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Shades of September |
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Filed under In the Cupping Room
One of our newest coffees is called Blackburn Estate from Tanzania, and it's a pretty special coffee. Fleur wrote a great little entry about it in our web shop, but I thought it would be nice to describe our experience of it so far.
Since high grown coffees are usually quite dense, we chose to roast this coffee quite aggressively in the first stages of the roast, relaxing the temperature rise through first crack, and finishing the roast near the end of first crack. We chose a slightly longer time than for our other African coffees, around 11 minutes and 45 seconds. Our drop temperatures range from 211 degrees celcius to 219 celcius as measured by our bean pile thermocouple. And with this coffee dropping at 214, it's a slightly lighter roast level than most of our coffees. The beans themselves aren't terribly attractive at this stage of the roast. Some coffees will puff out and finish with a smooth texture, while others - such as this coffee - remain quite closed up, with a wrinkly texture. While food show competitions and photographers may not like the appearance of coffee like this, it tastes great.
At faster roasts, closer to 10 minutes 45, we found a more lemon and molasses flavour came through when cupping it; a really interesting and crisp acidity, but a slightly unbalanced cup profile. We much preferred the raspberry jam and buttery mouthfeel of the slightly longer roast. So far we haven't put this coffee through our espresso machine as our Guest Espresso, but geez I'm looking forward to it. With such a great mouth feel, jammy flavour, and sugary sweetness, I think this will make a lovely little espresso.
We're stoked our friends at Deadman Espresso have enjoyed serving this coffee as a pour over, and we really hope you love it too!
