Good morning and welcome to today’s review of Theodore’s Coffee Roasters Buena Esperanza, a washed coffee from Guatemala. This is a light roast of one of Theodore’s best sellers, so let’s check this out!
Theodore’s Coffee Roasters website
Purchase this coffee directly for $19/12oz
THEODORE’S COFFEE ROASTERS BUENA ESPERANZA
Theodore’s Coffee Roasters is one of my favorite, go-to roasters, easily making it on my “buy anything from them and you’ll like it” list of roasters that I am constantly recommending to people. Theodore’s was started by Darwin Pavon in 2013, named after Darwin’s grandfather and is located in Owosso, Michigan. Darwin is Honduran and spent much of his youth on farms there. He became an agronomist and eventually was leading a team that worked with over 600 farms spread out from Mexico to Colombia. It was at this time that he started making the direct relationships with coffee growers that is such an important part of Theodore’s Coffee Roasters today. Theodore’s is strictly a roaster, with no cafe or retail side to worry about. If you live in the USA, you can order Theodore’s coffees with free shipping, which is a huge value, so stock up!
Today’s coffee is grown by old friends of Darwin, Nery and German. Darwin began working with them about 3 years ago to improve their coffee growing on their farm, Finca Buena Esperanza, located in Huehuetenango, Guatemala. “Huehue” is ground zero for coffee growing in Guatemala and I’ve lost count of how many wonderful coffees I’ve had from there over the years. Coffee from this section of their farm grows about 1800masl and this is a washed process coffee, meaning the coffee seeds (or beans as we call them) are separated from the cherries they grow in early on in the process to give a clean, clear cup of coffee to you.
I brewed this cup using my standard method of a 1:16.5 ratio of 22g of coffee to 363g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin dripper. I have mine set up to have 3 holes in the middle, so it’s basically like a Kalita Wave or any other 3-hole flat-bottom brewer. I use Kalita 155 filters in this brewer and pulse pour my water through a Melodrip to minimize agitation of the coffee bed while brewing. My grinder is an Orphan Espresso Lido 3. This coffee got a 30 second bloom and the total brew time, including bloom, was 3:20. For a coffee this light, maybe a bit finer grind to slow it down and get some more extraction would be a good idea, but I did enjoy this cup very much, so…
My Tasting Notes
The first thing I noticed about this coffee is how light it is. Just visually, I think I’d call this a “cinnamon roast,” which is taking the coffee right up to first crack (the literal cracking sounds the coffee makes when you are roasting and they start to expand and rupture the walls of the beans), but most coffee in the American market at least make it to first crack, even if it’s occurring in the cooling tray and the roast is mostly over. Using the Espresso Vision Roast Vision instrument, I got readings of 30-31 for this coffee (Agtron scale of 108-111 or so), on a scale of 0-35 where 35 is the lightest, so visually, this is a light roast, although this doesn’t take into account the actual roasting temperature and other factors that go into determining the overall roast level of a coffee.
The aroma from the cup is nice, mostly lightly caramelized sugars and a hint of brown sugar in the initial inhale. My initial sip is totally unexpected, giving me nutty flavors and toasted bread crust as the dominant notes. As my palate attenuates with some more sips, and taking bigger sips, I’m getting a lot of sweetness here and a lightly fruited tone to the flavors, but this is not the fruit-forward, acid-heavy, bright bomb I would expect, at all, from a coffee this lightly roasted, which is interesting to me and another reason why visual appearance only tells a little bit of the story. There is a light caramel note to the sweetness in the cup and I’m getting some apple notes in the mid-sip. These apple-ish flavors start as more of a red apple, then pick up a little acidity and remind me a bit more of a Granny Smith in the finish and aftertaste. There is a hint of lemon in the background in this cup, but it is not a predominant flavor note at all. Imagine an apple with a spritz of lemon on it to keep it from going brown… it’s more like that and very subtle. This coffee finishes sweet and has a hint of fresh strawberry, for me, at the end of the sip and especially in the aftertaste. Doing some really weird things with retronasal breathing, agitating the coffee a bit in my mouth and bringing in more air from my mouth at the same time (not a real technique, I was just messing around), I picked up some really pleasant florals and it enhanced that lemon candy brightness a lot, which I rather enjoyed (but would not do in public! LOL). I’m always amazed by how much the physical characterisics of my sips affect the flavor of so many coffees, including the size of the sip, how long I hold it in my mouth before swallowing, retronasal breathing, agitation, etc. All of these factors can REALLY change how a coffee tastes, sometimes dramatically. What is so interesting about this coffee, for me, is how prevalent that roasted nut/toasted bread note is, sitting right in the middle of the sip, and it’s like watching something with a pillar right in front of you, forcing you to lean this way and that way to see everything. This roasted nut note is not unpleasant at all, but it definitely overshadows the much more delicate notes of lemon, strawberry, those hints of florals I got, and offsets the sweetness of the cup a little, too. That being said, this is a nice cup, full of delicious flavors, and I’ll continue to play with grind size and experiment with different brewing parameters to see if the coffee changes based on some of those factors. Maybe a finer grind and a bit more dwell time would work well for this coffee, but overall, I’m very happy with it!
What Theodore’s Coffee Roasters Says About This Coffee
Theodore’s website doesn’t have a ton of additional information about this coffee that I didn’t cover above already. Their tasting notes say, “honey, blackberry, strawberry and caramel finishes, one of our most sweet and delicate coffees” so my notes aren’t far off from theirs, which is a nice feeling for me as a reviewer! As the cup cools, that strawberry note gets even more noticeable and it’s a really nice way to finish each sip. I like the aftertaste on this coffee as much as the flavor of drinking it itself, so definitely take the time with this coffee to let it cool and take your time in between sips or you’ll miss some of the best rewards of this coffee!