Good morning and welcome to today’s review of a new-to-me Portland roaster, K&F Coffee Roasters, and their Café Esperanza. Slurp…
Kittridge & Fredrickson Coffee Roasters website
Purchase this coffee directly for $14.95/12oz
Roast City: A Brief History of Coffee Roasting in Portland, Oregon article by Martyn Leaper
KITTRIDGE & FREDRICKSON CAFÉ ESPERANZA
Kittridge & Fredrickson Coffee Roasters (K&F from here on out!) have a long history in the coffee business and specifically in Portland, Oregon’s amazing coffee culture. K&F was originally founded in 1983 by J.K. (Bud) Dominguez and his son, Don, who is still involved with the company today. The company is named after Don’s great grandfather, Sven Fredrickson, who sailed the seas during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, bringing coffee back to San Francisco, and his other great grandfather, Kittridge, who was a SF dock worker. Bud learned the coffee trade from the master roasters of San Francisco and ended up becoming a coffee buyer and quality control director for Folgers. It was Don who had the idea to set up a specialty coffee micro-roastery in Portland, and when Don and Bud started K&F in 1983 there were just a couple of other companies in the now-famous coffee city with the same idea. In 2019, Rudy Zarfas bought the company. He was familiar with the K&F brand from selling their products as part of a sales position at a company that sells water and coffee to companies (for break rooms, coffee areas for customers, etc) all over the country. Today, K&F Coffee Roasters have a large line of their own coffees and also provide private label/white label roasting for others who want to slap their own branding on K&F coffees. This is not a terribly uncommon practice in coffee, I don’t think, and other industries like craft brewing have done similar (contract brewing) for decades. It’s a great way to get into coffee branding without having to have the know-how, expensive equipment and space of roasting yourself.
This morning, I am checking out K&F’s Café Esperanza. This is a Fair Trade and organic coffee that they call this a medium-dark roast. Café Esperanza is grown in Nicaragua and was previously a blend of this Nicaraguan coffee and another coffee from Peru, but somewhat recently they’ve switched it over to being the Nicaraguan coffee only. I have no other info on the coffee as far as origin information. In the interim between writing this article and posting it, though, I did get hold of a Roast Vision instrument from Espresso Vision and the number for this coffee came up as 15-16. This device measures the roast level of a coffee and expresses it on a scale of 0-35. The smaller the number, the darker the roast. I have a French roast, for example, that’s measuring around a 6. 15-16 lands righrt on the dark side of “medium” and the light end of the spectrum of “medium dark” for the Roast Vision.
I am 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. Grinder is a Knock Aergrind. Total brew time is about 4:00 with a 30 second bloom and I pulse pour through a Melodrip to minimize any agitation of the brew bed during brewing.
The aroma from this cup is sweet and pleasantly dark… molasses and dark caramelized sugars. Taking a sip, I’m greeted by a medium+ bodied coffee with a lot of sweetness up front and some nice “dark fruits” coming in right behind. Looking at the sweetness first, as promised by the aroma, there is a lot of dark caramel here and a hint of bittersweet chocolate in the base of this cup. The fruits I mentioned overtake it quickly while also adding more sweetness on top of those sugary notes. I’m getting alot of raisin here, as well as some plum notes that add a little acidity to the cup, too. This kind of acidity in coffee is a good thing… it adds brightness and a “ceiling” to that sweet base I described. I like to think of coffee like a building, which needs a foundation as well as a ceiling to give it shape and structure. Getting back to this Café Esperanza, there is a hint of roasted nuts in the flavor that lingers in the aftertaste, too. I know this will sound weird, but I’m getting something that reminds me of pencil shavings, too… a hint of cedar with that carbon smell from the core. This isn’t uncommon for me with darker coffees and I know it’s a weird descriptor for coffee, but there it is! That’s mostly in the finish and the aftertaste, but it’s just that hint of wood and carbon that hits the back of your nose and throat when sharpening a good wooden pencil. At least that’s the connection my brain makes with this flavor/aroma combination! Getting back to the fruits in this cup, I’m getting the slightest bit of cranberry here, too, like Craisins, maybe. Sweet, fruity and just a bit of tartness there, but REALLY just a bit. This coffee rides the edge of being a dark roast pretty closely, with a fair amount of roastiness coming through in the finish and aftertaste. As the cup cools I’m getting a lot of salted butter in the finish. This coffee finishes sweet and has that fairly complex, LONG aftertaste I’ve already described in bits and pieces.
This is a nice coffee. It’s on the dark-side-of-medium in my opinion, and this often makes what I call “crowd pleaser” coffees… sweet, slightly dark, not super complex, but enough origin character remaining to make it interesting. A coffee like this is great black but also holds up well to dairy and certainly to sugar, too, making it versatile for all types of drinkers… a crowd pleaser! I really like the play between dried, dark fruits and dark sugars with the acidity that comes from those fruits and this could easily be a daily drinker for people who like darker, but-not-too-dark coffees.
Of course, you KNOW I made some espresso with this coffee and it was very capable as ‘spro, too, not surprisingly. Using my Orphan Espresso Lido E grinder, that I have set to a fine grind even by espresso standards, I was pulling shots of about 18.5g in the portafilter and getting around 24g in the cup after about 28 seconds of running the pump. My machine is a Quick Mill Carola Evo with an E61 group. This is a fairly tight ratio of 1:1.3, so not quite a ristretto, but not too far off. Flavors are predominantly bittersweet chocolate, walnut and some lime acidity and bitterness. Café Esperanza makes a fairly traditional-tasting espresso shot, which I rather enjoyed, and I think it would pair well with milk if that’s your thing.
