Good morning and welcome to today’s review of one of my favorite roasters AND one of my favorite growers, Oddly Correct’s Las Lajas natural from Costa Rica!
Sprudge interview with Finca Las Lajas
ODDLY CORRECT COSTA RICA LAS LAJAS NATURAL
When it comes to coffee, I’m a fan of innovation and this review is the marriage of two of my favorite coffee innovators, local Kansas City roasters, Oddly Correct and Costa Rican producer, Finca Las Lajas. Oddly Correct started up in Kansas City when “third wave” specialty coffee was still fairly new to the city. They were infamous for being “that place that doesn’t have sugar or cream” although the OC gang has relaxed that a little in recent years and offers a couple of fantastic lattes with house-made syrups. Although I have been a coffee drinker for almost 30 years now, my conscious entry into specialty coffee and away from the “darker is better” second wave really coincided with Oddly Correct’s establishment here in Kansas City and so this is a shop and group of people I hold close to my heart. Las Lajas is similarly situated in Costa Rica, and it’s not too often I can say I have a favorite producer or farm just because there are SO many (and so many good ones), but Las Lajas is a name I recognize and even look for and I know unless the roaster does something weird with a Las Lajas coffee that it’s going to be fantastic, no matter what it is.
Las Lajas is located in the Central Valley of Costa Rica and they were actually the first producer in the country to do natural and honey process coffees. Quick primer on coffee processing… coffee is a fruit about the size of a normal cherry. Inside are usually two seeds and these seeds are what we call coffee “beans.” They press up against one another inside the coffee cherry and that’s what gives them the distinct shape and one flat side. After coffee is picked, it needs to be processed to remove the fruit, dry it and prepare it for transportation and roasting. Natural coffees are sorted and then, fruit intact, laid out on raised mesh beds where they dry out and break down in the sun, like big raisins. Eventually the dried fruits are run through a mill to separate the fruit from the seeds. Natural coffees tend to be fruity, have big body and lots of sweetness as the coffee seeds are like little sponges that soak up all kinds of flavors. This includes fermentation notes, which some people are unfortunately cursed with as tasting garbage-like. I am luckily not one of those people! Natural processing uses very little water. Washed coffees, a water-intensive process, are picked and sorted and then milled right away to break the fruit skins and remove most of the fruit, then the seeds are fermented in water baths with microbes, who eat the goopy, sugary stuff still clinging to the seeds. Then the bare seeds are dried and washed coffees tend to have a “cleaner” flavor profile. In between these two is honey processing. In this method, the skins are ruptured and removed in a mill as with washed coffees, but instead of going to fermentation tanks, the coffees are laid out with the goopy “honey” still clinging to them, and dried in the sun like naturals. These coffees get a little bit of the best of both worlds, although for my palate, honeys are generally hard to separate from washed coffees, although I’ve never done a side-by-side tasting.
Costa Rica traditionally washed all coffees and growers only did natural processing on coffee that got so ripe it fell off the trees on its own. These “natural” naturals were of low quality with unpredictable fermentation, so growers steered very clear. Due to a water and electricity shortage in 2008 resulting from a large earthquake that hit in the middle of harvest season, Las Lajas continued to harvest and tried their hand at natural processing for the first time, out of necessity. Other Costa Rican farmers didn’t care for the coffee, but tasters from Cafe Imports liked these coffees and Las Lajas started to develop a reputation, enhanced by the fact that they were the only grower in Costa Rica making natural coffees. To get around the bias against Costa Rican natural coffees, they invented their own lexicon for their natural, instead calling it the perla negra process, or “black pearl.” They were early innovators with honey coffees, too, and continue to do wild things like plant the Kenyan SL28 variety in Costa Rica. Experimentation of this kind makes me very happy, so this is the reason I love Las Lajas so much!
Specific to this coffee, this is a Villa Sarchi variety grown at 1450-1600masl. Villa Sarchi has a reputation for savory notes that can lean heavily toward balsamic vinegar flavors. If I hallucinate I can pull that out of this coffee, but this was not a balsamic-heavy coffee like some other VS’s I’ve tasted. For pourovers I am using my standard 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. This coffee got a 30 second bloom and a total brew time of around 3:30.
The aroma from this coffee has some wine characteristics for me. I’m having a hard time parsing that out, but it gives me wine vibes. Taking a sip, this is a medium bodied coffee that is sweet and fruity and has some other characteristics different from a “common” natural that I think are coming from the fact that this is Villa Sarchi variety. In the second half of the sip I get a little savoriness and in the finish I get some tartness that reminds me of balsamic vinegar and both of those are associated with Villa Sarchi coffee, but I’m getting ahead of myself, so let’s get back to the beginning. In the front of the sip I’m getting a caramel sweetness and hints of milk chocolate and sweet, heavy cream. Very quickly a rush of “red fruits” happens and there is cherry, red grape juice and plum here for me. At the same time there is a distinct tropical vibe to these fruits. I can pull pineapple out of there and there is definitely a hint of Hawaiian Punch here. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve had that stuff, but here it is! The second half of the sip has a hint of savory and a tartness that reminds me a little of balsamic vinegar, but honestly I’m not sure if I would make that association if I didn’t already know this was Villa Sarchi variety. I think I’m looking for that hint of balsamic here and maybe that’s not a genuine flavor descriptor. If I try to put balsamic vinegar out of my mind then I’d call this some lime acidity and that hint of bitterness that, to me, always comes with lime, but this is earthier and darker than what I would generally associate with lime. This coffee finishes sweet for me and has a very wine-like finish and aftertaste, with lots of layers of flavors sitting on my palate to keep me company between sips. Being a natural, this coffee does have some ferment, for me most noticeable if I wait a couple minutes between sips, so if you react poorly to ferment notes in coffee you probably already steer clear of naturals anyway, but I would direct you toward something other than this coffee. As you can imagine I did run this coffee as espresso quite a bit, too, and it made a very nice espresso in the 1:1.5-1:2 range of extractions (18-19g dosing, 28-30 seconds, aiming for 30-40g in the cup). The cherry and plum were enhanced in the espresso cup for me, as well as a bittersweet chocolate note, and it was just as wine-like in its flavors and complexities.
This coffee is a hit, for me, if you can’t tell. I mean, one of my favorite roasters handling one of my favorite producers, and I’m a sucker for natural coffees, too, so something would have had to go very wrong for me not to like this. What I love about this Las Lajas natural is its complexity. There is A LOT going on in this coffee. Central American and South American naturals can be pretty tame compared to their African cousins, but that’s not the case here. Naturals in general can be a bit one-dimensional at times, too, with a primary flavor note like berries dominating the cup, but that is also not the case here. This is a well-structured coffee with lots of layers to enjoy, ranging from wine-like characteristics to a dairy-like mouthfeel and sweetness. The fruits are varied and complex and this is just a fantastic coffee for someone who wants to slowly sip at it and take it all the way to room temperature, which has its own rewards. Complex coffees like this can often lose some drinkability, and there’s another thing I love about this, as it’s an easy-drinker for me. I don’t get palate fatigue or tired of looking for and trying to understand the flavors I’m finding, so this coffee works just as well for someone who is looking for nice flavors and doesn’t want to ruminate on the coffee itself. Complex AND drinkable is not a common combination, so another plus! I am sad to say this coffee appears to have sold out just within the past week, so I am a little late getting my review to press, but as someone who has drunk A LOT of Oddly Correct coffee, just go to the shop or their website and blindly pick a couple things and you will not be disappointed!