Good morning and welcome to today’s review, where I’m checking out some Colombian coffee that was roasted there and brought to us by Kaffeeward, a new-to-me brand.
Kaffeeward Specialty Coffee website
Purchase this coffee directly for $36/12oz
KAFFEEWARD SPECIALTY COFFEE PINK BOURBON
I was recently approached to review some coffee that is grown and roasted in Colombia and I’m always interested in what I’m going to get from other countries with deals like this! I know that shipping roasted coffee overseas comes with a lot of potential problems, but it’s worth the risk to me! The coffee I’m reviewing today is from a Colombia-based brand called Kaffeeward Specialty Coffee. The company appears to have been founded by Ivan Gomez and Lorena Garcia (who is my contact at Kaffeeward). I’m not sure what got Ivan and Lorena into coffee as Ivan’s background is in process engineering, business logistics and planning, statistics and analysis, etc and Lorena is an industrial engineer and strategic project management specialist. My day job is in healthcare and education, so looking at their LinkedIn’s provides me with a mysterious combination of words about things I have no understanding of! Both Ivan and Lorena are graduates of Universidad Nacional de Colombia, and Lorena appears to be based in Colombia while Ivan is located in the USA.
Kaffeeward sent me their two current coffees and today’s review is their flagship Pink Bourbon. This coffee is grown at Finca Buena Vista in Huila, Colombia. Huila department is east-southeast of Cali and in the mountains surrounded by national parks. Farms in Huila produce some great coffee and Colombia in general is well-known for its microclimates in the mountains that produce a huge variety of flavor profiles. In my opinion, Colombia is one of the most exciting coffee growing regions. In any case, the farm is owned by the Ordoñez family and it looks like they’ve been growing coffee for 45 years.
Kaffeeward’s address is in Manizales, located in the Caldas department of Colombia that is west of Bogota, south of Medellin and north of Cali. The coffee appears to be roasted by Coffee Roasting S.A.S. located in Chinchina, Caldas. This is a washed coffee, Pink Bourbon variety, grown around 1650masl. Kaffeeward gives us some notes stating this is a medium roast with juicy body, malic acidity (think the crisp acidity you’d associate with apples and pears) and aromas of florals and browned sugars. The flavor profile given is, “apple, tropical fruits and honey maple.” I assessed this coffee on my Roast Vision device from Espresso Vision and it registered a 13 on a scale from 0-35, which is a “medium-dark.” The smaller the number on the Roast Vision, the darker the roast, but that is just a visual assessment and more goes into determining “roast level” than the visual assessment alone. In any case, the beans are a uniform dark brown with a nice sheen on them but no oil spots to be seen, so I would guess this was pulled out of the roaster before it hit second crack.
I’m using my standard pourover method of a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin flat bottom dripper using a Kalita 155 filter. I pulse pour through a Melodrip to minimize agitation of the coffee bed during brewing and my grinder is a Knock Aergrind. This coffee got a 30 second bloom and had a total brew time, including the bloom, of 3:35.
The aroma from this coffee reminds me of marshmallow roasted darkly over a fire, with some singed bits here and there, but not quite burned. Taking a sip, I’m getting a lot of the same… lots of sweetness from the roast with some roastiness. I’m also getting quite a bit of apple in the flavors here, too, with some malic acidity that brightens the cup up a bit. The apple notes I’m getting remind me of a sweet, crisp red variety like a Fuji or Honeycrisp. The body on this cup sits between heavy and medium for me, with a lot of density and a feeling of weightiness on my palate that I rather enjoy. There is a slickness to the mouthfeel that reminds of an oatmeal stout and I always enjoy that, too. As the cup cools, it settles into a nice, sweet, easy drinking coffee, which is really the benefit of roasting into the darker side of the “medium” range. The downside is that some character gets lost from most coffees in this range, as acidity and some of the uniqueness of a coffee are exchanged for more sweetness and sugar development. Coffees like this are easy drinking and pleasant by themselves and always work as good vehicles for milk and sugar which is how A LOT of people drink coffee. This coffee finishes sweet and has a kick of apple acidity right in the finish with a lingering aftertaste of roasted marshmallows and cooked apple that I enjoy a lot.
Overall, I like this coffee. For a medium-dark roast it has some nice flavors and retains some character and my palate attenuated to the roasty notes fairly quickly. It’s a pleasant, easy to drink coffee that’s a big step up in flavors from what you would get in a typical grocery store coffee, but is still equally as approachable as those coffees. Where I am confused with this Pink Bourbon is the pricing. It looks like Kaffeeward is selling through an Amazon store, which makes some sense for an internationally-based company, but I was surprised to see a price of $36/12 oz bag for this coffee. That price is about two times what most of us are used to paying for super high quality specialty “third wave” beans, with most bags from American roasteries priced at $18-$22 for top quality beans. A lot of same roasters sell their house blends that have similar flavor profiles and easy drinkability for around $15-16 pretty commonly, so this selection from Kaffeeward commands a high price and it’s not clear to me why. Generally a higher-than-average price on a coffee is associated with it being a rare, expensive selection to begin with (like a Hacienda La Esmeralda gesha as an extreme example), an unusual process that requires more work for the grower and processor, or there is some sort of relationship built into the price like direct trade/Fair Trade where the grower is making more money for their work. I’ll try to find out from Kaffeeward why the price is so much higher than expected and I’ll post any updates on Instagram, so keep your eyes peeled!