Good morning and welcome to today’s review of the last of a run of coffees from S&W Craft Roasting. This is their selection from Peru and I always enjoy a nice, easy-drinking Peruvian coffee, so let’s see what this one has to offer!
Purchase this coffee for $15.35/lb (yes, 16oz!)
S&W CRAFT ROASTING PERU SANTA FE
I’m sad to say I’m at the end of the road for the coffees S&W Craft Roasting sent me recently. The Malawi Mpanga and Brazil Daterra were both fantastic and I’ve never had a bad coffee from S&W, so I’m excited to try this Peruvian selection out. Nick and Charlie founded S&W a number of years ago, before I got KC Coffee Geek up and running in 2015, and I’ve reviewed A LOT of their coffee and have always been super pleased. They do a great selecting their coffees and they always roast for sweetness and character. Their customer service is awesome and what most coffee geeks like the most about S&W is their incredible value. They sell all of their top notch coffees by the pound for $15-$16 give or take a handful of cents. There’s no frills spared on the packaging, labeling, website design, or other aesthetics, so you can buy with confidence knowing you’re paying for top notch coffee that is expertly roasted, not for pretty packaging. Nick and Charlie put all their profits back into their roasting operation, which is amazingly located in the tiny town of around 500 of Coatesville, Indiana. I love everything about S&W Craft Roasting and I hope if you haven’t started getting coffee from them already that you give them a shot because you will not be disappointed.
This morning’s coffee is S&W’s Peru Santa Fe, which comes from the Pena-Neyra family and their farm, Flor de mi Trabajo in the town of Nazaret de la Cumbre. According to the small amount of information I was able to find, Rosendo and Dona Maria Pena-Neyra actually founded the Nazaret de la Cumbre village over 30 years ago and began planting coffee there soon after. Today, their sons, Gil and Rogelio, work the farm, which is located in the San Jose de Lourdes district. I can’t even find the village using Google Maps, so this must be a tiny spot in Peru! I don’t have tons and tons of experience with Peruvian coffee, but it tends to land in the same category as Brazil, for me. I always think, “Oh, this will be pretty basic and not real exciting…” for these coffees and I’m always pleasantly surprised and very happy with the coffees I get from both countries! I’ll share S&W tasting notes after my own below so I don’t bias my palate during my sampling. Peruvian coffees tend to have a lot of apple notes in them for me, which I always enjoy, and tend to be fairly low complexity and easy drinking, none of which is a bad thing in the least. This coffee is a mix of Caturra, Mundo Novo and Typica varieties grown at 1600-1900masl.
I am getting some nice fragrances from the dry grounds before I start brewing. There’s raisin here, a bit of earthiness, and some molasses, for me, promising what I hope will be a full bodied, sweet cup. I am using my standard pourover setup and method of a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 363g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin dripper. I have my Origin set up to have three holes open in the bottom, and it’s a flat bottomed brewer similar to Kalita Wave and a ton of others. This one uses a Kalita 155 size filter. My grinder is an Orphan Espresso Lido 3 and this coffee took 3:50 plus a 30 second bloom to brew. It’s allergy season for me right now and my nose isn’t its best, but despite that I’m picking up some nice caramel and brown panela sugar aromas from the cup. Taking a sip this is a medium+ to heavy- bodied coffee, so that big mouthfeel I was hoping for did come through in the cup. I’m getting a nice dark caramel sweetness on the low end of this cup and I’m going to let it cool down and open up some more before I drink too much of this coffee! In the cooling cup I am getting some of that familiar apple acidity and flavor note I am used to with Peruvian coffees. There’s definitely some Granny Smith coming through here to give the coffee some high end and balance all that sweetness out. I’m also getting some crisp sweetness ala Fuji or Pink Lady apples, too, which I really like. If I do some swishing of this coffee and a little retronasal breathing I’m getting a sweet jasmine tea note here which is a surprise, and this coffee has a slightly dry finish and leaves my tongue feeling a bit scratchy, reminding me of a mild black tea in the aftertaste. There’s still some apple notes lingering in the aftertaste, too. If I hold the coffee in my mouth for a little longer than normal I am getting a floral note of hibiscus. I’m generally really bad with floral notes outside of rose and jasmine, but I drank Hugo Tea’s hibiscus iced tea all summer and so I do have some recency bias here!
Taking a look at S&W’s tasting notes for this coffee, I’m feeling damn fine about myself right now! LOL They say, “This is a heavy, sweet cup with plum, black tea and big hibiscus flavors” and they also found that it makes a “monstrously round espresso shot.” I had no love from this coffee as ‘spro myself, so I’m not sure what happened there. I know Nick and Charlie have a Decent Espresso machine which can do some pretty magical things, so maybe that was the difference?
Overall, this is a delicious and pleasant coffee that continues to improve as it cools toward room temp. I wonder how this would do as a cold brew? I did try to run this coffee as espresso a decent number of times and had very little luck with it. To keep the brew time in the normal range I had to grind super fine and I wasn’t getting a very good extraction, at least visually looking at my bottomless portafilter. The cups were VERY bright and acid-forward. Even trying some lengthy pre-infusion and other tricks didn’t yield much luck. I did see in a conversation on Reddit recently that someone said South American coffees often don’t produce a lot of fines in the grind and therefore, make it tough to provide enough resistance in the compressed puck for the water, forcing grinds that are too fine and making life difficult on the ‘spro machine. I’m not if this is true or not, but it seemed to hold true for this coffee at least. No worries, though, this coffee shines bright as a filter coffee, so you can’t win them all as dual-use coffees!