I wanted to dedicate most of November to espresso reviews and Tony’s Coffee hooked me up with a couple bags of their Ganesha Espresso. This is a chocolatey and nutty ‘spro and with attention and care in preparation, it’s balanced and tasty! Slurp…
Purchase Ganesha Espresso directly for $14/12oz
TONY’S COFFEE GANESHA ESPRESSO
Tony’s Coffee gets the official KC Coffee Geek stamp of most OG roaster that I’ve featured in a review to date! They got their start in Bellingham, Washington way back in 1971! Bellingham is about 90 minutes north of Seattle (when there’s no traffic) and pretty close to the Canadian border, so it’s way up (and over) there. In their early days, the folks at Tony’s Coffee roasted out of their coffeehouse, but as far as I could tell with my research, the company is strictly a roaster these days and does not have a cafe to worry about. Tony’s has what looks like a lot of really nice coffees in their rotation, so check the website link out above and if they’re new to you like they were for me, try some things out!
Tony’s has two espressos in their rotation right now, this Ganesha they sent me and their Espresso Noir, which I’ll have to try out sometime in the future. Ganesha won America’s Best Espresso Competition back in 2013 and has been rated in the 90’s by another review site on multiple occasions. I spoke with one of Tony’s roasters, who hooked me up with these two bags of coffee, and he informed me that the current blend is a mix of Peruvian, Honduran and Ethiopian coffees. The website adds that this is a “medium” roast level and Kosher certified.
I appreciate that Tony’s adds basic preparation parameters on their website, too. Any espresso geeks know that it’s nice to have some basic guidelines for what the people who know this coffee thinks work best. Tony’s recommends a 1:1.75 ratio in 25-30 seconds with 200-202 degree water. I do not have a PID on my Gaggia, so who knows what my water temp was when I was pulling this coffee, but I did control for the other variables. Using this type of recipe, then, you’re looking at, for example, 20g of coffee in the portafilter and trying to get to 35g of espresso in the cup in 25-30 seconds.
A quick word on equipment, I’m using a Gaggia Classic that I have “blind tuned” to 9 bars and I always use Third Wave Water’s espresso water treatment in distilled water for the most consistent water possible. I have an aftermarket naked portafilter so I can see how it’s extracting and then I use a 20g Decent Espresso precision basket with a matched Decent tamper that is calibrated to 25lbs of tamping pressure. Grinder is a Rancilio Rocky. I adds my grounds to the portafilter, do a quick “WDT” stir with an open paperclip (it’s nothing but high tech here at World Domination Headquarters!) to break up the clumps, groom the grounds with an OCD-style grooming tool and then finally tamp and pull.
I waited about 10-11 days for this Ganesha blend before I even attempted to work with it. My first handful of shots were coming in really intense and short because this coffee was producing a ton of crema and I was just eyeballing it at first, so I was getting what looked like in-the-ballpark shots that were way more air and crema than I thought! They tasted pretty good, though, all things considered. After a little more rest the coffee calmed down some and dialing in was easier, but even 3 weeks out like I’m pulling it right now it still produces A LOT of crema and if you’re not using a scale, you’re going to be all over the place.
I pulled two just this morning to get a fresh read on Ganesha and the parameters do really matter for this coffee. My first shot this morning started with 20g in the basket and I got just under 40g in about 29 seconds. This shot was roasty, had lots of bittersweet cocoa and a lot of nuttiness, along with something floral in the undercurrent of the cup. But, I was getting quite a bit of bitterness, too.
I pulled a second shot, this time worrying more about the output than the time. I did 20g in the basket and got 32.3g of espresso in the cup in about 26.3 seconds. I’ll save you on the math, that’s a 1:1.6 ratio, which is not too far off from that 1:1.75 Tony’s recommends. This shot came out a lot better with just that little tweak. A lot of the roasty notes were gone (although I suppose that could be that my palate was attenuated, too, so keep that in mind since I’d just had a shot before this one) and so was a lot of that bitterness that came with it. There was a marshmallow sweetness to the cup and plenty of nuts, mostly almond but a little pecan, too. Toward the end of the shot I got some light hints of roasted peanut that work well for this coffee (not that greener, grassier peanut flavor you can get with underdeveloped coffees). I was still getting a lot of cocoa and bittersweet chocolate from this cup, too. This shot had great balance and was delicious and enjoyable to drink.
Tony’s Ganesha lends itself toward being a more traditional style of espresso, which I very much like. This isn’t a super-duper sweet shot, so those people who are searching for that really sweet, caramelly espresso won’t find that here necessarily. This is what I consider an Italian-style espresso but elevated quite a bit from the Roman street espresso I grew up on. There’s really very little fruit, if any, happening in this cup for me, which always reads as “Italian” to me. But, this also has good balance, lots of sweetness, nice nuttiness and low bitterness/roastiness if you pull it close to that recommended ratio, so in that way it has the good elements of Roman espresso with none of the bad. Highly recommended!