Good morning and welcome to today’s review where I’m checking out the first roasted coffee I’ve tasted from local Kansas City-based roaster/shop Splitlog Coffee Co.
Feast Magazine article covering their expansion
Strawberry Hill Neighborhood Association
SPLITLOG COFFEE CO. COLOMBIA VILLA ESPERANZA
Just FYI, I love Kansas City and anytime I get to write about it, I get wordy. The headline is definitely buried in this review, so scroll a few paragraphs down to get to the coffee! I’m not even going to apologize!
Splitlog Coffee Co. was started in Kansas City by Adam and Caleb Wittmer in 2016/2017. The Wittmer’s had started the short-lived Flywheel Coffeehouse in the same neighborhood around 2012 or 2013, but the timing just wasn’t right and the place closed within the year. Splitlog made a splash here in KC for two main reasons: its first location opened in Kansas City, Kansas (I’ll explain why that’s notable in a sec), and it was the only specialty coffee shop in a town BRIMMING with awesome coffee shops to feature a drive-thru window, which is a big selling point for a lot of Americans! LOL For me, the important thing was that it was another high-quality coffee shop offering great drinks to people in a part of town that was mostly untouched by specialty coffee. Splitlog Coffee Co. originally opened as a multiroaster shop and sometime within the last year or so they have taken up roasting their own beans in addition to carrying other shops’ java.
For those of you not familiar with Kansas City, the city sits directly on top of the state line between Missouri and Kansas. When people say “Kansas City” they usually mean the Missouri side as Kansas City really started there and grew outward, eventually crossing the state line. KCK grew rapidly in the late 1800’s as a streetcar suburb of KCMO. Today, KCK is decidedly more blue collar and offers a different ethnic mix from KCMO, which gives the “two cities” a very different vibe that I enjoy. KCK has some pretty cool neighborhoods in its own right, but they tend to get overlooked by their more established brethren east of the state line. I’m not sure if it’s intentional, but Splitlog Coffee Co. seems to be specializing in less well-known, super interesting neighborhoods as homes for their coffee shops!
Splitlog has recently grown to two locations, both in cool, somewhat less-tread ‘hoods. The original one (a tiny shop that can sit maybe 15-20 people if you don’t mind sitting close) with the drive thru is in the KCK neighborhood of Strawberry Hill. This is actually the namesake of Splitlog Coffee Co. as Strawberry Hill used to be called Splitlog Hill after Mathias Splitlog, a wealthy Wyandotte tribe member who purchased the land in 1870 to construct an estate. The land was subdivided in the late 1800’s and was initially populated by Irish and German immigrants, then Croatian, Slovenian, Russian and Serbian immigrants populated the area in the early 1900’s. Most of these people worked in the meat packing plants and stockyards of the nearby West Bottoms area of KCMO and KCK grew rapidly thank to the extension of streetcars from downtown KCMO. The modest Strawberry Hill skyline is puncuated by the onion dome of a Russian Orthodox church that resides in the neighborhood. Strawberry Hill still has a lot of Eastern European flavor to it and the neighborhood has been on the “up and coming” list for a while. The view of downtown is really nice from this location and it’s not the usual skyline you see from the north or the south in most photographs, so that alone is worth the visit. If you time things right, you can get some of KC’s best BBQ right across the street at Slap’s, too, but I don’t want to get a BBQ fight started! Good coffee? Check. Good BBQ? Check. Good view? Check. Sounds like your next trip is already planned! LOL
In late 2019/early 2020 the brothers Wittmer built out a second location in Pendleton Heights. Until I visited Splitlog at this location a couple weeks ago I wasn’t even aware of the Pendleton Heights neighborhood and, man, what a gem it is! Super cool architecture, diversity, enough funkiness to see that people who live in PH really love it, and I have to say the home gardens (more like small farms) I saw while walking around made me instantly fall in love with this little piece of old Kansas City. PH was Kansas City’s first planned “suburb” although, today, it sits in the downtown/Independence Ave/Paseo area. Now, a lot of Kansas Citians will shake in their boots and tell people to avoid this near-east side of KC like the plague due to crime and poverty, but that’s a sweeping generalization that doesn’t apply to PH or its surroundings at all. Really, Kansas City is one of those cities where you can be in a neighborhood of million dollar homes and two blocks away half the properties are shuttered and derelict. Pendleton Heights is a historic neighborhood with jaw-droppingly gorgeous homes in a variety of turn-of-the-century styles. It’s small, super walkable, and not a problem in the least. The osteopathic college is a few blocks west and this is not a rough part of town. What amazed me in my walk around the neighborhood is how many of the homeowners are keeping substantial farming operations going in their yards. These aren’t casual little veggie gardens, this is a neighborhood of serious urban farmers and I loved it. Anyway, the move to PH allowed for a bigger setup for Splitlog and they also have a food menu there.
When Splitlog opened they were a multiroaster shop, generally carrying KCMO’s awesome Oddly Correct coffees as a mainstay and rotating out roasters from all over the country. They’re currently using another shop’s roaster here in town and have plans to open a dedicated roasting space for themselves in KCK within the next few months. As of right now, Splitlog isn’t listing their coffee for sale on their website, so that probably means they aren’t set up to be shipping it out and etc, but email them or message them through Instagram or whatever it takes in the meantime!
Let’s Talk About Coffee!
This morning’s coffee is Splitlog’s Colombia Villa Esperanza. This coffee caught my eye on my visit to Splitlog because it’s a natural process coffee. The vast majority of coffee that makes it out of Colombia is washed, so I’m a sucker for the relative rarity of honeys and naturals from that country. Natural process coffees are picked and sorted, then dried while they’re still in the cherry, like big raisins. This imparts a lot of fruitiness and sweetness to the cup. People who dislike naturals usually don’t care for the fermentation notes that come through with those fruity flavors. Personally, I love fermentation in coffee and it doesn’t bother me at all, but I would say this is a low-to-no-ferment coffee, in my opinion. This coffee comes from Finca Villa Esperanza, owned for 20+ years by the Trujillo family in Tolima, Colombia. Coffee grows around 1800+masl there and when I was doing my research it became clear that their natural coffee is highly sought after and a popular offering with roasters here in the USA.
For my filter coffee review 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 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. I did a 30-second bloom with this coffee and then forgot to record the timer because one of my dogs was bugging me this morning! It seemed to be an average time, I’d say, so probably 2:45-3:00 range if I had to guess.
For some reason, my schnoz isn’t working for aroma this morning, so I’ll skip right to the tasting… taking a sip, this is a medium to medium+ bodied coffee for me and this is a fruity coffee in a very different way from the typically fruit-forward Colombian coffees I love. Instead of bright citrus and tropical notes I’m getting darker flavors leaning more into the the berries and “red fruits” categories. This cup has a sugary sweet base that really anchors this coffee and creates a nice base for the fruits. I’m getting a light caramel tone from the sweetness here and an almost sticky sensation on my palate from the sugars, but it’s not cloying. On top of all this sweetness I’m getting berry notes I would expect from an Ethiopian natural, but still different. This cup is dripping with strawberry for me, and I’d say that’s the dominant fruit note here. There’s something reminiscent of peach in the fruitiness of this cup, too. I’d be hard pressed to say “oh! peach!” drinking this, but there’s a sweetness/mouthfeel/hint of tartness that reminds me of eating a peach, and in the aftertaste I do pick up some actual peach notes lingering on my palate, too. There’s a little bit of a red plum note in the second half of the sip, too. This coffee finishes sweet and has a pleasant aftertaste of strawberry, hints of peach, and caramel for a long time between sips. This is a jammy, very sweet-leaning coffee that tastes and feels like eating a spoonful of preserves, but somehow it’s not cloying and doesn’t fatigue my palate at all. There’s not a lot of evident acidity here, either, although fruit notes in coffee automatically come with acidity because it’s acidic compounds that are responsible for most of those fruit flavors. This is a vibrant, structured coffee without it being “harsh” or “acidic” or too bright-tasting, although I love bright, shiny Colombian coffees, too.
Will It ‘Spro?
Single origin Colombian espresso can be hit or miss. Often times, my favorite filter coffees from Colombia are bright and fruit-forward and feature a lot of acids carrying flavors and they can be hard to tame on the espresso machine. This is NOT one of those. Single origin coffees can be tough to pull nicely, anyway, in my experience and this is a proper well-behaved coffee, no spitting, spurting, channeling. It looks absolutely gorgeous on the bottomless portafilter, too (need to get a video and throw it on IG). It starts off jet black with oily drips slowly appearing and then develops into a beautifully striped masterpiece. Really stunning and that’s unusual, in my experience, with light roasted SO espressos.
Anyway, it looks great and behaves like a model citizen, so how about the one thing that matters, taste? I did a crazy dial-in shot that was 40 seconds long, 18.6g in and I didn’t even weigh the output because I figured it’d be terrible, but probably around 20g and it was tasty, super intense, but I knew I had a winner if a weird dial-in shot was actually tasting good! My next shot was 18.6g in, 32.2g out in 30 seconds. Intensity was well-managed, this had a nice mouthfeel and was sweet and very nicely balanced. No acid/heat like single origin Colombians can be. I was getting tropicals like mango and guava, strawberry (especially in the finish and aftertaste), very clear notes of brown sugar and lime acidity. This was a syrupy shot and WAY more than I expected. Gorgeous to see, to look at AND to drink!
For the espresso nerds, I’m using a Quick Mill Carola Evo and an Orphan Espresso Pharos Grinder, although I have that perfectly dialed in for another coffee, so I used a OE Lido E for these shots, actually. I replaced my stock shower screen with an IMS precision shower screen and use an IMS precision 16/20 basket with Decent Epresso tamper.