From time to time roasters are kind enough to send me limited edition/availability coffees to try out and Rainbow Lightning from Folk City Roasters is one of those. With a name like Rainbow Lightning and a skull pumping rainbows out of his eyes on the label, how could I let it pass me up?!
FOLK CITY ROASTERS RAINBOW LIGHTNING
Folk City Roasters from Pt. Pleasant, Pennsylvania in the Upper Bucks area of the state does some pretty cool limited edition coffees. I suppose that’s part of the fun of being a small company. Around Halloween last year they released Devil’s Altar, featuring artwork by Josh Myers (@arguablyhuman on Instagram) and a blend of dark roast from Guatemala and a light roast from Ethiopia that was killer. In February, James Arnold (owner and roaster of Folk City Roasters) released Rainbow Lightning with more of Josh’s art, this time a skull being struck by rainbow colored lightning emitting two arcs of rainbows out of his eye sockets! In an industry where most coffee labeling is either starkly modern or quaintly olde tyme-y it’s nice to see something different and weird on coffee bags and this fits the bill! LOL This coffee was originally only available at Farley’s Bookshop (where artist Josh also works) and a few bags trickled onto Folk City’s website, too.
James’ original Instagram post said that Rainbow Lightning was a 50/50 mix of Yirgacheffe natural and Guatemalan beans, but my bag says that it’s 100% Yirgacheffe natural. Other than that I know nothing about the origin or sourcing of this coffee and except for a couple Instagram posts I couldn’t dig up a cached webpage for this coffee to learn more or anything like that. I’m using my standard pourover setup of a 1:16 ratio of 28g of coffee to 450g of Third Wave Water in a notNeutral Gino dripper with Kalita 185 filter and a Knock Aergrind doing the grinding.
Just looking at the roast it appears to be a little toward the darker end of medium, but visuals don’t always tell you what you think when it comes to coffee. There is some berry jam in the aroma. Taking a sip, this is a medium-bodied coffee with berry jam and plenty of florals right up front. Toward the end of the sip it morphs into a roastier, darker cup and it really does seem to have a “rainbow” or spectrum of flavors within, which I’m not sure was the impetus for the name, but nonetheless, there it is! LOL On the front end of the sip I get a little blueberry with lots of raspberry and blackberry, as well as those florals (berries + florals always read as “blackberry” to me). There’s a lot of sweetness and the acidity to balance it comes mostly from the fruitiness of the berry notes. In the mid-sip I get the slightest hint of lemon, like a quick squeeze of lemon over a berry salad, and into the finish I get more berry jam that is sweeter and also a roasty note that adds a hint of smoke to the mix. This carries into the aftertaste which is roasty and full of berries, too. This is the second coffee I’ve had from Folk City that uses a darker roast (or maybe this is a blend where some of the beans are roasted darker than others?) on a natural Ethiopian where it adds some smoke and roasty notes without killing off the berries, citrus and fruitiness inherent to this type of process. Push much past where James takes this and you’d start to lose the fruits and acidity and bring out more roast and chocolate/cocoa notes, so this is a nifty trick. I wonder if maybe this isn’t a blend of some lighter roasted and some darker roasted beans? In any case, however James is getting there, it’s a nice effect that adds a lot of dimensionality to a coffee like this. I just wish more people could get their hands on these cool limited edition/availability coffees, but I’m grateful to be included in the mix, too!