Good morning and welcome to today’s review of one of my local favorites, Oddly Correct, and their Colombia Las Flores! It has been a minute since my last review because of work craziness, so I’m excited to dive right into this coffee!
Order this coffee directly for $15/12oz
ODDLY CORRECT COLOMBIA LAS FLORES
Oddly Correct is one of my favorite Kansas City roasters. They first opened as a roastery in Midtown in 2008, opening a cafe (more of a tasting room concept) in 2012. I’ve always liked Oddly Correct because of their coffee, first and foremost, and their quirky aesthetic, second. Co-owner, Gregory Kolsto, uses a printing press to letterpress all the bags he designs and cuts for the press, and bags feature any number of themes from the fantastical to local patrons of the shop. This Las Flores bag is the most tame I’d seen from them for a long time and I wonder if there is secret code in the letters on display… O, R, D, C? A mystery to solve. Anyway, until a couple years ago, Oddly Correct had a “no milk, no sugar” policy in the cafe. You could get your standard milk-based espresso drinks, but no creamer or add-ins for your cup of coffee because they wanted you to enjoy it black. This policy has softened some in the past couple years and OC even has their own homemade flavored latte combinations that are killer. I’m very much a black coffee drinker or espresso solo person myself, but once in a while I’ll indulge in one of their lattes and they are always fantastic. Most recently, Oddly Correct has been embracing transparency and improving their employment practices, like offering health insurance and higher wages to their staff, so I applaud these efforts.
This morning’s coffee is Las Flores, a Colombian that I purchased about a month ago for $15 and is still on offer. This coffee is a steal at $15! There’s not a ton of info about the grower/source on Oddly Correct’s website, but they do tell us the pertinents that it’s a washed coffee grown in Huila, Colombia between 1200-2000masl and that it’s a mix of Castillo, Caturra and Colombia varieties. Huila is in the southwest of Colombia, in the Andes, so like most of Colombia’s coffee growing departments (states, essentially), it is full of microclimates and unusual weather patterns that give specialty grade, high altitude coffees the magic! Oddly Correct give us tasting notes of, “pink lady apple, caramel, orange” and a cup profile of, “bright, sweet, tea-like.”
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 (basically a 3-hole flat bottom like Kalita Wave). I use Kalita 155 filters in it and pulse pour through a Melodrip to control the coffee bed agitation as I brew. Grinder is a Knock Aergrind. This one ran a little slow with a 30-second bloom and a total brew time of 4:15 including the bloom, but the flavors are great, so why mess with it?
Taking a sip, this is a medium to medium- bodied coffee for me. I’m getting a honey-like sweetness leading the sip, and this is definitely a bright, fruity coffee… my favorite flavor profile from this region and what I associate most with Colombian coffee. As the cup cools, I’m getting a hint of brown sugar in the sweetness here, too. Each sip starts off mellow and then the midsip seems to be where everything happens! I’m getting tea notes and mouthfeel here and a lot of fruit acidity that gives ceiling and structure to the cup. Parsing out these fruity, bright notes, I’m getting Granny Smith apple with its crisp, refreshing acidity, but slightly more soft and round than what I would expect from an apple itself. I’m also getting some orange notes, and I’m going to say this note leans more toward freshly squeezed orange juice. Light and sweet. I’m picking up some subtle black tea in the middle and end of the sip and that is more intense in the aftertaste. This Las Flores has an interesting finish that is sweet in flavor but dry on my palate. This is a pretty dry feeling coffee on my palate in general, which I think lends strongly to the tea-like character even though the actual tea flavor of this coffee is fairly subtle for me. Often when I find orange and black tea flavor notes together in coffee I get a strong Earl Grey vibe from it and I’m not with this coffee at all. I think that’s because the orange note just isn’t reminding me of bergamot but I also think this coffee FEELS more tea-like than having actual tea flavor notes, for me. In the shorter aftertaste I’m getting some black tea notes and then in the longer aftertaste there’s a nice, sweet apple flavor like a Fuji or some other sweet, crisp, reddish variety.
As longtime readers already know, I have also been pulling some espresso shots with this coffee but for some reason I haven’t been keeping any tasting notes or shot recipes. Go figure! I’ve been using doses between 18-19g, a little finer-than-normal grind and pulling around 28-32g shots in around 28-30 seconds. These are very bright, sweet and intense but likeable, for sure. Lemon candy is certainly a feature in the espresso profile, for me. I don’t get the feeling this coffee would make a good milky, but as a standalone single origin shot it’s good. Very modern, fruit forward, not at all like a traditional Italian espresso if that’s your thing, but also not a face melter or one that gave me puckerface!
This is a nice coffee. It’s bright and fruit-forward but nicely balanced and sweet, too. It’s light and refreshing and feels like if coffee was trying to hold onto the last handful of warm days and sunny skies before autumn really sets in! Oddly Correct absolutely slays everything they roast, and in my experience, this is particularly true of Colombian coffees. If show up to Oddly without knowing what I want, if it’s a Colombian or Ethiopian (washed or natural, doesn’t matter), they’re instabuys for me, no thinking required!