Good morning and welcome to today’s review, where I’m checking out a “honey” of a Sumatran roasted just a couple miles from my house by my friends at Sway Coffee Roasters! This one smelled amazing as grounds and right off brewing, so I’m excited to try this out with you!
Purchase this coffee from Sway for $17/12oz (and free shipping on orders over $25!)
Other reviews in this series: Guatemala Direct Trade
SWAY COFFEE ROASTERS SUMATRA KERINCI HONEY PROCESS
Sway Coffee Roasters are a fairly new addition to Kansas City’s insanely good specialty coffee market, having opened at the end of 2019. I had a chance in early March to do some coffee tasting with Kris Carlson, who is the brand manager (among other hats she wears) and got my first taste of their coffee and what they’re hoping to bring to the specialty coffee scene. Sway is a sister company to McClain’s, a well-loved local bakery. Around September of 2020 Sway moved its roasting into a space shared with the beautifully built-out new McClain’s in downtown Shawnee, Kansas (for those not from around here, Shawnee is one of the many suburbs/smaller towns that are part of the Kansas City sprawl). I hate to admit, but after living here in KC for 14 years, this was my first time stepping into McClain’s, so better late than never! This new flagship location, which also serves as home base for Sway, is just a few minutes’ drive from KC Coffee Geek World Domination Headquarters, so that’s nice for me… maybe not so nice for my blood sugar! McClain’s Bakery opened in Kansas City, Missouri in 1945 and was run by the McClain family for three generations. It changed hands in 2001 and again to the current owners in 2014. The newest location in Shawnee has their awesome baked goods and is headquarters for Sway Coffee Roasters, in addition to having lunch items and an alcoholic beverage menu, patio and even a drive thru. Sway Coffee Roasters is under the watchful eye of Kris, who has an extensive resume with many of the top roasters and cafes here in Kansas City, lots of barista experience, and with an infectious personality, seems to know everyone there is to know in the coffee scene! I think I caught in our conversation that Kris is a Q-grader, meaning she has the palate and knowledge to go along with all of that experience, and Sway Coffee Roasters is poised for big things because of it!
In addition to providing coffee for the McClain’s locations, Sway is set up to be an independent brand and is looking for wholesale partners and cafes who want to share their coffee with their patrons. Sway has a nice website and can ship coffee anywhere, and they have a LOT of options right now, so you will find something for every taste on Sway’s site, for sure. Currently they are shipping for free with any order over $25, so don’t miss out on that promotion!
My Tasting Notes
As I’ve gotten into the habit of lately, I’m going to write this review like I experience these coffees, and I’ll share my tasting notes with you first and then we’ll talk about the coffee and what Sway has to say about it at the end. It’s VERY easy to… sway… your palate one way or another if you read the roaster’s tasting notes ahead of time, so I try to keep my knowledge of my review coffees to a minimum if at all possible so that doesn’t happen.
What I do know about this coffee is that it is a honey process coffee from Sumatra, which is a somewhat novel process from that part of the world (and, no honey is added… I’ll explain after my tasting notes), and this coffee comes from Kerinci, a major coffee-growing area of Sumatra surrounding an active volcano. I’ve had quite a few coffees from this area and they’re always tasty. Visually, this coffee looks like a solid medium roast from Sway.
I’m using my standard pourover setup to brew this coffee, which is a 1:16.5 ratio of 22g of coffee to 363g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin dripper. The Origin is a flat-bottom brewer and I have mine set up with three drain holes, like a Wave. I’m using a Kalita 155 filter and I pulse pour my water through a Melodrip to minimize agitation. My grinder is an Orphan Espresso Lido 3. This coffee ran a little fast, with a total brew time of 2:50 including a 30 second bloom.
The dry fragrance from these grounds was fantastic, with notes of berries coming through. Also, right off brewing, this coffee’s aroma was sweet, full of brown sugar and warm spices. As the cup is cooling I’m still getting a lot of caramelized sugars and I’m starting to get some hints of berries in the nose, too. Taking my first sip, I’m hit with a LOT of flavors all at once. Really strong citrus notes, some earthy notes, a lot of sweetness, some berries, a big bitterness (not necessarily a bad thing) laying like a blanket over everything I just mentioned… and this all hits right in the front of the sip, so this is going to be an interesting coffee to parse out! Now that things are cooling off to my preferred tasting temp around 110F, this coffee is settling into a medium to medium+ bodied presence on my palate and there’s still a lot going on here, but it’s a little more structured and the flavors have some separation that is making my job easier here. At the front of the sip I’m getting a caramelized sugar sweetness along with an interesting citrus note that’s reminding me of lemon-lime soda. It’s a sweet, sugary citrus flavor that carries into the mid-sip and gains power there, coming off almost like a grapefruit candy. As the cup cools it’s a little less grapefruity here in the mid-sip, and I’m getting some tart berries here, too. Definitely not strawberry or blueberry… raspberry, maybe, blackberry, for sure, as there is still that lemon note here. Blackberry notes, for me, in coffee read as a light berry flavor with florals and/or a significant lemon presence, at least that’s how my mind separates blackberry out from other berry flavors, and that’s what I’m getting here. Toward the end of the sip there is, again, a big lemon candy presence and there is some spice coming through here, like a black pepper. In the finish this black pepper/spicy note lingers for a while and the aftertaste has some umami in it for me, too, although I don’t really get that anywhere else with this coffee.
As the cup cools further that lemon-lime soda note is just getting bigger and bigger. It hits hard at the back of my tongue and exerts a heavy presence across my entire palate. The finish is still spicy with some umami but there is also a dairy-like sweetness coming through now that the coffee is approaching room temperature. Like dairy, for me at least, it sits way back in my mouth, really more in my throat. If I take a bigger sip I get a little less lemon-lime soda and I pick up more grapefruit and a lot more of that blackberry note. This Sumatran coffee has a pretty neutral finish and then picks up a bit of dryness in the aftertaste.
This is a REALLY interesting coffee and I’m having a great time drinking it! This is definitely one of the more complex cups I’ve had in a while, with a lot of flavors going on and a lot of development occurring through its range of temperatures as it cools. I’m really digging the citrus and berry notes in here, it’s unlike any other Sumatran coffee I’ve ever had. If this was a blind tasting I’ll bet I would call this a Colombian with all these really bright, aggressive, but pleasing flavors. This is a really interesting coffee and deserves a lot of attention as you drink it, but for all its complexity it’s not wearing out my palate or reading as less drinkable to me. The flavors are huge in this cup, super well-defined and structured. Aggressive is really the right word for it, but in a good way… maybe assertive is less violent sounding! LOL What a fantastic cup, I am in love with this coffee!
About the Coffee
Sway’s website is a little sparse about this coffee, saying this is a medium roast Sumatra Kirinci, “Full bodied. Balanced acidity while still maintaining a fruit forward flavor profile. An excellent all around daily drinker for those of you seeking something unique.” I agree with all that! Unique is right, in all good ways! On the label, they add that this coffee grows at 1200-1500masl and gives tasting notes of “orange peel, rosemary.” This is how powerful associations are and how easy it is to trick your brain. I took my final two sips of this cup right after reading “rosemary” and guess what? Of course, that note I was calling “black pepper-ish” in my review above turned instantly into rosemary! LOL Oh, how easily the brain is tricked!
Sumatra is most famous for a process called “wet hulling,” in which coffee is picked, the cherries and the sticky mucilage inside them are ruptured and removed, and then the coffee is generally run through another machine to remove the “parchment” layer that surrounds the seed (what we call a bean). This allows for the quickest drying, helpful in this wet environment for sure. But, these unprotected, totally naked coffee beans are flavor sponges and they will pick up EVERYTHING they are near. A lot of these coffees get bagged up while they’re still pretty wet, and they can get pretty funky… typical adjectives for Sumatran coffees can be things like herbal, woody, earthy, smoky, peaty, tobacco, etc.
Honey processing, which is fairly novel to Sumatra, involves a similar starting step where the cherries are ruptured and some of the mucilage coating the beans is removed, however, with this type of process, the coffee is spread out to dry. Here, there is still some mucilage clinging to the coffee beans and they are still protected by the “parchment” layer. This more controlled drying is good for the coffee, too. This Central American style process should impart sweetness, body and fruitiness to a coffee. And, boy, that is true in the case of this Sumatran from Sway!