Happy Monday! What better way to start the week than with September’s MyCoffeePub.com subscription from Fort Worth workspace/cafe/roaster, Craftwork Coffee Co? This Ethiopian is killer! Slurp…
MY COFFEE PUB SEPTEMBER 2018: CRAFTWORK COFFEE CO. ETHIOPIA YIRGACHEFFE WENAGO
Well, the good folks at MyCoffeePub.com have done it again with September’s subscription drop! A new coffee from a new-to-me roaster that is not only unfamiliar, but that I’ve never even heard of! Apparently, Craftwork Coffee Co. is a well-kept secret, though, because a coffee friend in Dallas (which is right next door to Fort Worth, where Craftwork is located) had never heard of them either, and he has sought out all the local roasters he could find. Hopefully this will spread the word!
Craftwork Coffee was founded by Riley Kiltz and Collin Sansom in January 2016. Craftwork is primarily a “community oriented workspace” that also has a cafe attached to it. Riley’s occupation left him on the road a lot and he found that workspaces like this just weren’t doing it for him. He partnered with Collin, whose background was in coffee, to open Craftwork as a better workspace and coffee experience for those using it. As of today, they’ve grown to three locations in Fort Worth, Texas and have a fourth opening soon in Austin. Craftowork were originally using other roasters’ beans, but somewhere along the way they opened their own roastery in Fort Worth and are doing their own thing now. Unfortunately, the one thing I found lacking in Cratwork’s online presence was anything about their coffees. It looks like they label their bags, “0, 1, 2 or 3” and it looks like 0 = decaf, 1 = single origin, 2 = house blend and 3 = espresso. A simple, clean label on the bag denotes what coffee is actually in it. But I combed every page of their website and their social media and could not find a place to learn more about what they’re roasting or how to purchase from afar. The no-info zone is a major bummer, and it looks like, for now, at least, you’ll either need to call them to see what they have and see if they’ll ship it, or be a local or have a local connection to send it to you.
The coffee the MyCoffeePub gang selected for September 2018 is Craftwork’s Ethiopia Yirgacheffe Wenago. Doing some independent research, Wenago is a woreda in Ethiopia’s Yirgacheffe zone, which is part of the Southen Nations, Nationalities and Peoples’ Region. Got that? Geography quiz coming soon! Woredas are districts, or collections of towns. A collection of woredas becomes a zone, and a bunch of zones make up a region. In any case, Wenago is part of Yirgacheffe and this coffee is from that area, presumably grown by smallholder farmers involved in a co-op there, since that’s most of the coffee in Ethiopia. Coffee grows around 1800-2000masl in Wenago and this is a washed coffee with notes of, “Apricot, black tea, vibrant” accoridng to the label on Craftwork’s bag.
I am using my standard 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin brewer. I keep all the holes in the filter basket blocked except for the middle three and I use Kalita 155 filters in my brewing. Grinder is a Knock Aergrind.
Taking a sip, this is a bright coffee, as I’d expect from a washed Yirgacheffe. This is a medium-light bodied coffee and right up front there is a lot of fruity acidity, but it’s a sweet cup, too. I’m getting apricot sweetness and that tartness that denotes apricot in coffee, for my brain, too, right in the front of the sip. If I let the coffee linger on my palate for a while, I’m getting a fuller peach flavor that is sweet, almost like those peach rings gummy candies. I really had to let my cup cool down a lot for all this to develop, so as with most of the coffees I’ve reviewed over the years, this is another one that will reward your patience as you let it cool way down from brewing temperature. I’m getting some really nice cocoa/chocolate flavors in this coffee, too. Believe it or not, chocolate is hard for me to pick up in coffee sometimes, but not here. This reminds me of high quality Dutch process cocoa and it’s really apparent as a background to the peach and apricot fruitiness going on. The finish is sweet and I’m getting some lemon in the end of the sip. It’s bright but sweet like lemon candy and some sips are finishing with a huge lemon candy note that is unmistakeable.
This coffee ended up being really satisfying and enjoyable for me. I didn’t think it was going to go that way, at first, because I was a little biased not to like it since the coffee side of things seems to take a major backseat to the workspace side of the business. I was getting nothing to write home about in the aroma as it brewed, and even in the brewed cup the aroma wasn’t doing much for me, so I thought this was going to be a flat, lifeless example of a washed Ethiopian coffee and, boy, was I wrong! This really turned out to be a great coffee with lots of nuances and wonderful balance between fruits and chocolates. I mean, I have a really tough time finding chocolate and cocoa in coffee (fruits are easy for my palate/brain) and this is probably the most chocolatey/cocoa-y coffee I have had in recent memory. The peach and apricot with that lemon finish are great, too. A real stunner!
On a side note, I did run this coffee as espresso for close to a week before sitting down with it as a pourover. It proved to be a tasty espresso, but really hard to tame. Some coffees are like that for me where I can get good flavors but the extraction is a mess looking at the bottom of the naked portafilter. Pulling a 1:2 ratio in closer to 25 seconds or so seemed to be where I was getting the best flavors, but this coffee was really sensitive to even small weight changes or grind setting changes as I was dialing it in. And even with the parameters I found I liked I was never getting the streams to pull together into that nice, photogenic cone. My cup looked like it was involved in a coffee massacre every time I was done because this Wenago was dripping and spitting all over! LOL The espresso brings out a lot more of the lemon and apricot from this coffee, but given a choice, pourover is really the way to go with this one. YUM!