Good morning and welcome to today’s review of my first tasting of Rochester Brewing and Roasting Co.’s anaerobic Ethiopian coffee, something I was assured is the craziest coffee they’ve ever offered. I’m excited for this first sip, especially of a local Kansas City roaster’s coffee, so let’s get right into it!
Rochester Brewing and Roasting Co. website
Purchase this coffee directly for $18/12oz
ROCHESTER BREWING AND ROASTING CO. ETHIOPIA GUJI URAGA SOLOMO
I was recently combing Facebook Marketplace ads looking for an espresso upgrade for work and stumbled into a happy accident of meeting Philip Enloe, one of the partners in Kansas City’s Rochester Brewing and Roasting Co. I was embarrassed to realize that Rochester has been brewing beer and roasting coffee here in KC since about 2017-2018 and I had never had their coffee, their beer, or even stepped foot in the place. I guess that speaks to the robustness of Kansas City’s food and beverage culture, but also of how hard it is to stay current in a city with this much going on when you have a job-job and other responsibilities (not to mention that whole Covid thing!). All excuses aside, I did get a chance to see Rochester’s relatively massive space on the edge of the vibrant Crossroads district in Midtown KC and I will be back for beers and more coffee soon!
The idea for Rochester Brewing and Roasting Co. came from Phillip and his friend, Marshall Van Tuyl, in 2017. Today, Phillip is the head roaster of the coffee operation and Marshall is the head brewer on the beer side of things. As is the story for so many people, Phillip began home roasting coffee around 2011 and Marshall was trying his hand at home brewing. Marshall won the 2017 HIgh Plains BrewHoff Brewer of the Year and the duo decided it was time to take their hobbies to the next level, and Rochester Brewing and Roasting Co. was born. The operation was named after the original Rochester Brewery, which began operation in Kansas City around 1897. Doing a little sleuthing around, I found a 1905 Kansas City Times article that mentioned L.F. Rieger as being the president of the brewery, a name associated with KC’s alcohol history that lives on as the Rieger whiskey and bourbon distiller here today. Rochester was later acquired by Muehlebach (another name with a lot of meaning here in the city), Heim Brewing and Imperial and merged into another conglomerate of breweries (and probably another and another after that, as these things go). In any case, hence the Rochester name in Kansas City, and I think it’s cool to get a little bit of history from this newer company that is located in the historical heart of KC.
Enough history, though, let’s check out this coffee! As usual, I will have detailed notes about the coffee AFTER my own tasting notes below so as to not bias my palate accidentally by reading someone else’s impressions of this coffee. All I know at this time is that this is an anerobic process coffee from Ethiopia that Phillip said is the wildest coffee Rochester has ever offered. I am using my standard pourover method to prepare it, which is a 1:16.5 ratio of 22g of coffee to 363g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin dripper using a Kalita 155 filter. The Origin is a flat-bottom brewer like a Kalita Wave. I pulse pour my water through a Melodrip and my grinder for pourovers is Orphan Espresso’s excellent Lido 3. This coffee got a 30 second bloom and the total brew time including bloom came in at 3:25.
My Tasting Notes
The fragrance from the bag of beans is crazy, and I learned my lesson from the last anaerobic natural I tasted a couple weeks ago to not bury my nose in the bag and take a big whiff! So, I approached this one a little more cautiously and was rewarded with a nose that didn’t get “burned” from fragrance. This coffee has lots of super ripe, maybe even past-ripe, fruit notes and a really boozy fermented fragrance dominating the nose. The brewed cup has some hints of strawberry and raspberry on the nose for me, some overripe banana-ish notes and a warm spice note that is something in the vein of cinnamon and nutmeg, but not either of these, either. Taking a sip, this is a medium to medium+ bodied coffee with a lot going on in the flavor, too. Wow, this is definitely a coffee for the most adventurous natural lovers, and if you have are one of those unfortunate souls for whom fermentation notes taste “garbagey” then this is a coffee you will want to steer well clear of. If you like funky, weird naturals, then belly up to the bar because this one’s for you! LOL
In the warmer cup, I’m getting tons of ferment, like bananas that are either needing to be turned into banana bread or thrown out and super ripe berries with a slightly boozy overtone. There is also a roasty note that is quite out of place in this coffee and that reads a little carbony, like someone just sharpened a pencil nearby, but my palate attenuated to that really quickly and the roastiness didn’t end up bothering me or really coming through much. As the cup cools, the aroma mellows some and that funky banana note is going into the far background as a more “tropical” flavor profile seems to be coming out. I’m getting more fresh strawberry coming through and papaya with a HINT of pineapple floating around. The finish on this coffee is neutral to just slightly sweet and that spicy note of something along the lines of cinnamon and nutmeg comes through and lingers into the long aftertaste, too. I know there has been some controversy in the coffee world (“Cinnamongate”) with some of the anaerobic producers adulterating anaerobic tanks with cinnamon and other flavorings during fermentation, but I have not had enough of these types of coffees to know if this is one of them nor been “calibrated” to what these coffees should taste like. The spice note isn’t a huge component of the flavor, so if it is an additive then it was subtly done. I suspect this coffee is the result of the processing and not of adulteration. In any case, getting back to the coffee now that it’s about room temperature, there is some lemon-lime acidity coming through nicely that gives a nice, bright hit to my palate, too. This is a coffee that continues to develop and change through the whole temperature range after brewing and I always enjoy coffees like that. For as much as is going on in this cup, I am not getting palate fatigue or getting tired of this coffee at all for that reason, and while it has complexity for days it doesn’t overwhelm me with things to think about, either. That being said, I wouldn’t call this an easy-drinking coffee due to its complexity, and I couldn’t see myself drinking this by the pot throught the day, but I’m still enjoying the heck out of it. I see these types of coffees like I see big beers. Just like you wouldn’t choose a huge double IPA or imperial stout to drink all day at the pool in the summer, this isn’t necessarily a “session coffee” either, but it’s a coffee I’d enjoy drinking a cup of every day to wake my palate up and see what new I can experience from it, something I’m looking forward to doing with the rest of this bag of this unique coffee.
And to answer the question, “Will it ‘spro?” I’m not sure about this one. I tried a couple shots a couple different ways and could not tame the outrageous flavors I was getting from it. I’m sure it’s possible with enough time and some fancy pressure profiling tricks, but not every coffee is meant to be brewed every way and this is one that is great as a pourover and was a face-melter as espresso, for me, so why push the issue, I say? One last parting note… my last few sips of this cup at room temperature are sweet, candy-like and full of those papaya/pineapple/mango notes I was getting before. Absolutely delicious, but not a tame coffee by any stretch of the imagination!
About the Coffee
I was initially a little bit skeptical about finding any information about Rochester’s coffees on their website, but if you follow enough links it will take you to this page, which then has a lot of detail about each coffee in a popup window if you click on the individual selections. I would like to see this info easier to access for us coffee nerds in the future. Checking out the label for this Guji Uraga Solomo coffee, we get initial tasting descriptors of, “Chocolate, Raspberry, Spice, Juicy” and that’s in the vein of what I was getting. Like most specialty coffee from Ethiopia, this coffee is a lot of coffees combined from many, many smallholder farmers who work through a cooperative washing station. So, the way things work in Ethiopia is that hundreds and small growers, some of whom are literally growing a handful of coffee trees in their yards, will work through a cooperative that generally also owns a washing station, where coffee is brought, weighed, sorted, and combined into lots before further processing. This coffee is from the Uraga district in the Guji Zone of Ethiopia, where coffee grows at a staggering 2200masl. This coffee was anaerobic processed for 20 days, where the coffee cherries were placed in sealed bags with the oxygen removed. As CO2 is naturally produced as the coffee begins fermenting, the rest of the oxygen is pushed out and thus an “anaerobic” or oxygen-free environment was created. This kind of processing can create some pretty wild flavors and this coffee is a good example of that! This was followed by 2-3 weeks of more standard dry/natural processing wherein the coffee cherries are sorted and then dried on raised mesh beds where the fruit slowly dries out and breaks down and the seeds inside (what we call coffee beans), soak up flavors of this process like little sponges.