Good morning and welcome to today’s review of S&W Craft Roasting’s current Kenyan coffee. This is one of their owner/founder’s current daily drinkers, so let’s dive in and find out what’s so good about it!
Purchase this coffee directly for $16.25/lb (16oz!)
Other reviews in this series: Ethiopia Yirgacheffe Organic Worka Single Farm Natural Gelgelu Edema | Guatemala Ayarza Wine Series Natural
S&W CRAFT ROASTING KENYA NYERI AB GIAKANJA
S&W Craft Roasting is proof that you don’t need to be located in a big metropolitan area, or have a flashy, fancy website and branding, to be top-notch coffee roasters. Owned by Nick and Charlie, S&W is located west of Indianapolis in the small town (pop. 555!) of Coatesville, Indiana. They put all of their energy into sourcing and roasting excellent coffees, rather than marketing, packaging and a fancy website. These things are functional for S&W, but I do appreciate that they continually reinvest in their equipment and what matters most, what ends up in my cup, instead of their aesthetic. This also helps then continue to offer coffee by the pound (16ozs) for $15-$16 for most of their coffees. At $16.25/lb, this morning’s coffee is their most expensive offering. Last weekend I bought a fairly standard Ethiopian for $25/12oz (didn’t know the price until I was checking out and didn’t want to be cheap LOL), so this is an absolute STEAL, and S&W source GOOD coffee just like the flashier roasters and brands. Nick and Charlie have earned their place on my “buy anything from them and it will be good” list!
The coffee I’m drinking from S&W Craft Roasting this morning is their Kenya Nyeri AB Giakanja. Unpacking this name a little, this coffee is most obviously from Kenya, and Nyeri is a county in the central highlands of the country, where a lot of the best coffee is grown in that country. Most coffee in Kenya is grown by smallholder farmers with tiny plots of land, so they work together in cooperatives to pool their coffee into bigger lots and process it in a central location. This coffee comes from the Giakanja Cooperative Society, which has about 1800 members whose coffees grow in the range of 1700-1800masl. The “AB” in the name denotes the size of the beans. Kenya and some other African countries (Tanzania off the top of my head) still sort coffee beans by size, with AA being the largest, followed by AB and so on. There is NO quality association with this designation, i.e. AA is not better than AB, AB beans are just slightly smaller. This gives Kenyan coffees a nice uniform appearance in the bag and they are always a pleasure to look at, for sure. This particular coffee could be a mix of Arusha, Dega, Ruiru-11, SL-28 and SL-34 cultivars grown by the Society. Measuring the color on the Espresso Vision Roast Vision, this coffee comes in at 26, which is “light” on the Roast Vision scale, which goes from 0-35 with higher numbers being lighter in color. This is about a 96 on the Agtron scale. So, at least judging by visuals alone, this is a light roast that should offer plenty of origin characteristics.
I’m using my standard pourover setup for this coffee, which is a 1:16.5 ratio of 22g of coffee to 363g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin dripper. I have my Origin set up to be a three-hole dripper and it has a flat bottom, so it’s like a Kalita Wave or any similar flat-bottom brewer. I use Kalita 155 filters and pulse pour through a Melodrip to minimize agitation during brewing. This coffee took a total of 4:30, including a 30-second bloom, to brew.
My Tasting Notes
I feel like it has been a long time since I’ve had a Kenyan coffee (this is definitely the first one of 2021 and the year is half over!), and I’m digging the aroma from this one… I’m getting some citrus and a lot of graham cracker, which I rather like. Taking a sip, this is a medium+ bodied coffee that is quintessentially Kenyan… big, bold, citrus-forward… everything I’d want from this coffee. The front end of the sip is sweet, with a light caramel note and a lot of the graham cracker I caught in the aroma. This is immediately followed by the fruits in the cup, which rush in like a tidal wave. Rather than the classic grapefruit notes that Kenyan coffees are so well known for, I’m getting more orangey flavors here, mostly like tangerine, which for me is similar in flavor to orange but with a bit more brightness and lightness to its flavor. There’s some lemon here, which comes out a lot if I take big, frequent sips (almost gulping this coffee down) and also lingers in the aftertaste if I control myself between sips and slow down some. It’s not super apparent, but there is apricot here for me, too, which for my brain and palate has a peachy note to it, but with more acidity and “bite” to it. As the coffee cools to almost room temperature, I’m getting a bit of a lemon pie vibe from it, and there is also a dairy quality to the sweetness here, reminding me of something like lemon pudding made with milk. This is a really nice coffee, what I’ve come to expect from my friends at S&W! It has all the qualities I love from Kenyan coffees without any of the harshness or bite that they can occasionally have. This is a bright, fruit-forward coffee, but it’s super well-balanced and sweet, and I adore it!
Comparing my tasting notes to Nick and Charlie’s, they say this coffee is “Big beefy Kenya… loads of tamarind and sorghum sweetness with a plummy finish. City roast… I often find peach and nectarine tones in it as well.” Boom! Our palates are calibrated, so there’s no telling what can happen this week! LOL Really, I can’t say it enough… S&W Craft Roasting is a top roaster and you are really missing out if you aren’t ordering coffee from them regularly, period.