Good morning and welcome to today’s review of Starved Rock Coffee Co.’s top shelf Nicaragua! I’ve been enjoying this coffee for a few weeks now, so let’s jump in and see what my thoughts on this one are!
Starved Rock Coffee Co. website
Purchase this coffee directly for $21/12oz
STARVED ROCK COFFEE CO. NICARAGUA
Starved Rock Coffee Co. was founded by Matt and Jill McLaughlin in 2017. Matt and Jill (and their 5 kids!) are lifelong residents of the Illinois Valley area west/southwest of Chicago. Coffee was originally a simple pleasure tucked into a day of caring for an army of kids and working, but as it does for so many people, it morphed into a business idea. Taking their name from Starved Rock State Park, a beautiful getaway from the city of Chicago, the duo have been sourcing and roasting top notch coffee ever since.
This morning’s coffee is from their “top shelf” collection but it looks like it sold out a week or two ago, or maybe was pulled from the rotation and will make it back in again soon. Edit (2/25/22) They had run out of bags for this coffee but it is back in stock again! Starved Rock did say it was one of the best coffees they’ve ever sourced, so it wouldn’t be a big surprise if it’s gone. As always, I’ll share my notes on the coffee first to minimize any bias in my flavor perception, then I’ll talk more about the coffee after that. I can say right now that this is from Finca Un Regalo de Dios in Nicaragua and it’s Pacamara varietal, unmistakeable because of Pacamara’s HUGE bean size!
I drank about 90% of this bag as espresso (using about 15-16 grams of this coffee and 3-4g of their natural Ethiopian I’ll be reviewing later in the week and it was so good!), but for my cup this morning I am using my usual pourover method of a 1:16.5 ratio of 22g of coffee to 363g of Third Wave Water. I’m using a Trinity Origin dripper, which has a flat bottom and I have set up to have three drain holes in it, and it uses Kalita 155 filters. My grinder is an Orphan Espresso Lido 3 and I pulse pour my water through a Melodrip to minimize coffee agitation during brewing. This coffee got a 40 second bloom and a total brew time, bloom included, of 3:45.
Both the dry fragrance of the grounds and the aroma from the cup are fruity, with some berry notes coming through. Taking a sip, I’m getting blackberry right in the front and a bit of fermentation, so I’m going to guess that this is a natural process coffee. This may be the most blackberry-tasting coffee I’ve ever had! In the berry pantheon, blackberry tends to be a little tougher for me to taste compared to strawberry, raspberry and blueberry that are so often found in natural coffees, but this coffee is a blackberry bomb! For me, blackberry has a more subtle, slightly less sweet flavor than other berries and seems to be accompanied with a bit of bitterness that balances it well, as well as some acidity, making it more complex than some of the other berries I noted. I’m finding all of that here in this coffee, too. There’s a sweet base to the sip that is balanced by the blackberry note, and then coming in right after that blackberry is a nice citrus acidity, too. I’m getting pink grapefruit in the acidity that isn’t harsh at all. It’s bright and forward, but also sweet and balanced with these other flavors. The acidity spreads out over my palate and hits the sides of my tongue nicely. I’d say this is a “juicy” coffee, making me want to take more frequent sips. There’s a slight hint of savory with that pink grapefruit note that gives me a little bit of a Kenyan vibe and as the cup cools and my palate attenuates, it’s becoming more and more about the grapefruit. In a blind test, if it wasn’t for that ferment note still hanging around, I’d probably say this is a Kenyan coffee. The vast majority of Kenyan coffees are washed, though, and don’t have that ferment flavor from dry/natural processing, so that’s the only thing that would keep me from declaring this incorrectly as a Kenyan coffee. This coffee has a nice, full body which gives good weight and presence on my palate, too, making it physically enjoying to drink. The finish is sweet and leaves blackberry and pink grapefruit behind on my palate for as long as I can stand it before taking another sip. This is a beautifully bright cup of coffee that somehow manages to be almost entirely about the high notes, but doesn’t come off as harsh or “acidic” at all. A beautiful example of what an acid-forward, fruity Central American coffee can be. No wonder Starved Rock were so excited about this coffee!
More About the Coffee
Getting back to the coffee and what Starved Rock has to tell us about that, it’s a Nicaraguan coffee from Finca Un Regalo de Dios (roughly translating to “gift from God farm”). The label says, “Light roast with a clean, bright acidity and sweet notes of blackberry and black currant.” Getting into the details, I was correct that this is a Pacamara variety (the ENORMOUS beans are almost always a giveaway) and I was also right about this being a natural process coffee. Natural processing is when the coffee cherries are picked and sorted, then laid out whole on raised mesh beds to slowly break down and dry out in the sun like big raisins. The seeds inside the cherries, what we call coffee “beans,” soak up flavors from the fruit as they break down, including that slight ferment flavor this coffee has that was a hint for me about its processing. Natural coffees tend to have a lot of sweetness and fruitiness in the cup. The growing altitude for this coffee is 1350-1800masl and it was grown by Luis Alberto near the Mozonte village in Diplito-Jalapa.
It’s a bummer this one sold out already, but you can’t go wrong with Starved Rock’s other top shelf coffees or their popular blends. Stay tuned because I’ll be posting the review of their natural Ethiopian from the top shelf collection later this week, too!