Last week my coffee of the month from MyCoffeePub.com dropped and I’m finally getting time to spend with this new-to-me-roaster, Good Folks Coffee Company, from Louisville, KY. Let’s get right into it!
Purchase this coffee directly for $18/12oz
Access Ventures investment story
Good Folks Coffee Co. blog on Rodrigo Sanchez
MYCOFFEEPUB.COM MAY 2018: GOOD FOLKS COFFEE CO. RODRIGO SANCHEZ (FINCA EL PROGRESO)
Last week was so crazy I didn’t even have time to enjoy this month’s selection from my MyCoffeePub.com subscription, but that changes this morning! I was excited to see May’s coffee is from a new-to-me roaster, Good Folks Coffee Company, in Louisville, Kentucky. I love two things about MyCoffeePub’s subscription service: the surprise of what coffee is going to land every month (never a stinker!) and the discovery of new roasters or origins. Good Folks Coffee Co. is a wholesale roaster based in Louisville, shipping to cafes, grocery stores, restaurants and homes throughout the country. They have a wide variety of offerings available currently, including this Colombian we have this morning.
Good Folks Coffee Company got its start in late 2015/early 2016 after securing an investment from Access Ventures. Prior to this, owner, Matt Argo, was involved in Argo Sons with his cousin, Adam Argo. The pair had concocted an idea for a high-quality coffee that would compete well on grocery store shelves with simpler, more familiar packaging they called Good Folks Coffee blend. This strategy worked well, as the average coffee drinker in that market seemed keen to pick up a bag of “regular coffee” where they would avoid the unfamiliarity of a single origin Yirgacheffe, for example. Adam left the company in late 2014 and Matt changed the name of the company and moved to what looks like a great space (see The Coffee Compass link above), spinning Good Folks blend into a new coffee company. The Daily Coffee News article says they still offer friendly packaging, with white bags for single origins, craft bags for blends and black bags for seasonal blends and espresso, but when I checked out the site I only saw white and black bags, so maybe things have been simplified further.
This morning’s coffee is from farmer, Rodrigo Sanchez, and his Finca el Progreso in Palestina in the Huila department of Colombia. Finca al Progreso has been run by Rodrigo’s family for over 80 years and Rodrigo has won awards in the Cauca Best Cup and Huila Best Cup competitions. El Progreso is a 23 hectare farm and Rodrigo is quite willing to experiment, growing Caturra, Geisha and cultivating a mutation of Caturra called Purple Caturra. Rodrigo Sanchez is a well-known producer and is highly regarded in Colombian coffee, with lots of his specialty beans coming here to the US. This particular lot is a washed Caturra grown around 1580masl. Good Folks gives us tasting notes of, “brown sugar, caramel, lemon, floral.”
I’m using my standard pourover setup of a 1:16 ratio of 28g of coffee to 450g of Third Wave Water. This goes into a notNeutral Gino with Kalita 185 filter and my grinder is currently a Knock Aergrind. Taking my first few sips, I can already tell I’m going to love this coffee! It has relatively thin medium-light body but there is a ton of flavor packed in. This is a nicely balanced coffee with light caramel and honey sweetness anchoring the low end and a sweet lemon acidity that is just perfect for this cup.
As this coffee cools it seems to get sweeter, more mellow and more balanced, if that’s possible. Although, smaller sips tend to yield bigger lemon notes for me while larger sips are more balanced and rounded out with sweetness. This is what I love about coffee so much… even the size of the sip I take carries nuances I wouldn’t expect! The cooler cup (approaching room temperature) has a more substantial body, too, with a creamy mouthfeel I didn’t get from my usual drinking temperature. I’m getting more caramel and some light nuttiness in the cup, too, as well as a finish that has brown sugar and some light baking spice notes in it.
This is an absolutely KILLER coffee! I love everything about this offering and this is a fantastic selection by my dudes at MyCoffeePub.com. I wouldn’t change a thing about this coffee if I could and I hope this is the beginning of a relationship between Good Folks Coffee Co. and KC Coffee Geek!