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Coffee Haters Club
I'm in the process of trying to roast and drink my way through all of my older coffees as well as testing my olfactory senses versus the expected flavor profile of said coffees. This week's roast is a Rwandan coffee from yikes, several years ago. My first go 'round, I got a lot of "generic good pourover" flavor initially, that mellowed into a more generic sweetness with some citrus tartness on the side. I wondered to myself if my senses were dulling or, more charitably, if they were just a little rusty. The next day, when preparing my coffee, I realized that I had my water temperature set to 200 degrees, which could definitely flatten the more delicate flavors, so I dialed it down to 195 and had my second cup. The initial flavor mellowed more quickly, of course, and again the sweetness was there right away, along with the citrus and some tantalizing fruitiness that I couldn't put a finger on. Okay, time to face the music and compare my own tasting notes to the notes of the cupper and... "base sweetness of sugarcane juice, spiced Darjeeling tea aroma, fruited hints, lemon citrus accent, acidic impressions, elegant pourover."
Huh. I guess my olfactory nerves aren't so badly calibrated after all!
Next up is likely to be an old Guatemalan that I never got around to trying before I disassembled my roaster for cleaning. I'll be doing the same blind tasting and hopefully I'll still be on the same page as the cupper!
I ordered more beans. Still waiting for one of them, a Mexican, to arrive. I was amazed by one new variety: Monsooned Malabar. Holy crap. There's a LOT going on in this bean. After grinding, there's so much spice, several kinds of spice, and perhaps some nuts and other things, in the aroma. It's pretty full bodied in the cup.
Ooh, nice, that sounds lovely and the flavor profile definitely checks out. Indian and SE Asian coffees in general are bigger on the nut and spice notes and have an earthy taste to them that most other coffees don't have. They're excellent coffees, especially for those that enjoy darker roasts. I actually thought a lot about getting an aged Sumatran in my latest order (yeah, I caved, what can one do?) but I'd already loaded up on a bumper crop of good looking Ethiopian beans so I chose a different Indonesian coffee instead. Always good to have some Asian coffee in the mix for variety!
If color is anything to go by, these monsooned beans are actually lighter than anything else I've tried.
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