusta species coffees on board that traditional Italian blends have. Super good! And for those espresso nerds, I’m using a Quick Mill Carola Evo, bottomless portafilter and IMS 16/20 basket, using a Decent Espresso 58.5mm tamper.