Good morning and welcome to today’s review of my first taste of coffee from new-to-me roaster, Tobra Coffee! I’m taking a look at their light roast Breakfast Blend, so let’s dig in!
Purchase this coffee directly for $11/12oz
TOBRA COFFEE BREAKFAST BLEND
Tobra Coffee was started in 2013 by Shane and Jessica Monroy, lifelong residents of Tekoa Washington. Tekoa is a little town of about 770-ish people (2010 census data) in the southeast corner of Washington state. The couple doesn’t say what got them into the coffee business, but that they roast all Fair Trade certified coffee and are committed to providing premium coffee to the people of the Pacific Northwest. They roast on a Diedrich infrared roaster, with training from the man himself.
This morning’s coffee is Tobra’s Breakfast Blend, which they call a light roast. This coffee was a 2019 Bronze Medal winner in the Golden Bean Awards, but other than that, the Tobra website doesn’t detail anything else about this coffee, so I can’t tell you anything else about this coffee, unfortunately. Breakfast Blend is described as, “Well balanced and smooth. Hints of graham, chocolate, cherry.”
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 dripper with a Kalita 185 filter. My grinder is a Knock Aergrind and I pulse pour through a Melodrip to control agitation during brewing. This coffee got a 30-second bloom and the total time was about 3:15.
The aroma from this coffee is sweet with light caramelized sugars and a hint of graham crackers or a crusty sweetened bread. Taking a sip, I’m getting all the sweetness I hoped for from the aroma, but a lot of brightness, too. This is a medium bodied coffee with a low end anchored by light caramel flavors and that sweet crusty note (that doesn’t sound as good as it tastes! LOL) I found in the aroma. There is some fruity brightness here, too, and I am getting a lot of cherry from this coffee. Whereas in espresso cherry usually reads as a more tart component, here I’m getting more of a cherry pie filling tone to the fruit. There’s a round, soft citrus here that reads as orange juice and a ton of chocolate in the second half of the sip for me. Ironically, cocoa and chocolate flavors are a little hard for me to suss out of coffees, but this Breakfast Blend has a HUGE chocolate bar (think something like Hershey’s) note in it for me! The finish on this coffee is sweet and the aftertaste lingers with a lot of the fruitiness on my palate and a cocoa note. I also am getting some reminders in the finish and aftertaste of a pipe tobacco called Cult Blood Red Moon. This is flavored with cherry and vanilla and there’s definitely tobacco notes in the finish here, so I know that’s a very specific descriptor, but there you have it!
I think Tobra achieved everything they wanted to with this coffee. Blends are intended to be easy drinking and inviting. There is some complexity here to dig into but this is definitely a crowd-pleaser of a coffee, with familiar flavors that work extremely well with one another… caramel, sweet crust, cherry pie filling, orange, milk chocolate? I mean, come on! And the price is very right for a coffee like this! My only gripe is not having the information my geeky heart desires when it comes to origins and information about the coffees and farms, but not every consumer is like me. It’s nice to have access to that info, though, for those of us who are cursed in that way! LOL