Another super special competition coffee from Switchback Coffee Roasters… sorry you can’t buy this from Switchback right now, but there is another roaster with it as a current offering and these coffees are too nice not to share with you readers, even if they are tough to obtain. Enjoy!
Colombia La Palma Natural Gesha review
SWITCHBACK COFFEE ROASTERS LA PALMA LACTIC SIDRA
Earlier this year, Switchback Coffee Roasters’ Sam Neely was the youngest competitor to ever compete in a US Coffee Championships barista competition, as he had just turned 18, the minimum required age. Not only was this Sam’s first time competing in the barista comp, but he placed 6th, which is crazy! Sam has been a longtime reader of KC Coffee Geek (wow!) and has hooked me up with coffees in the past. As a thank you (I should be the one thanking!!!), he sent me samples of his competition coffees to try out. I reviewed the Colombian gesha he used that is La Palma y El Tucan’s first natural process coffee, and it was beyond fantastic!
This other coffee Sam used is also a Colombian coffee from La Palma y El Tucan, a company I am an unapologetic fanboy of. This is one of La Palma’s own coffees from their farm in the Cundinamarca, which grows around 1800masl. Oddly enough I haven’t been able to find out a lot about Sidra, although I know La Palma is a pioneer in growing it. Sidra is a Bourbon and Typica cross, but otherwise I don’t know much about it. Another thing La Palma is a pioneer in is using different microbes to wash coffees, and I’ve always been particularly fond of their lactic washed coffees. In my previous experiences with La Palma lactic acid washed coffees, there are lots of tropical notes, a milky texture to the coffees and a bit of a pleasant sourness that reminds me of a very dialed back version of what can be found in sour beers that are also fermented with lactic acid producing microbes like the gose style.
Even though Sam competed with this coffee as an espresso, the small sample I got was too precious for me to risk wasting with dialing in, so as with his gesha, I played it safe and made my cups of this coffee as pourovers. I’m using a Trinity Origin with all but three of the bottom holes blocked out and Kalita 155 filter. I’m using a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water and my grinder is a Knock Aergrind.
Taking a sip, there’s a lot going on in this cup. The complexity is apparent right from the first taste. This is a medium bodied coffee with a creamy dairy texture and mouthfeel. It’s smooth and slick like an oatmeal stout. This heavy mouthfeel carries a syrupy sweetness that is immediately balanced by a bit of tartness that I associate with the lactic fermentation process. I’ve tasted this in the other La Palma lactic coffees in the past and it’s one of my favorite flavor notes in coffee. As with Switchback’s gesha, I get some white grape juice in the syrupy sweetness of this coffee, and that clean, white grape note comes in again in the aftertaste, too. I’m getting a lot of tropical fruits in this coffee… mango, a bit of pineapple, passion fruit. It’s a tropical fruit salad but these notes also have some restraint. Whereas pineapple in coffee can sometimes be very aggressive, this isn’t. Toward the second half of the sip there is a rose note mixed in that is subtle but also really apparent to my palate. At warmer temps I was getting flashes of pear, which I don’t think I’ve tasted in too many, if any, coffees in the past, but as the cup cools that was less apparent. Maybe in the aftertaste if I think about pear I can get it back, along with that rose and white grape. For as tropical as this coffee is on the front end, the finish is so subtle, but so clear and defined, too. On the front end this is all about that syrupy sweetness and tropical fruit brightness, but the sweet finish and aftertaste is pear, rose, white grape… really fantastic! If I let a minute or two go between sips that rose note in the aftertaste just continues to build and it’s just such a unique flavor!
This is another super killer coffee. Of course, the coffee is only half the battle in a barista competition… the person extracting it and making drinks with it has to be completely familiar with everything it can do and every subtle shift that every minute change in parameters brings. As if I wasn’t a La Palma y El Tucan fan enough already as is, these coffees from Switchback have that status carved in stone now! LOL This Sidra couldn’t be more different than the gesha, but they’re both top coffees, for sure, and experiences I won’t likely forget. I can’t say any more. I just wish I could share these cups of coffee with every single one of you dear readers! While you can’t buy this from Switchback, you can get it currently from Onyx Coffee Lab for $80/12oz, as well as the same gesha that Sam used, and I trust Onyx’s roasting implicitly, too.