Good morning and welcome to today’s review of S&W Craft Roasting’s El Panal, a coffee from Guatemala that comes with some sticks of honey for reasons I’ll explain below. I’m excited to start this Monday morning off with a cup of coffee, so let’s get right into it! Oh, and happy birthday to Angelo Moriondo, who invented the first espresso machine in 1884!
Purchase this coffee directly for $16.60/lb (16oz!)
S&W CRAFT ROASTING GUATEMALA EL PANAL
I’m digging into my big box of coffees from my friends at S&W Craft Roasting this morning and I pulled the Guatemala El Panal. I avoided looking at the descriptor on the label or reading ahead on their website so I can keep my palate unbiased. So, I’ll share my tasting notes below, first, and then I’ll finish the review telling you more about the coffee. First off, though, S&W Craft Roasting has been around a little longer than KC Coffee Geek and is comprised of business partners, Nick and Charlie, who roast out of Coatesville, Indiana! Coatesville is a town outside of Indianapolis that boasts a population under 500, and is proof that you can get top notch specialty coffee from anywhere in the country. S&W are value-oriented and don’t have a fancy website or packaging that you are paying for. Instead, every penny you spend with them goes into sourcing excellent coffee and roasting it expertly. S&W have had to raise their prices, like everyone else in the last year or two, and you can still get a pound of coffee (16 ozs!) for $16 and change. S&W Craft Roasting is one of my all-time favorite roasters and if you are sleeping on them, you need to try them out!
My Tasting Notes
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. The Origin is a flat-bottom dripper that uses Kalita 155 filters and I pulse pour my water through a Melodrip to minimize agitation of the brew bed. My pourover grinder is an Orphan Espresso Lido 3. This coffee got a 30 second bloom and had a total brew time of 3:20 including the bloom.
The aroma from this coffee is sweet with hints of molasses and a bit of apple for me. Taking a sip, this is exactly the kind of Guatemalan coffee flavor profile I love so much. This coffee has a medium+ body for me that coats my palate and feels syrupy. I’m getting brown sugar, candy-like sweetness in every sip along with apple juice notes that really kick in in the second half of the sip. There’s a little bit of acidity with the apple notes and that makes this coffee read as “refreshing” to my brain. As the cup cools I’m getting some definite orange notes as well as tart cherry that definitely ups the brightness I’m getting from this cup. The finish on this coffee is just a tiny bit on the dry side and is full of deep orange and cherry notes. In the aftertaste I’m getting hints of rose florals that I didn’t appreciate before and that cherry tartness lingers on my palate for a while, too. As this coffee reaches room temperature for me it’s coming through like an interesting, unexpected candy from a foreign country I’m traveling to for the first time! LOL It’s sweet, sugary, bright and slightly tart all at the same time, but well balanced and VERY easy to drink. I’m an easy mark for Guatemalan coffees and it’s because of roasts like this El Panal, which are so easy to enjoy.
About the Coffee
El Panal is a lot of Caturra and Bourbon varieties grown by Jose Mendez in the San Pedro Necta region of Guatemala. San Pedro Necta is found in the Huehuetenango department (like a state in the USA) of western Guatemala, which butts up against the border with Mexico’s Chiapas state. This is the heart of coffee growing in Guatemala and I can’t count how many wonderful coffee experiences I’ve had from Huehue! This is a washed coffee grown at 1600masl. S&W say this is a “medium bodied cup boasts heavy roase flavors, with a light clove and nutmeg finish… you’re likely to get plenty of chocolate and a little cherry, too.” So, we’re pretty close in what we experienced with this coffee, maybe just in different proportions. Third Wave Water tends to jack up the brightness in coffee, too, and S&W suggested maybe to try 1/2 dosing my water with TWW instead of using a full dose, which I may experiment with in the coming weeks.
In any case, Jorge is also a producer for the Coffee Blossom Honey project and each pound of his coffee comes with 5 sticks of his honey. In fact, it was Jorge’s honey that led to the idea for Coffee Blossom Honey in 2015. A 12oz jar of Jorge’s raw El Apiario honey will set you back $16 from Coffee Blossom Honey, and they have some nice samplers and varieties from other coffee growers, too. I’m far from being a honey connoisseur, but S&W Craft Roasting were kind enough to include some of Jorge’s honey sticks in their care package to me. For my limited honey palate, I got citrus and hints of rose from the honey. Mine had some crystals of sugar forming in it and I left them, but did warm up the honey. I like a little bit of of the crystals in there to crunch on and, man, this is some excellent tasting honey!