Good morning and welcome to today’s review of a new coffee from S&W Craft Roasting, this time from Malawi. Sluuuuuuurp!
Purchase this coffee directly for $15.85/lb (16ozs!)
S&W CRAFT ROASTING MALAWAI MPANGA AAA PLUS RFA
S&W Craft Roasting are one of my all-time favorite roasters, definitely in my top 5 and easily on my “order anything from them and you’ll like it” list. I’ve been reviewing S&W coffee since I started in 2015. I’m not sure when Nick and Charlie got their start as S&W Craft Roasting, but one of the things I love is that they are located in Coatesville, Indiana, a town of fewer than 600 people. I love the fact that you can find outrageously well-sourced coffee that is roasted expertly in a small town like this in the rural Midwest. It says so much about coffee in the USA right now. The second thing I love (well, third, because their excellent coffee is at the top of the list) about S&W is their value. They sell coffee by the pound, so 16ozs instead of 12 or the ever more popular 8oz bags, and they do so at prices that are borderline crazy. Right now, their most expensive coffee is $16.25 and most of the time they land in the $15-ish range per pound, which is amazing. Yeah, the website isn’t fancy, the bags aren’t fancy, the labeling isn’t fancy… but the coffee is excellent, the value is probably best in specialty coffee right now, and they put their money back into their roasting operation and not into aesthetics, which I can certainly appreciate.
Jumping right into today’s coffee, I’m checking out one of their new offerings, a Malawi Mpanga AAA Plus RFA. I’ll get into all the details after I share my notes, so as to not bias my taste buds by accidentally reading any tasting notes. What I can say right now is that this is only the second coffee from Malawi that I’ve tasted on KC Coffee Geek, with the last one being way back in 2015 and roasted by S&W’s neighbors in Indianapolis, Tinker Coffee, interestingly. Is there an Indiana-Malawi connection??! Malawi is a relatively small country located with Tanzania to the north, Zambia to the west, and Mozambique to the south and east. The giant Lake Malawi runs most of the eastern length of the country. 90% of the country’s economy is driven by agriculture, primarily tobacco exports. You can read all about the growing coffee industry in Malawi in this article in Perfect Daily Grind. Other than that, I know the RFA in the name means it’s certified by the Rainforest Alliance (read more about that here), and I’m assuming the AAA is a grading convention either for the quality or possibly the size of the beans, as is done in Kenya and some other eastern Africa countries. Ironically, the only reference I can find to coffee grading in Malawi is my own past review on Tinker’s coffee, and I have a reference link in there to Roast Magazine, but the article link no longer works. So, after 30 minutes of research, I guess I’m forced to quote myself that this AAA “grade” is a reference to the size and screening of the beans. Whew, that was a lot of work! LOL
For this coffee I’m using my standard preparation method of a 1:16.5 ratio of 22g of coffee to 363g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin dripper. The Origin is essentially a flat bottom 3-hole dripper like a Kalita Wave and I’m using Kalita 155 filters in it. I pulse pour my water through a Melodrip to minimize agitation of the bed during brewing and my grinder for pourovers is an Orphan Espresso Lido 3. This coffee got a 35 second bloom and brewed in about 3:30, not including the bloom.
The aroma from this brewing coffee reminded me a lot of panela sugar, which is an unrefined form of sugar that has some brown sugar and molasses notes to it. Taking a sip, this is a medium to medium+ bodied coffee and I’m getting that panela note in the sweetness here as well as some nice citrus notes coming through. This is syrupy quality to the sweet base of this coffee, each sip coating my tongue and palate in its sugary goodness. In the mid-sip I’m getting citrus brightness with the necessary acidity to balance all this sugar-like sweetness out. This is an interesting flavor note and it reminds me of Kenyan coffees, although it seems like it has been AGES since I’ve reviewed anything from Kenya! This fruity component reminds me of blood orange, but there is an interesting savoriness to it, too. This is definitely not landing in “tomato” territory like some Kenyan coffees can, but it’s similar in that acid + savory flavor hit like a tomato. In bigger sips I’m getting orange juice and tangerine, maybe even a bit of granny smith apple in there. This coffee finishes sweet and those fruits linger on my palate for a long time between sips. This is a very easy drinking coffee and I imagine it would be well-accepted by pretty much any coffee drinker, with its big body, syrupy sweetness and soft, but delicious citrus notes.
More About the Coffee
This coffee comes from the Mpanga estate in southern Malawi where it borders Mozambique. Coffee grows around 1050-1150 meters above sea level there, which is relatively low for Africa where, for example, Ethiopian coffees regularly reach the 2000+ masl range. This lot is SL28 and Catimor. SL28 is “the classic” varietal grown in Kenya that gives a lot of that “Kenyan character” to coffees from there, so I’m not surprised I was getting Kenyan vibes from my cup. This is a washed coffee as is typical for this part of Africa, too. S&W Craft Roasting gives tasting notes of, “Deep and smooth – plum, lychee, dragonfruit… demerara and malt sweetness brings some heft to the body, a few dense floral tones waft through, finishing with a light spritz of lemon… this is the smoothest cup I’ve had in a long long time! City roast.”
I can’t say I’ve ever had dragonfruit, but demerara is a type of unrefined sugar so I feel OK about that! LOL Our tasting notes are quite different, but my exposure to dragonfruit and lychee are almost nil, so it makes sense. S&W do mention this is a lemon-forward espresso requiring a very fine grind and I would second that. I didn’t spend a ton of time trying to get this coffee to work as espresso, but even with a really fine grind and playing with pressure and flow controls I had trouble taming it on my equipment. My shots were super bright and very acid-forward, so I’m going on record to say this coffee really shines as a drip and I’d recommend keeping it away from your espresso machine unless you are really adventurous and/or just love face melters! That being said, this is an EXCELLENT filter coffee and a winner in my book!