It’s a rainy, stormy, thunder & lightning kind of Monday morning here in Kansas City, so I’m more than ready to tuck into a warm cup of coffee! This morning I have a Colombian selection from Portland’s Elevator Coffee, so without further ado…
Purchase this coffee directly for $15/12oz
Elevator Coffee Guatemala El Triunfo review
ELEVATOR COFFEE COLOMBIA BACHE
Elevator Cafe & Commons is located in the former Boyd’s coffee roasting facility in east-central Portland, Oregon, serving as a cafe and de facto meeting space for the startup companies that share the building. With a breakfast menu as well as beer and hard cider taps, Elevator Cafe & Commons is a great place to get work done or get away from work, depending on your needs! Elevator is also conveniently located right across the street from one of two coffee roasting “incubators” in Portland (that I know of), Buckman Coffee Factory, where people can rent storage space and time on roasting machines without having to undergo the expense of actually owning one. Originally a multiroaster shop, Elevator recently started having Andrew Coe, who also roasts under his own moniker, Coe Coffee, develop a line of coffees for the cafe. Andrew has about 8 coffees on offer right now under the Elevator name, so this program must be working out great!
This morning I’m having a taste of Elevator’s Bache, a single origin selection from Huila, Colombia. It’s full-blown allergy season for me and I’m hoping my nose isn’t too stuffed up to get all the flavors and notes out of this coffee that I can! Huila, along with Cauca and Nariño, tends to have higher elevation farms compared to some other coffee growing “departments” in Colombia, yielding more complex coffees. This particular coffee is a mix of Colombia and Castillo varieties grown around 1500-1600masl and this is a fully washed coffee, as you’d expect from Colombia. Andrew gives us tasting notes of, “rich and balanced, flavors remind us of raisin, walnut and cocoa.” Visually, this coffee looks like a solid medium roast and so this is going to lean into darker, sweeter flavors, it sounds like, than the super bright and fruity coffees I love so much from Colombia. I’m using my standard pourover method of a 1:16 ratio of 28g of coffee to 450g of Third Wave Water in a notNeutral Gino dripper with Kalita 185 filter. My grinder is a Knock Aergrind.
Even with a half-working nose, I get a pleasant “warm” brown sugar note in the aroma of this cup. Body is on the heavier side of medium and this coffee has a nice presence and mouthfeel on my palate. Right up front I get a fair amount of roastiness along with that brown sugar sweetness and it’s really inviting and maybe a perfect combo of flavors for such a rotten Monday morning! To offer some balance to this dark sweetness there is some citrus acidity that reads as orange for me. I get a little savory component in there with the acidity, too, not unlike the combination of sweetness, acidity and savory I get from a tomato, although I wouldn’t give this particular coffee a tomato descriptor as far as flavor goes. With the roastiness in the background I do get a nutty vibe from this coffee, too. Walnuts, pecans, that sort of thing (definitely not peanuts or almonds). This coffee finishes sweet and is a super easy drinker, too.
This is a really enjoyable coffee. This is not a big, bright, complex Colombian coffee, but rather a simpler, sweeter, more balanced and easier drinking cup and there’s nothing at all wrong with that! For a morning pick-me-up or a late morning/early afternoon work coffee, this is perfect. It’s delicious, warm, inviting and familiar and it doesn’t take much attention to really enjoy these flavors as opposed to something more complex that takes a lot of thought and contemplation to suss out. Beautiful!