Happy Monday! After a bit of a hiatus to have a bit of vacation in Mexico, I’m back with another fresh coffee from my friends at S&W Craft Roasting! This is one of three Guatemalan coffees S&W is carrying right now, their Las Plantas SHB. Slurp!
Purchase this coffee directly for $16.45/lb (16oz!)
S&W CRAFT ROASTING GUATEMALA LAS PLANTAS SHB
Nick and Charlie have been roasting as S&W Craft Roasting since a year or two before I got my start with KC Coffee Geek in 2015. Based in the tiny town of Coatesville, Indiana, roughly an hour or so outside of Indianapolis, S&W’s ethos is to bring you high quality coffees at ridiculously good prices. With all of their coffees on offer for $15-$16.50 per POUND (that’s 16 ounces, folks), they still reign supreme as the best deal going in specialty coffee, and their coffees are GREAT and very well roasted. You won’t get fancy websites and branding with S&W, but you will get top notch coffee that saves you money to spend on your ridiculous espresso cup collection… errrr… whatever it is you’re into. LOL
This morning’s coffee is one of three Guatemalan coffees S&W is currently roasting. As usual, I’ll give you details and notes about the coffee after my own tasting notes below so as to not bias my palate, which is very easy to do. All I know as of right now about this coffee is that it is from Guatemala and has the “SHB” or strictly hard bean designation common of high altitude specialty coffee in that country. I think it’s safe to assume it’s a washed coffee, too, but like I said, all the details will follow my tasting notes below.
I’m brewing this coffee with my usual pourover method of a 1:16.5 ratio of 22g of coffee to 363g of Third Wave Water using a Trinity Origin dripper. The Trinity Origin is a flat bottom dripper with 12 holes in the bottom that uses rubber blockers so you can customize the hole pattern if you want. I have all the blockers out and this uses Kalita 155 filters. I pulse pour through a Melodrip to minimize agitation of the coffee bed during brewing and my grinder is an Orphan Espresso Lido 3. This coffee got a 30 second bloom and a total brew time of 3:15 including the bloom.
The ground coffee smelled like graham crackers to me, and I got a little bit of that along with some apple notes in the aroma from the brewed cup. Waiting until the coffee was around 110F for my first sip, this coffee promises to be another tasty treat from Guatemala, one of my favorite origins (although, if I’m being honest, I don’t meet too many coffees I don’t like). This cup still feels like there’s a lot of potential that hasn’t opened up yet, though, so I’m going to be patient and let it cool off some more before I really get going with my sips.
Sure enough, now that the coffee is cooling down, I’m finding a nice medium body with a syrupy mouthfeel and the flavors are more apparent. There is a lot of that syrup-like sweetness I associate with Guatemalan coffees here, as well as a good amount of nuttiness in this cup. Not sure exactly what kind of nuts to write about here, but there is a nutty vibe all the same. Definitely not almond or pecan or walnut, but maybe if you could squish these three together we’d be in the ballpark? In the mid sip I’m getting some apple juice sweetness and some beautiful citrusy notes. Blood orange is here for me, and I’m having trouble not just gulping this coffee down in a rush. It’s really delicious and slightly juicy, making me want to just down it in a few big shots! There may be a hint of pineapple here and I was getting some mango-like notes a few sips ago, but my bigger gulps really accentuate the citrus notes more than anything and I seem to have attenuated to some of these more subtle tropical notes now. This is really sweet coffee but the citrus and apple notes balance that out perfectly, making this an exceptionally easy drinker. The finish is slightly dry on my palate and my tongue is left pretty dry in the aftertaste, too. That nuttiness comes back in the aftertaste and orange lingers forever, it seems, on my palate between sips.
More About the Coffee
S&W tell us this is a “medium bodied cup with cashew, pistachio and elderflower flavors” and they say this is a nut bomb on the espresso machine, which I didn’t try with this particular coffee. This coffee is a mix of Caturra and Catuai grown by Octavio Herrera on his farm, La Esperanza. La Esperanza is located in Huehuetenango and coffee grows at 1650masl on this farm. I’ve had some of Octavio’s coffee before, way back in 2019, and struggled with the same problem, apparently, of wanting to just guzzle it down and miss appreciating the flavors! LOL The Herrera farms are run by second generation members of the family today, and their 50 years of experience in coffee growing is apparent with selections like these. You can get coffee blossom honey from La Esperanza for $16/jar, too, and really experience everything the Herrera’s farm has to offer in the way of coffee!
Nicholas Smith
So nice to find nuts in the origin character! We also offer this bean (once in a while) as a medium roast called “The Nuts” intended fir espresso.
-Nick at S&W