I have a SUPER special coffee to share with you this morning and I will apologize ahead of time that you can’t get this coffee from Switchback right now (but Onyx has it available!) but it’s too special and too good not to share with you dear readers, so I hope you enjoy!
Article on Sam Neely, Youngest USBC Competitor in History
SWITCHBACK COFFEE ROASTERS COLOMBIA LA PALMA NATURAL GESHA
Switchback Coffee Roasters have sent a lot of coffee of late for me to share with readers and as it turns out, their director of wholesale is a kid named Sam Neely who has been following KC Coffee Geek since the beginning of his coffee career! That’s so cool! Even better, Sam is the youngest barista to ever compete in the United States Barista Championship, which has a regulation that you have to be 18 to compete. Sam just made this qualification this year and not only did he compete, but he placed in the six finalists in the USA competition, which is just crazy!
For his competition coffees in the finals, Sam used two coffees from Colombia’s La Palma y El Tucan. Like many specialty coffee nerds, I’m a big-time La Palma fanboy. I mentioned them a lot in reviews in the past, so do a quick search, but essentially, La Palma started out as consultants and processors to a bunch of tiny microlot farmers in Colombia, helping them grow and pick and the exact right time and then using the best methods available to process these coffees and fetch top prices when sold. La Palma were at the forefront of lactic fermentation practices and the use of various bacteria in washing tanks and how these microbes affect flavor. To call them innovators would be an understatement. More recently, La Palma y El Tucan have been producing gesha, the famed variety that was traced back to Gesha village in Ethiopia, where it is commonly grown. Gesha made it to Central America as a leaf rust-resistant variety and more or less forgotten about over the years until the Peterson family melted the coffee world’s face with it in Panama’s Cup of Excellence auction in the early 2000’s. Since then, gesha (sometimes spelled “geisha”) has been all the rage. I’ve been fortunate enough to try a handful and this is one of the best I’ve had, if not THE best!
The past couple years have been very dry in Colombia and this dry weather allowed La Palma to process a small amount of their gesha using natural processing for the first time. So, not only did Sam share one of his winning coffees with me, but it’s a La Palma coffee that I’ll never forget, AND it’s the first coffee, and a gesha at that, that La Palma has ever done natural processing on! To say I’m grateful is the understatement of the year! Natural processing is where the cherries are picked and sorted and laid out to slowly dry in the sun like giant raisins. It’s almost unheard of in Colombia, where washed coffees are king, because of the super wet microclimates that predominate the coffee-growing regions there.
I don’t see either of Sam’s competition coffees listed on Switchback’s website, but as it turns out, Dylan Siemens from Onyx Coffee Lab also used this gesha in competition and they are selling it for the cool price of $90/12oz on pre-order (they’re going to roast it 6/20). I haven’t had Onyx’s interpretation of this coffee, but I can only imagine it’s not far off what I’m tasting from Switchback, based on their description of the flavors.
My sample is pretty small and so I certainly didn’t want to risk wasting any dialing in an espresso extraction. I went straight to my new Trinity Origin brewer and, man, what a coffee! I’m using a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water (probably very important for a coffee like this). The Origin uses a Kalita 155 filter and I’m using the blockers in the bottom of the brewer to cover all but two rows of three holes (6 total) in the filter holder. I did a 30 second bloom on this coffee and the total draw down, including bloom, was a quick 2:59 for this coffee.
The aroma from this coffee is insane. It’s hard to describe… fruity, sweet, clear and structured, very floral… I’m getting raspberry, strawberry, candy-like sweetness, jasmine and other florals and that’s just from the aroma! Top geshas classically have intense aromas and this coffee is up there with the best noses I’ve experienced. Taking a sip, all of this translates well into the flavors, too. This is a medium to medium-light bodied coffee that is full of complex fruitiness throughout the sip. There’s honey sweetness anchoring the low end of the cup, but this is all about bright fruit notes and it’s quite stunning. I get some smooth citrus acidity right up front, maybe tangerine juice if I really had to nail it down, then there is cranberry coming through loud and clear. In the mid sip I get loads of fresh strawberry and raspberry and then in the second half of the sip it’s watermelon as clear as a bell. I’ve gotten hints of watermelon in coffees here and there over the years, but this is, easily, the most watermelon-y coffee I’ve ever had. It was elusive in the warmer cup, but as this gesha cools it just opens up more and more and gets more lively and the flavors get sharper and more resolute. There’s some white grape juice in the sweetness, too. Each of these flavors is structured and separate from the next, which is what makes this coffee so uncanny to me.
In my mind each sip is like a layered candy… a strawberry and raspberry bomb with a shell of florals and cranberry around it, then when I get past the outer layers it’s pure watermelon and white grape in the core inside! I wish everyone could taste this cup, but alas. I am super-grateful to Sam and Switchback Coffee Roasters for sharing this with me, as well as his other competition coffee that I’ll drop on you later this week or next week. It’s an honor and privilege to work with people like this and to share coffees like these ones with you dear readers!