Illinois provided one of the trickiest challenges for this project for the simple reason that I did not want to repeat myself with roasters I've tried before. I don't currently live in Illinois and my coffee-drinking years actually don't overlap at all with the time I lived there, but I still go back a lot and have sampled a lot of the major Chicago roasters at this point. As such I had to dig a little deeper. Conscious Cup, a roaster based in the northwest suburb (or perhaps exurb) of Crystal Lake and operating a handful of cafes in that area, seemed like a good option - they've been at it for a while but aren't a big name, they appear to focus on environmental and fair trade concerns, and they had a nice variety of origins. Though in the end I actually stayed in a single region...
State #14: Illinois
Conscious Cup Coffee Roasters
Crystal Lake, IL
Despite the wide range of options, I found myself compelled to stick with East Africa for the simple reason that, since starting to track my coffee consumption on a very granular level about two years ago, I had never had Arabica coffee from Uganda. (While participating in "The World's Largest Coffee Tasting" last month, run by the YouTube coffee expert James Hoffmann, I did get a chance to sample Ugandan Robusta, but the less said about that the better.) As you might guess from this blog, I am kind of an obsessive collector - these days I prefer to collect things that I can just tick off a list, rather than things that will take up physical space in my apartment, and "coffee origins" certainly falls under that category. Uganda, as a relatively new origin for high-quality specialty Arabica, is not as widely available, so I hadn't been able to check it off my list yet, but now I have. This was a very good, fairly classic East African cup to me - the acidity was a little on the bitter side, sort of a dry grapefruit flavor, which isn't my absolute favorite. But beyond that the flavors really opened up - there were floral notes of jasmine, spice notes that reminded me of gingerbread, and a nice medium body that really added to the drinkability factor. I'm not 100% on what varietals were in here - this is one area where the Conscious Cup website was partially deficient, but a little Googling to other websites selling similar lots suggested that it was probably a mix of Bourbon with some of the Scott Labs varietals, in particular SL14 and SL28. These are all fairly common varietals for the region, so it makes as much sense as anything else. In all, I rated this an 8, Very Good.
Ordinarily I would not order two coffees from the same region, but I've had a lot of success with Burundian coffees lately, and something in particular caught my eye - the website listed the varietal for this one as "Landrace." If you're not familiar with that term, it's kind of (although not entirely) interchangeable with "Heirloom" - it's used to refer to the various Ethiopian-derived varietals that emerged more organically from the wild coffee forests, as opposed to being more explicitly bred by humans from the original Typica line that first made its way to Yemen. Landrace coffees are often much more interesting than the Typica/Bourbon-derived varietals because their genetic diversity is so much higher, yielding a wider range of flavor profiles. (Try a few different coffees out of Ethiopia and you'll see what I mean.) What was particularly interesting about this is that my understanding had always been that Burundi's coffee industry was required by law to plant Red Bourbon exclusively, so the idea that there was some form of heirloom coffee hanging out somewhere in the country was highly intriguing.
The question is whether this was an accurate labeling or an error, like the template had been copied from an old page that was offering an Ethiopian and not updated. It's hard to say. Personally I did not find this coffee to be as reminiscent of some of the other Burundian coffees I've had recently - indeed, the Ugandan seemed a lot closer. The last two Burundi offerings I tried were somewhat similar to each other, with sweeter acidities, medium bodies, and some particularly appealing spice notes. This one was rather different - the acidity was more citric, leaning towards a lemongrass kind of profile, and the body was lighter. There was a tannic, tea-like flavor and a related dryness on the palate; there were some fruit notes, but mostly in the grape/raisin area. Critically, there wasn't much in the way of spice, which I really associate with the standard Burundian profile - granted, this is off a pretty small sample size so that's probably a little strong, but I've gotten that off basically every East African Bourbon coffee I've had and it wasn't notably present here. As the coffee cooled a bit there were maybe some mild hints of clove, but even so that's rather different from the more gingerbread profile I've often picked out. The point is, I think it's reasonable to believe that this might genuinely be a landrace varietal growing in Burundi, which is pretty cool. With that said, from a strict flavor standpoint it was marginally less appealing to me personally. I rated it a 7, Good. It's a perfectly decent cup of coffee but if you asked me to choose between this and previous Burundian coffees I've had in the last six months, it's no contest.
In combination, this gave Conscious Cup a total score of 15, tying it with DC's Lost Sock Roasters for sixth place so far, which is basically in the middle. I think that's a fair representation of the experience for me - it was totally solid, but neither coffee quite made it to my uppermost echelons. As always, that is of course only one man's opinion, and I certainly feel confident in saying I doubt you will be disappointed if you try coffee from this roaster.
Next up is Indiana. You may have noticed this post took a lot longer to appear - it's been more than two months since the last one - and a key reason for that is that due to temporary changes in living situation I'm only making coffee for myself at the moment and as such I'm not going through it as quickly. I could go through the states about as quickly as I was if I only order one bag per roaster, but I like to try a couple different things (plus if I changed now, the scoring system wouldn't work, and anyway if you're paying for shipping it's simply more cost-effective to order more than one bag). So this may go on a little longer than I originally expected but whatever. It's a couple years' worth of project anyway.
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