Happy Monday! I have Quantum Coffee Roasters back with a Costa Rican medium roast, so let’s get slurping!
Other reviews in this series: Ethiopia Yirgacheffe
QUANTUM COFFEE ROASTERS COSTA RICA SAN JUANILLO
Fidel and Diana Moreno are Quantum Coffee Roasters. Full time teachers in the San Antonio, Texas area, Fidel and Diana started roasting coffee after being inspired by a student, who eventually sold his roasting kit to them. Things went well, which is not a big surprise considering how much attention to detail is involved in coffee roasting. Fidel is a physics teacher and Diana is a math teacher, so the pair are assuredly pretty used to recording numbers in graph composition books and analyzing data! In fact, their careers in math and physics was the inspiration for the “quantum” name. The Quantum Coffee Roasters website was started in spring of 2017 and the pair have been involved in a lot of collaborations, from chocolate featuring their coffee to cold brew and coffee beers.
This morning’s coffee is Quantum’s Costa Rica San Juanillo. The Quantum website is a little sparse on information and my searches didn’t yield anything definitive, so all I know about this coffee is that it is a washed coffee with a “medium” roast. Quantum gives us tasting notes of, “black tea, lemon, basil, butterscotch.” I am using my standard pourover method of a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin brewer with Kalita 155 filter. Grinder is a Knock Aergrind.
Right after brewing I caught some aromas of coconut from this coffee. Taking a sip, this coffee has a medium-heavy body with a sweet, caramel base that has a hint of something more in it… maybe a touch of baking spices and a little brown sugar note to it, too. Into the mid sip there is a nice lemon candy acidity that offers balance and some high notes to the cup. The cup has a sweet finish but leaves a little bit of a dry finish on my palate. Coupled with the lemon notes, this definitely has a tea-like character to it, but not as overtly as some washed Yirgacheffes can have, for me. The long aftertaste has a bit of a bitter edge and that contributes to that tea-like presence, too.
This is a nicely balanced, very easy drinking, sweet and clean coffee. It checks all the boxes many of us have for specialty coffee and it’s a really nice, approachable cup that I’m enjoying a lot as I write this review. Another winner from Fidel and Diana at Quantum Coffee Co!