Like I said in the last post, Colorado was one of the states I was most familiar with already. I've been progressively increasing how much I'm getting into specialty coffee over the past few years, and in that time I've managed to sample Colorado a fair bit. In particular, I was in Denver for a few days in 2016 and visited several different coffee places (not all of which do their own roasting), including Huckleberry and Novo. I've also ordered from Novo a couple times since I started ordering coffee online, and the first roaster that I ordered from back in October when I really started carefully tracking my coffee-drinking experiences for flavor and overall enjoyment was Dragonfly, out of Boulder. So while I'd had good experiences with Colorado roasters in the past, I also didn't want to revisit old ground. After a little searching, I settled on Color Roasters. For a slightly different twist, they're located in Eagle, a small town in the mountains of west-central Colorado, about 2,000 meters above sea level - pretty good coffee growing height, if we were on the equator!
State #6: Colorado
Color Coffee Roasters
Eagle, CO
Although most high-quality coffee is grown at altitude, there did seem to be something particularly fitting about having a coffee grown in the Andes and roasted in the Rockies. This did indeed turn out to be a pretty "classic" coffee as the label promises. The acidity has a raisin-like quality and there were a lot of sweet chocolate notes - it wasn't perhaps the most complex coffee in the world, but it was eminently drinkable. Even without adding any dairy, it's a smooth and sweet cup - and with a bit of half and half it nearly tasted like a chocolate milkshake! Perhaps I've had enough coffee at this point that I've moved beyond seeing it as predominantly bitter - even though that is the crucial component of the flavor profile - but it was remarkable to me how sweet this was, and not with the obvious berry sweetness of a natural-process coffee. This might be the coffee to use if you're attempting to get someone into coffee for the first time.
By comparison, the Rwandan selection was much more how I tend to picture "specialty coffee" - a complex profile with fruit and spice notes. The fruit notes were somewhat jammy, as the label notes; it's perhaps hard to define how that differs from a normal fruit flavor, but I guess I would call it a bit sweeter and more concentrated of a flavor. The body was also nice and balanced. Between this and the Burundi I got from Verve, I've been really enjoying coffees out of East Africa's Great Lakes region lately!
On my "Coffee Enjoyment Ratings" spreadsheet I have a five-point Likert scale on which I rate each of the coffees. Because specialty coffee starts with such good inputs, I have yet to rate anything below a 3 - the middle of the scale, subjectively defined as "Okay." 4 is "Good," and 5 is "Great!" I've rated quite a few 5s, but Color is the first roaster in the 50-state project where I gave a 5 to both coffees I ordered from them (Verve was close but I gave the Honduras a 4). Honestly, one of the few things I don't enjoy about this project - because of course I love sampling coffees from all over and collecting states and origins - is that when I really like a roaster's output I can't try them again right away. There's nothing TECHNICALLY stopping me, of course, but you know. I'll just have to circle back once I'm done with this - which I guess may not be for a couple years. In the meantime, consider this a strong recommendation for Color Coffee Roasters!
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ReplyDeleteThis is a test comment from the computer rather than the phone. Ça marche?
ReplyDeleteI have a couple of thoughts/questions. 1) Given that your evaluations are clustered at 4 and 5, does it make sense to have 1/2 points - so 3 1/2 and 4 1/2 adde for finer gradations? 2) How about keeping a running leaderboard of the roasters and the states. So, if someone wanted to try out the coffee from you highest rated roaster, it would be easy to find out who that is.
ReplyDeleteWhen I started my rating spreadsheet, I wrote it less as an intentionally numbered Likert scale (even though that's how I described it here because it turned out to work as one) and more as a series of subjective judgments: Great, Good, Okay, Meh, and Bad. It is however true that I have not graded anything as Meh or Bad and only 6 of 46 ratings have been Okay. On the one hand, I do think this speaks to the fact that I'm only really dealing with high-quality coffee, but I suppose it also makes it a little less useful. I could probably push it out to a larger scale... maybe a ten-point scale which would add another point on the good side of the scale? Something like this: Superlative (10), Great (9), Very Good (8), Good (7), Above Average (6), Passable (5), Mediocre (4), Meh (3), Not Good (2), Bad (1).
DeleteOf course I would have to go back and retroactively change the ratings which is a little tricky given that they go back more than seven months in total. But it could be doable.
DeleteOkay, I tried switching to a 10-point scale, re-rating (had to do a bit of it from my memory of how much I liked something, so it's slightly imperfect, but close enough), and then I added a list to the main page of the blog which ranks the roasters so far. Ironically it still ended up pretty clustered! But it's also only been six states so far, hopefully as we go forward it will break out a little more.
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