I was on the road for five days last week for work, so it’s with great pleasure that I get to make a nice cup of coffee in my own kitchen at home this morning. I may as well empty both barrels and pick a coffee from legendary German roaster, The Barn!
THE BARN EL DURAZNO
It only took a couple shipments of coffee from Berlin, Germany roaster, The Barn, to make me into a total fanboy and I can say that without any shame! With exceptional sourcing and top notch roasting, The Barn is, quite simply, one of my favorite coffee roasters, period! The only “problem” is that they do a lot of very small lots, and between the time they send coffee to me from Berlin and I get reviews posted on KC Coffee Geek, it’s often already sold out or out of their rotation. But these coffees still need to be written about, so readers can understand what a great roasters The Barn is and that they simply cannot go wrong picking any coffee off their current selections list, which changes constantly.
The coffee I’m drinking this morning is El Durazno from Guatemala. This coffee was an exclusive partnership between the farm and the Barn (which sounds funny when you think about it) with 13 bags of this coffee in total. The coffee cherries were fermented for 38 hours before undergoing the washing process, which The Barn feels adds depth, complexity and interest to this cup. The Barn gives us tasting notes of “white peach, caramel, jasmine, citric acidity” for this coffee. 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 and I used a Knock Aergrind grinder for the hard work.
The aroma coming off the Origin after brewing this was about as close to peach juice as I have ever smelled in a coffee. There were some florals and other hard to identify scents, too, but tons of peach in the aroma. Taking a sip, I have a medium-bodied coffee that’s perfectly balanced between sweetness, brightness and even a hint of tartness. This is a juicy coffee that just had me taking big gulps of it and greedily going in for sip after sip without wanting to think about what I was tasting as much as wanting to keep it all to myself! LOL It really is a great coffee! Willing myself to slow things down, there’s a sweet, smooth, milky caramel base that is one of the best sweet flavors in a coffee I’ve tasted. It’s phenomenal. Toward the mid sip, a nice, easy peach note rolls in. I just had some white peaches recently and that’s a great descriptor for the peach note in this cup. There are also florals and a light lime acidity accompanying the peach. The florals linger into the long aftertaste, which is sweet peach caramel for days, and the lime acidity is really a condiment in the context of this coffee, like a spritz over a meal to add a bit of complexity and brightness without so much adding its own flavors, per se.
This is an absolutely amazing coffee. Again, I’m very sorry to tease you with a review of a coffee you can’t currently buy, but I’d be on the lookout for anything Guatemalan that The Barn lays its hands on, for sure. Simply stunning!