Good morning and welcome to today’s review where I’m taking a taste of Kaffeeward’s Gold Coffee, a barrel aged coffee grown, processed and roasted in Colombia!
Kaffeeward Specialty Coffee website
Other reviews in this series: Pink Bourbon
KAFFEEWARD SPECIALTY COFFEE GOLD COFFEE
Kaffeeward Specialty Coffee is a Colombia-based brand 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, so I’m sure there’s an interesting story there! 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’s coffees are grown and processed in Colombia, and they are roasted by Coffee Roasting S.A.S. in Chinchina, Caldas. I reviewed their Pink Bourbon a couple weeks ago and did question the price, which I noticed has come down to $22/12oz from the $36 it was priced at before. Kaffeeward sells their coffee in the USA through Amazon and I was pleased to see that price, which eliminated the major hurdle, for me, which was price. Update: I just spoke with Lorena and she said Amazon was supposed to price the coffee at $22/bag or $36 for TWO bags, so that explained the pricing discrepancy for the Pink Bourbon.
There’s not a lot of detail about this morning’s coffee on Kaffeeward’s site and the label simply states that it is from San Jose, which is also located in Chinchina, Caldas. If the farm is right there near the town of Chinchina, that’s as local as it gets for the roaster! The website states that this coffee uses “a special process that give it liquoric notes” but doesn’t specifically clarify whether this is a flavored coffee or barrel aged. Smelling the contents of the bag, it smelled barrel aged to me rather than being sprayed with flavoring, and, sure enough, when I inspected the bag more carefully I found that it does say “barrel aging” on it. That detail was hidden on the “foot” of the bag and I didn’t notice at first glance. Based on the aroma in the bag, this had rum notes rather than the more common (in the USA) bourbon/whiskey barrel and, again, I was pleased to see in the tasting notes on the back of the bag that the suggested flavors are cedar, chocolate, rum! It’s always nice to get confirmation that my nose knows what it’s smelling! Kaffeeward says this coffee is grown at 16600-1700masl and that it is a medium roast. Visually, the beans have a uniform dark brown color with a dry appearance, free of pools of oil or even an oily sheen, which would match most people’s definition of a “medium roast,” at least by vision.
I’m not sure when the trend of barrel aging coffee started, and where the idea came from, but I suspect it was inspired by craft beer brewers doing something similar with beer, although that’s just a guess. To barrel age coffee, green coffee beans, which soak up flavors from their environment quite readily, are placed in a barrel that was used to age some sort of alcohol. Whiskey/bourbon barrels are probably the most common, I’ve seen a handful of coffees aged in wine barrels, and I’ve reviewed two coffees in the past that were rum barrel aged. The longer the beans are in the barrel, the more of the alcohol and barrel notes they pick up, so these can be quite boozy to quite subtle. Personally, I drink coffee to taste the coffee, so I don’t really go for adjuncts like barrel aging, adding things to coffee, etc, but I do appreciate them for what they are and, for me, I tend to look at these coffees as being dessert coffees to be enjoyed after a meal either alone or with something sweet, maybe even a cigar or pipe. I think of the three types of barrel aged coffees I’ve had, I generally like the rum barreled ones the best. This is only my third one, but they seem to provide the best balance of being boozy enough to enjoy the barrel aging, but not so boozy that it overwhelms the coffee.
The beans in the bag have a fairly boozy fragrance, but not overwhelming. I didn’t know this was a barrel aged coffee when I first opened it, so my initial thought was, “Oh no, what’s happened to this coffee?” and then my brain caught up with my nose and realized it was barrel aged. The rum note in the bag is nice, sweet. Taking a sip, this is a medium to medium+ bodied coffee for me and I definitely think it’s worth waiting for this cup to cool down, quite a lot, to get the most out of it. 100 degrees and lower is where I really enjoyed it. As nice as the rum fragrance is on the beans, during brewing and in the steam coming off the hot cup it wasn’t super pleasant. It had a strange tone where I could smell the booze but there was something not really nice mixed in with it. I don’t get this in the flavor at all and in the cooler cup, the aroma from the coffee is nice, so something was “boiling off” in the hotter temps that wasn’t great, to my nose. Setting the carafe a foot or two away, though, and I got a REALLY nice caramel note that just filled my kitchen and that really had me interested to take my first sip.
This coffee has a good amount of rum in the flavor, and remains very noticeable into the aftertaste, too. And, for a rum barrel aged coffee, this is what I want. At the same time, it’s not overpowering like bourbon/whiskey barrel aging can be to my palate. I’m getting a lot of woody notes from this coffee and I think they work pretty well along with the rum. Up front in each sip there is a cedar-like note that has a perfumed, incense-like character to it, too. In the second half of the sip I’m getting something that reminds me of oak and a little hint of pine resin. In the context of alcohol, there’s almost a bit of a gin undertone to the second half of the sip. The rum brings a lot of sugar sweetness and a lot of caramel notes to this coffee that work well with all these wood flavors. I’m getting a good amount of vanilla in the mid-sip. I don’t have any dairy in the house today but I imagine this coffee plays really nice with some cream or half and half and I could see pouring some of this over a nice vanilla ice cream, even! It’s hard to evaluate this coffee, itself, with so much character of the rum and barrel coming through, but there is a hint of roast here, good body and mouthfeel and nothing is clashing with the rum notes, so I suppose that’s all I could ask for. This coffee finishes sweet and leaves a nice, lingering rum/sugar/caramel sweetness and flavor on my tongue for a long time between sips. Last week, the link to this coffee on Amazon still worked, but it takes you to Pink Bourbon, now, so I am afraid it may have sold out, but I hope they do another coffee like this again as this works nicely. Again, for MY personal tastes, this would be a special-occasion coffee with guests after dinner, rather than a daily drinker, but as far as barrel-aged coffees go, I really enjoy this and think it offers a perfect balance between subtleness and booziness, for me, so a nice job by Kaffeeward and the roaster in Colombia!