Narrative Coffee Roasters are a new-to-KC Coffee Geek roaster who sent some single origin coffee for “espresso month” here at World Domination Headquarters! Let’s check out how this Colombian coffee fared on the bean squeezer!
Purchase this coffee directly for $14/12oz
NARRATIVE COFFEE ROASTERS COLOMBIA TOLIMA
Narrative Coffee Roasters was founded by roaster, Caleb MacPherson and finance guru, Clayton Feinstein, at the very beginning of 2018. Caleb is originally from Canada, and after moving to southwest Florida, he felt there was a need for specialty coffee in the area. Narrative is located in Cape Coral, in the beautiful Fort Myers area. Caleb and Clayton attempted a Kickstarter campaign to fund a brick and mortar shop, but didn’t meet their goals, so at this time they are strictly roasting, doing online sales and wholesaling their coffee. Their site lists at least 10 places in the SW Florida area that sells their coffee, so they’ve done a great job on that end of things! I decided that I wanted to dedicate most of the reviews in November to espresso, and after a brief convo on Instagram, I had a bag of what Caleb considers their best coffee for ‘spro headed my way!
Narrative sent me their Tolima, a single origin bean from Colombia. This is a washed coffee that Narrative chose for its “caramel sweetness and smooth nutty undertones.” This particular coffee is grown around 1850masl, but otherwise there is no further info on the label or site about variety, producer, etc. My bag was roasted 10/27/18.
In my experience, even the most mellow Colombian coffees can be tough to tame as single origin espresso, but this one is pretty well-behaved and produced a really dense, pretty crema, which I was also surprised by. I have not tried this coffee as a pourover yet, it went straight into the espresso machine. For the gear/process nerds, I am using a Gaggia Classic that is “blind” adjusted to 9 bars and a bottomless portafilter. I use a 20g Decent Espresso precision basket and matched precision Decent Espresso tamper than is also calibrated to 25lbs of tamping pressure. My grinder is a Rancilio Rocky. After dosing I do a WDT stir to break up any clumping, then I groom the puck and level with an OCD-style grooming tool, then, finally, tamp.
My best extractions were coming in with slightly larger than 1:2 ratios and a little faster than I would expect. Starting with 19.8-20.0g doses I was hitting 43.1-43.6g of espresso in the cup in 22-25 seconds. This was giving me coffee with a heavy body and a really syrupy mouthfeel. The crema on this coffee is REALLY dense and persistent and had a shaving cream consistency and nice color. Quite often, in my experience, the crema on single origin coffees can be weak and thin, but not for this Tolima from Narrative. Even with a nutty, sweet roast profile, as expected, I am getting a lot of brightness from this coffee. The first sip hits with a lemon candy acidity that changes to lime, which I find a little more mellow than “lemon” but also with a healthy helping of bitterness that I don’t associate with lemon notes. In coffee, especially espresso, this works very nicely. About 1/3 of the way into the sip, that initial lemon burst changes to lime for me and then rides out into the finish and aftertaste. I’m getting a little brown sugar and some cocoa notes in the second half of the sip. This coffee has a nice balance to it and in my last two sips of the cup I got some nice leather and cigar tobacco (think unlit cigar, not the actual smoke) notes that really work well for this coffee. I wasn’t pulling a lot of nuttiness out of this espresso, but once my cups were done and the coffee had been on my palate for a few minutes, I was picking up a lot of hazelnut, so that’s where the nuts appeared for me.
I drink very little milk, so I didn’t experiment with this in milkies, but I suspect it would do great, especially in smaller drinks like macchiatos and cortados.
All in all, I am really happy with this coffee. It’s balanced, tasty, well-behaved on the machine for dialing in, and a delight to drink. My only regret is that I don’t have a few more bags of Narrative’s other offerings waiting in the wings for me to check out!