It has been a long times since I got my hands (and my palate!) on Onyx Coffee Lab’s coffee, but thanks to April’s MyCoffeePub subscription drop, I have this sweet, sweet Colombian to share with you this morning! Slurp!
Purchase this coffee for $16.50/12oz
MYCOFFEEPUB APRIL 2019: ONYX COFFEE LAB COLOMBIA APONTE VILLAGE
Onyx Coffee Lab is one of my favorite roasters of all time, but it’s hard to stay in touch with them all, so ironically, I don’t often get to try much of their coffee. When I opened April’s MyCoffeePub subscription shipment, I was super happy because this bag of Colombian coffee from Onyx was staring back at me! MyCoffeePub is a great subscription service that sends you one bag of coffee, always a surprise, every month. I love the surprise and I also love the fact that the MCP crew pick good coffees from a mix of well known and much lesser known roasters, so I get a good mix. The surprise element is wonderful, but I also love having someone else pick a coffee for me as it is often not one I would’ve gravitated to myself, but that I always end up enjoying, so there is a bit of a challenge there, too, that I really appreciate.
This month’s roaster, Onyx Coffee Lab from NW Arkansas, needs no real introduction. Opening in 2012, Onyx quickly grew to fame with great roasting, awesome cafes, a solidly consistent social media presence and killer branding. They really do all the aspects of running a roasting and cafe business right, at least from my perspective as a consumer. In 2018 they won 3rd place in the US Roaster Championship and co-founder, Andrea Allen, took 5th place in the US Barista Championship. That’s just two of many awards for Onyx. NW Arkansas (Bentonville, Fayetteville, Rogers, etc) has been going through a nice specialty coffee renaissance for a handful of years and it’s great to see how a little part of the country no one would ever think of as being a hotbed of great coffee sourcing and roasting can put itself on the map through efforts like these being made by Onyx. I still haven’t made it down there for a visit yet, and now I’m just going to stop talking about it because I make myself feel bad every time I reveal that to you, dear readers! LOL
In coffee, I think Cafe Imports has the best website I’ve seen so far (from the perspective of an information junkie), but when it comes to roasters/cafes, I think Onyx is right up there, too. The coffee MyCoffeePub selected for April 2019 is Onyx’s Aponte Village, a honey process coffee from Colombia. Colombia is really the land of the washed coffee, so I’m pleased to see a different process for this coffee. I’ve had a lot of honey process coffees, but not from Colombia. Aponte Village sits in the Juananbu Canyon in Nariño and this coffee is produced by the indigenous Inga community. This area was the northernmost reach of the Incan empire and traditional laws and customs are still upheld by the Inga people. This coffee is Caturra and Bourbon varietals grown around a staggering 2100 meters above sea level. The honey process that this coffee was produced with has nothing to do with honey. Most coffee in Colombia is “washed,” which means it is picked, depulped (the cherry skins are ruptured and removed) and then fermented and washed in tanks of water to remove the remaining sticky mucilage around the coffee beans. A honey process coffee is depulped, but then fermented dry rather than washed. As that sticky mucilage, or “honey,” breaks down, it imparts all sorts of fermentation byproducts to the coffee that will come out in brewing. Usually this translates to all sorts of interesting fruity notes, sweetness and body.
Onyx Coffee Lab has a ton of information about this coffee on it, which is why I love their site so much, and it also has lots of brewing information parameters for both espresso and filter preparation methods. They recommend a fast, 2:30 extraction, which I will be playing with more and posting my thoughts on Instagram if it changes my perception of this cup much. I went with my standard pourover method of a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin dripper with Kalita 155 filter. My grinder is a Knock Aergrind and I pour through a Melodrip to control my pulse pouring. I did a 40-45 second bloom for this coffee and the total extraction including the bloom took 3:16.
The aroma from this coffee has a sweet, dark fruit vibe to it. This morning my allergies are fired up and I have a killer case of tinnitus in my left ear (which, I know, isn’t my nose), so there’s probably more going on in the aroma than I am picking up with my limited senses right now. Taking a sip, this is a medium bodied coffee with a slick, syrupy mouthfeel that I really enjoy. It’s impossible to talk about Colombian coffees as a general origin since each region, each area within a region and, thanks to crazy microclimates, even which side of a hill a coffee is grown on, has a big impact on the coffee itself. Add lots and lots of varied processing methods, fermentation practices, etc and it’s even tougher. But, for the most part, when it comes to specialty Colombian coffees, I tend to expect something bright and aggressive and complex. This Aponte Village really has a lot of dark vibes instead, and I’m enjoying that. I’m getting a light caramel and dark honey sweetness in the base of the cup and I’m also picking up a lot of dark cherry notes right in the front of the sip. These carry through to the finish and into the aftertaste, too. It has been years since I’ve had Bell’s Cherry Stout, but that’s the memory that popped into my head the second I tasted this coffee. Behind that tart cherry note is a bit of fig and raisin adding more sweetness and balance to the tart cherry, and I’m getting a nice bitterness in the cup from somewhere that also adds dimension and balance to these flavors. This cup brewed at 3:16 and Onyx recommends a much faster 2:30 drain time, so I may have overextracted this cup a bit, hence that slight bitterness, but as someone who likes bitter flavors I really like what I’ve gotten with this extraction. I’ll play around with larger grind sizes and faster brew times over the next few days and post updates on my Instagram. Finally, this coffee finishes slightly sweet and I’m getting that really nice tart cherry note with a bit of chocolate in the mix and a hint of baking spices that carries to the next sip.
This is an interesting Colombian coffee for me. None of those bright, brassy citrus notes or tropical flavors I love so much in so many Colombian coffees are here, but I like this darker, more brooding attitude just as much. This is a complex coffee with a lot of flavors to tease out, but it’s also nicely balanced and very drinkable for anyone looking for a nice cup to be their companion as they read the news or work on something while they enjoy a pick me up. For years, Onyx Coffee Lab has been on my, “It doesn’t matter what coffee you get from them, it’ll be great” list, and this Aponte Village just solidifies that for me. Total winner!