Happy Wednesday! To celebrate this auspicious day of the week, let’s check out a new-to-KC Coffee Geek roaster, Twelve Gate Coffee Co. and one of their current, fresh Colombian coffees. Slurp!
Purchase this coffee directly for $17/12oz
TWELVE GATE COFFEE CO. MELKY CHAVEZ BOLAÑOS
Despite its challenging algorithm, Instagram remains my favorite way to discover new roasters, and a few months ago I started Instastalking Twelve Gate Coffee Co., who recently sent me a couple of their current Colombian coffees to share with you dear readers. Twelve Gate is located in Sweet Springs, Missouri, about an hour east of Kansas City on I-70. Twelve Gate is a roasting brand owned by The Old School Coffee Company, also in Sweet Springs. Old School is, apparently, just a mile off the highway in this small town of about 1500 people, and the reviews for the coffee and baked goods are great, so well worth the detour, it sounds like. For a lot of coffee shops that start roasting for themselves, it makes good business sense to spin off the roasting operation under a different name. I don’t know about all the business implications, but it does allow the roasting business to pursue wholesale accounts, shelf space in stores, etc in a way that wouldn’t be as feasible under the shop name. It sounds like that’s exactly what happened with Twelve Gate. Edit: one of the sources I used to put together information for this review was terrible, apparently, and Twelve Gate is an independent company, however, they do rent/use space for their roasting at Old School, but there is no business affiliation there. I thought Twelve Gate’s name has a bit of a Biblical vibe to it and a little investigation showed an affilitation between Old School and a local church in Sweet Springs. Further reading showed me that Twelve Gate is a reference to a Revelations passage from the Bible. Edit: Again, bad source of information. Twelve Gate is not affiliated with any churches in Sweet Springs, althought they think the local church is great. This all makes a lot of sense to me as coffee and Christianity are tightly interwoven, particularly in this part of the state. You can read a lot more about that here, and here. Regardless of religious affiliation, I’m always happy to discover new roasters and get my hands on more coffee!
The first of Twelve Gates’ coffees that I’m tearing into is their Melky Chavez Bolaños. I was a bit confused as their bag label shows this as being a coffee from Huila, Colombia, however their website ties it to another region, Nariño. Some more digging around and I found out that Melky does grow coffee in Nariño, so it’s just a misprint on the bag. No big deal, I’ve never met a coffee from either region that I didn’t love! Melky grows Caturra varietal coffee on a small farm that sits around 1800masl. Twelve Gate gives us tasting notes of, “Lush caramely body, juicy black currant, rose florals and black tea…” Yum!
For my cups I am using my standard pourover setup of a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin dripper with Kalita 155 filter. My grinder is a Knock Aergrind and I’ve been playing with faster brew times, 2:35 including a 30 second bloom in this case, and having good luck with my output. I’m also pouring my kettle through a Melodrip to control my pours.
The aroma on this coffee is interesting, with lots of sugars coming through along with some floral notes (sorry, I’m not great with specific flowers, and my allergies are still lit) and something that says “tropical!” to my brain but also isn’t more specific than that. This coffee smells great, though, how about leaving it at that? Taking a sip, I’m finding a medium bodied coffee and I’m getting a hint of roses of all things right up front. So there are my florals! I don’t taste rose in coffee that often, but man, it is really apparent in this one for me. Getting past that perfumed, rose note there is some lemon candy acidity that is really nice. On a side note, if a perfumy, rose-heavy coffee sounds like a turn-off, don’t worry. As with most florals, my palate attenuates really fast and I stop tasting it for the most part after a few sips. Your mileage may vary, but once I stopped thinking about roses I stopped tasting it in this cup, not that I didn’t like it when I took my first few sips!
If keep this coffee in my mouth for a few seconds before swallowing, the lemon gets really strong, and it’s delicious, so if you drink coffee like a normal person it won’t be nearly as big of a feature, although it’s still there and creating a nice ceiling for this cup. On the other end of the spectrum there is a light honeyed sweetness anchoring this coffee. Toward the second half of the sip, I’m getting a lot of black tea and the finish has a slightly dry finish that enhances this “tea effect” in this coffee for me. Sometimes washed Ethiopian coffees can read as very tea-like to me, too, but somehow this Colombian is totally different from those experiences I’ve had… this coffee tends to have a lot more body than the really tea-like Ethiopians I’ve had, reading as almost syrupy as it cools toward room temperature. There is a hint of tropical fruit in there, too, maybe like papaya or guava.
Overall, this is a really nice cup. It’s kind of a unique, unusual coffee compared to the many, many coffees I’ve had from Colombia, but further proof that this country, full of microclimates, is the furthest thing from a one-trick pony that there could possibly be. There’s a lot going on in this coffee, so it’s quite complex, but all the flavors work really well together. Despite being very complex, this coffee is still really drinkable, with that lemon candy and honey sweetness being the main features of the cup and the other things I mentioned more like condiments. Delicious, and a great introduction to this new-to-me roaster!