Good morning and welcome to today’s review! I’m checking out another coffee from Starved Rock Coffee Co., their Kenya Kiandu. Slurp!
Starved Rock Coffee Co. website
Purchase this coffee for $22/12oz directly
Other reviews in this series: Organic Ethiopia
STARVED ROCK COFFEE CO. KENYA KIANDU
Starved Rock Coffee Co. was founded by Matt and Jill McLaughlin, lifelong residents of the Illinois Valley area west/southwest of Chicago. They have five (5!) kids and coffee started as a simple pleasure, then became a business idea. They trained experts in the field and it looks like the company got its start in late 2017. Starved Rock started out on a San Franciscan roaster, and more recent photos in my Instaresearch, showed they were roasting on a Probat, so they’re not just playing around with this whole coffee thing!
Where did the McLaughlin’s get the name of their company from? Starved Rock is a popular state park outside of Chicago in the Illinois Valley. In the 1760’s, battles were going on between two tribes of indigenous people (humans have inhabited Starved Rock since 8000BC!) and their allies. A band of Illinois tribespeople took refuge atop the sandstone butte that is the “rock” in the name, and was surrounded by the enemy tribes where they eventually succumbed to starvation. Today, the park is a beautiful, peaceful refuge for people to get out of the city and enjoy a little nature.
This morning’s coffee is Starved Rock’s Kenya Kiandu. This is a coffee from Tetu, Nyeri, Kenya. Nyeri is coffee-growing ground zero in Kenya. As I pointed out in my previous review, the only thing missing for me in Starved Rock’s presentation (LOVE that pearlescent copper stamping on their bags) is the geek info on the website. I want to know varieties, geography, washing station, altitude, all that stuff! So, we don’t know anything more about this coffee other than where it’s from, and Starved Rock give us tasting notes of, “Sweet and caramelly with a juicy acidity and notes of citrus, red grape and rich brown sugar.” Right away, I can tell this isn’t going to be the “usual” Kenyan coffee (as if an entire country’s coffee profile can be summed up in a few tasting notes), but this is why I’d be curious about the varieties. The classic SL-28 grown commonly in Kenya is what I’ve seen attributed to those grapefruit notes we know and love so much in Kenyan coffee, so I wonder if this coffee isn’t SL-28, or if the differences in flavor profiles come down to how it’s roasted, or what? In any case, let’s taste!
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 3-hole dripper with a Kalita 155 filter. My grinder is a Knock Aergrind and I pulse pour through a Melodrip to minimize agitation of the coffee bed during brewing. This coffee got a 30 second bloom and the total brew time came in around 4:00.
Taking a sip, this is a medium- bodied coffee for me, maybe even light+. This is a bright, light, almost effervescent coffee for me with a lot of flavors going on that will take some concentration to parse out. “Juicy” definitely comes to mind here. I know this sounds super stupid to write, but this is a very “wet” feeling coffee on my palate. The sweetness here is very fruit-juicy, too, reading as a light caramel or honey to me. There’s a lot of red grape in the flavors, maybe even a hint of purple Concord grape juice. This Concord grape comes up a bit more if I hold the coffee in my mouth and take little breaths out my nose (retronasal tasting). On the citrus side of things I’m getting tangerine instead of the expected grapefruit tones that Kenyan coffees are so famous for. In the cooled cup (I’m about at room temperature here), there is more body to the coffee and I’m getting even more sweetness and more of a brown sugar note in the low end, kicking in after the midsip and toward the finish. The finish is sweet and there’s a little dryness on my palate in the aftertaste, which has a lot more of that purple grape juice lingering between sips. This coffee is really a grape bomb, and it’s a sugar bomb, too, but somehow it doesn’t fall into the trap of being cloying. It’s bright, but the brightness and fruitiness of the cup somehow accentuates the sugars in all those fruits rather than the acidity, if that makes sense, so I can’t imagine someone mistaking all this brightness as “sour.” Of course, all those fruit notes ARE from acids, so that’s where the balance in this coffee is coming from to offset the sugary sweetness. This is a delicious cup, different from the prototypical “Kenyan profile” of upfront acidity and grapefruit notes (which I also love). This is a superb coffee!
On a side note, since I haven’t been going to work as much and sharing my overage with other faculty and students, I’ve been re-visiting coffees to see how they hold up. This one is a couple months off roast and I know how much people hate when I talk about this, but it still tastes awesome without any off-flavors or unpleasantness. Let’s be honest, once you taste this coffee it won’t last long, anyway, but just in case, it seems to hold up with age very nicely! LOL