Good morning and welcome to today’s review! I’m getting to revisit a roaster who hasn’t been on KC Coffee Geek since 2015, so enjoy!
Purchase this coffee directly for $21/12oz.
H+S COFFEE ROASTERS COLOMBIA FINCA EL PARAISO
One of my favorite things to do with KC Coffee Geek is revisit past roasters that I haven’t heard from in a while. I was paging through Instagram the other day and caught sight of a “this is what we’re roasting right now” post from my old friends at H+S Coffee Roasters and I reached out to them and coffee was soon on its way to Kansas City! H+S Coffee Roasters were last featured on KCCG way back in 2015, if you can believe it! H+S Coffee Roasters was founded by Coulter Sunderman and Joshua Heien in the summer of 2014 in Laramie, Wyoming. Sunderman had gotten his start as a barista at another local Laramie roaster that leaned more traditional in its offerings. He worked his way into roasting and eventually becoming the roast master before heading out into the frontier on his own. H+S has remained strictly a roaster since then, with no cafe or open-to-the-public tasting room, although they do host cuppings and other events from time to time. They distribute coffee in shops and markets throughout Wyoming and even into Colorado in Fort Collins and the Boulder/Denver area, as well as happily shipping online anywhere you would like to order from.
H+S sent me four coffees this time, so choosing was tough! This morning’s coffee is their Colombia Finca El Paraiso, which apparently took third place in something called Huila Magico that I need to learn more about! One thing I really love about H+S’s website is the amount of information available, from their description of the coffee and the farm to very transparent info about where it was sourced and even brewing recommendations. As a coffee geek, this is the type of info I love to be able to see when selecting coffees. The samples H+S sent were in small, handwritten bags, so I was pleased to be able to stay “blinded” to tasting notes until I was writing my review. That always helps keep me objective as it doesn’t take much of a suggestion when it comes to flavor to bias the brain.
The Huila Magico competition was organized by two groups called The Coffee Quest and The Bean Project. They set it up to help highlight the producers of Colombia’s Huila region, who have the constant challenge of being coffee farmers with the additional challenges the Covid pandemic has brought into the mix. This coffee from Finca El Paraiso was grown by Ernedis Rodriguez. In cupping, this coffee scored an average 85.75 out of 100, which is a very good coffee indeed. This is a Caturra variety grown at 1840masl, and Ernedis did an experimental washing process with a double fermentation, first fermenting the coffee whole in the cherry, then pulping it to rupture the cherries and fermenting it again in the sticky mucilage that surrounds the coffee seeds inside the cherries. All that is really technical stuff, I get it, so to simplify things this is a washed coffee at the end of the day, so expect a lot of clarity of flavor and a lot of structure. H+S sells this coffee for $21/12oz and says to expect flavors of plum, mango and a juicy profile. Juicy coffees tend to hit your cheeks and sides of your tongue and promote salivation, making you want to gulp these coffees down faster than you might otherwise. It’s a “feel” more than a flavor.
I am using my standard pourover method for this coffee, which is a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin with Kalita 155 filter (basically a flat bottom, 3-hold brewer like a Katlia Wave). I just switched up my grinder from a Knock Aergrind to an Orphan Espresso Lido 3 and this was my first time using it, which worked out great once I dialed it in. I pulse pour through a Melodrip to minimize agitation in the brew bed. This coffee got a 30 second bloom and the brew time, bloom included, was 3:15.
The aroma from this coffee is bright, fruity and tropical but I’m having trouble placing specific aromas here. I feel like I haven’t had a filter coffee in a LONG time because I’ve been so espresso-focused the past few months! Hopefully my palate still works! Taking a sip, I’m immediately greeted by the type of Colombian coffees I love the most: bright and fruit-forward. This is a medium-bodied coffee with nice presence on my palate and it finishes into a nice aftertaste that is somewhat short-lived but very pleasant tasting.
I’m starting to sip with the cup warmer than my usual drinking temperature and it’s tasting fantastic, so it should only get better as it cools. At this warmer temp I’m getting a grape juice sweetness and flavor note that is somewhere between a white grape and purple grape juice. In the cooling cup, this grape juice sweetness and flavor morphs into more of a plum note, with a hint of tartness I’d associate with the tartness of purple plum skins. There is a nice citrus note in this cup leaning more toward orange in the sip and it brightens up and gets a little sharper in the finish and aftertaste. It borders on a lemon candy note here but it’s not QUITE to that level. As the cup cools even more, I’m changing my mind again and that lemon is more apparent. This coffee seems to have picked up some more body as it cools, too, and between the now medium+ to medium-heavy body and that lemony citrus note, couples with tons of sugary sweetness, this coffee is reminding me of a sweet lemon bread and it’s delicious! If I hold the coffee in my mouth a little longer and agitate it some I get more plum notes from this cup. This coffee finishes sweet and has a lovely aftertaste with lemon candy and a bit of baked sweet lemon bread lingering for a while. There is also a coated feeling on my tongue and palate like I’ve been eating a piece of hard candy. Despite all these fruit-forward, acidic flavor notes, this is a really sweet cup that really is like drinking candy! This is a fantastic coffee!