Good morning and welcome to today’s review of my (sadly) last coffee from S&W Craft Roasting, one of my all-time favorite roasteries and the kings of good value in specialty coffee! This is a natural from Rwanda and I’m excited to share it with you!
Purchase this coffee for an insane $15.15/lb (16 ozs!)
Other reviews in this series: Ethiopia Yirgacheffe Organic Worka Single Farm Natural Gelgelu Edema | Guatemala Ayarza Wine Series Natural | Kenya Nyeri AB Giakanja | Rwanda Dukorere Kawa Bukure Women’s Cooperative Natural
S&W CRAFT ROASTING RWANDA KININI NATURAL
S&W Craft Roasting is a company located in the small (population under 600!) Indiana town of Coatesville, west of Indianapolis. It was founded by Nick and Charlie and I’ve been reviewing S&W coffee for years now. I have yet to have a bad coffee from these guys and what continually amazes me is how much value you get for your purchase. They source GOOD specialty coffees, but have no frills when it comes to marketing, packaging and labeling. It’s down to business for S&W and that is passed along to the buyer, for sure. They sell coffees by the pound (16 ounces) and most of their coffees run about $15/lb, give or take a dollar. This is amazing and borderline outrageous considering these same coffees tend to run in the $18-$20/12 oz range in most specialty roasteries. Good value, great coffee, awesome guys… S&W Craft Roasting is always on my “buy anything and you will like it” list when people are asking what to get next.
This morning’s coffee is the last in a series of four African coffees S&W sent me a while ago. Like the last coffee I reviewed from S&W, this is also a natural from Rwanda, but I don’t want to spoil my palate/brain by writing about it yet, so I’m going to share my tasting notes and thoughts first, then we can dive into the details about this coffee.
My Tasting Notes
I used my usual pourover setup of a 1:16.5 ratio of 22g of coffee to 363g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin 3-hole flat-bottom dripper using Kalita 155 filters. I pulse pour through a Melodrip to minimize agitation of the coffee bed during brewing and my grinder is an Orphan Espresso Lido 3. This coffee got a 30-second bloom and a brew time (minus the bloom) of 3:45.
I get a lot of fruitiness on the nose from the fragrance of the dry grounds and the aroma coming from the cup with this coffee. I know this is weird, but I smell “red” with this one and I can’t really explain that really well! LOL There’s maybe a winey grapiness to the aroma… maybe something like plum… but “red fruits” is the descriptor that comes to mind, even though I know that’s not really a thing. Taking a sip, this is a medium+ bodied coffee and I’m getting a lot of different fruits coming through. There’s a lot of citrus here for me and I’m getting blood orange and some grapefruit in the flavors. The grapefruit is more sweet grapefruit juice or candy, rather than the sharper grapefruit notes I may expect from a classic Kenyan coffee, for example, but it’s still very apparent and really delicious. There’s a honeyed sweetness to the bottom end of this coffee and it offers a nice balance to the citrus. “Honey” is sometimes a hard note for me to pick up in coffee, but not here. I HAVE been eating honey more than I usually do lately because I picked up a small container from Daisy Chain Coffee in Des Moines (definitely worth the stop) last month and the owner has his own bees, so maybe there is some recency bias on my palate, but I really do feel like I’m getting some nice honey notes here. Those “red fruits” I was getting in the aroma are coming through in the second half of the sip, but are subtle compared to the citrus here. There may be a hint of berry jam and plum, but mostly this is a citrusy cup for me. If I hold the coffee in my mouth and do some retronasal breathing it brings the berry/plum notes forward and tamps down the citrus, but regular sips are super sweet, citrusy and have a little acidic kick right in the finish that I really love. There is a slight savory note here, too, that gives a HINT of the “tomato” vibe that comes with some Kenyan coffees, but it’s not a tomato bomb by any stretch of the imagination. That adds some nice complexity to the cup, though.
One thing I really like about this coffee is its balance. It’s fruit-forward and has a lot of citrus notes, but they are rounded and pleasant and not harsh at all. For as fruity and citrusy as this Kinini is, it’s not an “acidic” coffee and doesn’t have that bite that sometimes comes with citrus. It’s really nicely balanced and sweet like citrus candy. The finish is also sweet and has a lingering aftertaste of orange and grapefruit for me, with some hints of chocolate late in the aftertaste.
Will it ‘spro? It will, but I had trouble with all 4 of these African coffees from S&W. They are roasted very light, and they were all dense beans, so I had difficulty grinding fine enough to keep the extractions in a reasonable timeframe and I got a full body workout every time I used my Pharos hand grinder with any of these coffees, so I was slightly demotivated because of that! LOL I have manual pressure profiling on my machine, so I did long pre-infusions and ran at a lower pressure to tame the pull and overall had limited success. The espresso from this coffee was a bit thin and quite bright, but certainly drinkable, although this coffee really shined as a pourover, so I didn’t see the point of burning through most of the bag to dial it in perfectly when the solution was so apparent… just make pourovers with it! 🙂
S&W’s Descriptions and Details About This Coffee
Ha! S&W’s description of this coffee is, “Surprisingly, this Natural reminds me very much of a washed Kenya. This is a dense cup which leads with black grape and mandarin tones, followed by a little black tea and you might pull some island spice tones in the finish. It drinks slightly more subtle than similar Kenya cups.” Validation for my palate, for sure!
As I stated, this is a natural process coffee, which means the cherries are picked and sorted then laid out on raised mesh beds to dry slowly, like big raisins, before the cherries are broken and separated from the seeds (what we call coffee beans) inside. This tends to impart fruitiness, sweetness and body to the coffee. Unlike most Ethiopian naturals, though, I didn’t get any ferment notes from this coffee, so people who are sensitive to ferment flavors would probably be fine with this one. This is grown near Tumba village in the Rulinda region of Rwanda (north-central part of the country) at a staggering 2200masl and consists of Bourbon, BM-139, BM-71, Jackson and Mayaguez cultivars. According to the S&W website, this washing station lays their naturals out for 48 days with regular turning to avoid overfermentation, so that explains the low ferment notes I got from this cup (although I like fermentation notes in natural coffees, so I’m weird like that). This description refers to “Bourbon Mayaguez 71” as a cultivar brought originally from Ethiopia to Rwanda, so I suspect the Jackson, Mayaguez and BM-71 cultivars mentioned in the description on S&W’s site are all the same thing. Hard to know, though, and I am far from well-versed when it comes to the biology of coffee. It tastes damn good, I know that!
