Good morning and welcome to today’s review where I’m checking out Barista’s Choice from Angry Barista. Let’s dive right in!
Purchase this coffee directly for $15/12oz
Angry Barista social media: Instagram | Facebook | YouTube
Intentional Espresso coffee catering website
Other reviews in this series: Day Off blend
ANGRY BARISTA BARISTA’S CHOICE
Angry Barista is Randy Matheny, who describes himself as, “Fighting for a better coffee experience. Our CBO (Chief Barista Officer) isn’t angry; Rather, by making great coffee for your office or event he’s preventing those from whom you care about from becoming angry.” Randy is the owner/founder of Angry Barista and Intentional Espresso, a mobile espresso/coffee cart, located in Portland, Oregon. Randy also offers business consulting services to the coffee industry and is an executive board member of the Oregon Coffee Board. Randy and Intentional Espresso got somewhat famous for the wrong reasons at the end of November 2018 when his trailer containing everything he uses for Intentional Espresso got stolen. It was recovered about a month later and Randy’s ties to the Portland coffee community (which is pretty great, in my own experiences) got him through that rough patch and catering the events he was obligated to work.
One of Randy’s projects is roasting coffee under the Angry Barista moniker. I’ve been following all of his socials for a long time and when he reached out to me to send a couple coffees, I was immediately excited. I like AB’s simple labeling and enjoyed the bit of surprise color in the bags. Usually kraft bags like this are all brown, but this one has a nice rust red (to my colorblind eyes) pop of color on the side panels. There’s not much you can really do with a coffee bag, so I’m always ecstatic when I see something I haven’t seen before in coffee bag aesthetics! It’s the small things, really…
On face value, it’s hard to know what the difference is between this morning’s coffee, Barista’s Choice, and the previous Angry Barista coffee, Day Off, I reviewed recently. The origins are both listed on the label as “East African and South American,” although the flavor descriptors are totally different. Digging into Angry Barista’s website, though, the differences start to reveal themselves. Day Off was a blend of two washed coffees, presumably from Ethiopia and Colombia. Barista’s Choice is “a very special South American coffee” and two Ethiopian coffees, one washed and one natural. If I had to take a wild guess, I’d say Barista’s Choice is probably Day Off with altered proportions in the blend of the Ethiopian natural component. But, it doesn’t really matter because the blends change seasonally anyway. Also, with just a little of my own roasting experience, these coffees could be the same blend roasted differently and still taste wildly different. In any case, this 3-component blend has flavors of, “Lime sweetness, cherry fruit, apricot” according to Angry Barista.
For my filter cup of this coffee I used 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 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, bloom included, was 3:30.
The aroma from this coffee in a cooling cup is buttery for me. Taking a sip, this is a medium to medium- bodied coffee for me, and it has nice fruits evident right from the get-go. I can taste the natural component of this blend very easily. Pouring more coffee from the Origin into my cup, that agitation puts a fruity, berry-forward aroma into the air that I really dig. There’s a honey-like sweetness to this cup and a little brown sugar in the finish, on the low end. Lime is definitely here, more in the mid-sip to second half of the sip. It’s not so bright as it is more of true lime flavor and that bitterness that I associate with lime vs lemon. Bitterness can be good, it’s not a bad thing, especially in coffee, which is inherently bitter to begin with, and in the case of Barista’s Choice, it’s very good! There is definitely a berry note in this cup. I’m getting raspberry for sure, a hint of blueberry… sort of a berry jam. If I hold the coffee in my mouth for slightly-weirdly-too-long the berry notes morph into a sweet cherry, not-quite-goopy-canned-cherry-pie-filling flavor that is delicious. I’ll disagree with Randy on the apricot descriptor because I’m getting a little bit of peach, but that’s definitely splitting hairs. For me, peach has a deeper, more subtle sweetness and hard-to-describe essence of… peachiness… to it (I’m a real wordsmith, thank you) while apricot is similar but has a tartness or bit of an acidic edge to it that I’m personally not getting here. So, I’ll roll with peach. This coffee is not a peach bomb for me, but it’s here in the background in the second half of the sip and in the finish, and there’s a similar feeling on my palate between sips that is slightly dry like the feeling of eating the skin of the peach fruit. This cup gets peachier as it cools. Oh man, I just took a sip from my cup, which is a bit cooler than lukewarm right now, and it was SUPER peachy, there was that apricot tartness in the back of my throat, then a huge berry jam flavor coated my entire tongue… drool. I know I say this about every coffee, so you know I mean it, but DEFINITELY let these cups cool way down to get the most out of them. If you’re drinking your coffee hot, you are missing out. What’s the right temp? My recommendation is you should be able to chug the whole cup down without being the slightest bit worried that you’ll burn yourself or even be mildly uncomfortable (aka my thermometer is in the kitchen and I don’t want to go get it). This coffee finishes slightly sweet and leaves berry jam, some peach/apricot and honey all lingering in the afteraste. About 5 seconds into the aftertaste a nice buttery note that I was getting in the aroma kicks in.
I LOVE this coffee as a pourover. This is an absolute KILLER of a coffee! Super balanced, super easy drinking. The flavors blend in and meld together seamlessly, but there’s enough clarity in the cup to tease them all out if you’re a coffee geek like me. I’m absolutely in love with this coffee and what Angry Barista has achieved with it. Barista’s Choice? No doubt, it’s easy to see why. And of course, you know this begs the question… will it espresso? Let’s find out…
I pulled some nice shots using a slightly less-orthodox approach of 18.4g in, 23.7g out in a head count of 32 (my head count is a little fast, so probably 28-30 seconds real time). These shots had syrupy body, but were not too intense at all and nicely balanced. Up front I was getting cherry with lime acidity and bitterness. I wasn’t getting a lot of peach flavor, per se, but I was getting a sensation of peach… like drinking peach nectar… in the back of my throat, and the aftertaste had lots of peach to it for me. For this much fruit, this was not an overly bright shot in the least and the perceived acidity was nicely balanced. It was round, sweet, delicious, balanced. YUM!
Did I mention that I love this coffee yet?
