Checking out a new coffee from a new roaster today, Ontario-based Sly and Sons Coffee Roasters’ Colombia La Meseta. Without further ado… slurp!
Sly and Sons Coffee Roasters Instagram
SLY AND SONS COFFEE ROASTERS COLOMBIA LA MESETA
Sly and Sons Coffee Roasters (Mark Sly), contacted me via Instagram not too long ago to send some coffees and have me check them out. I try to know as little about roasters and these coffees I review as I can until I have done my evaluation and taken my notes because biases are hard to control when it comes to sensory experiences like coffee reviewing. Once in a while, that bites me in the butt because, as luck would have it, I know next to nothing about Sly and Sons and Mark appears to be on vacation this week and off social media altogether, yet the train must keep rolling! LOL Sly and Sons do not have a website currently, and it looks like Mark’s coffee Instagram just started a few months ago, so, presumably, he is new to the world of roasting. I imagine you can shoot him a direct message through Instagram to order coffee at this time. He appears to be a worship leader at a church in Ontario, north of Toronto, and that’s all I was able to find out on my own. Thanks for your patience and I will fill in the details as they come available to me! LOL
Today’s coffee from Sly and Sons is their La Meseta from Colombia. Unfortunately, getting the low down on this coffee has eluded me, too. Too many La Mesetas pop up on my searches to know which one, if any of them, supplied this coffee. Again, I’ll fill in the details once Mark is back on this planet and within reach! Actually, turning your phone off for good while you’re on vacation is a superb idea and we should all do it! From the bag, this is a washed coffee grown around 1800masl. Mark gives us tasting notes of “caramel, butter pecan, honey.” I’m using my standard pourover method of a 1:16 ratio of 28g of coffee to 450g of Third Wave Water in a notNeutral Gino dripper. I am using a Knock Aergrind for grinder duties.
Visually, this coffee looks like a solid medium roast. There’s quite a bit of chaff in the grinder, but a lot of smaller roasting machines do accumulate more chaff in the roast than large machines, in my experience, so it’s common to see this with roasters who are starting out. Chaff doesn’t affect the flavors at all, so it’s not a problem. In the cup I have a medium-bodied coffee that is bright and sweet, but also has a lot more roasty notes than I would guess just based on the visual inspection of these beans. I don’t mind roastiness in coffee (I mean, it IS roasted after all), but this one is sufficiently roasty that it needs to be pointed out. Up front I get a honey sweetness with fruity brightness that is a bit of green apple type acidity (malic) and a hint of orange citrus, too. Overlaying all of that is that roasty component that carries into the middle and finish of the sip and then long into the aftertaste. Toward the finish and early aftertaste there is a butter pecan note that is readily evident (I’ve been eating butter pecan ice cream in recent days, too, so am I REALLY tasting it, am I getting palate drift, is this suggestion? That’s always the question, but it tastes real to me). This is a nicely balanced cup. The brightness is also plenty sweet, so it reads more as fruitiness than acidity, even though it is literally acidic compounds in the coffee that gives those bright notes. Likewise, the sweetness of this cup is more than it seems at first because it does have those bright notes to balance them out. This balance makes this a nice and easy to drink coffee.
The only thing that stands out as a “flaw” for me with this Colombian is the roastiness. While it in no way will prevent me from enjoying the rest of this bag of coffee, that roasty overtone does distract me a little from the positives this coffee has to offer. Don’t get me wrong, if you served me this coffee on any day of the week I would be perfectly happy with it, but getting the forwardness of those roast levels down some would bring out even more sweetness and brightness in this coffee and would turn this from a good, solid offering into something exceptional. That’s the art of roasting. It’s not easy to do that and that’s the dragon every roaster chases. For an initial offering from a new roaster, this is a great achievement and if I’d ever roasted something half this good myself, I would be completely stoked!