State #15: Indiana
Tinker Coffee Company
Indianapolis, IN
Tinker had a pretty intriguing option right off the bat, which was this "day lot" coffee from Ethiopia. "Part of our Rare and Exclusive series," you say? Twist my arm! Basically, the coffee arriving at the washing station was separated out by daily deliveries of cherries, which doesn't usually happen due to volume considerations. So this coffee represents a group of cherries that were all picked at basically the same time, which is a really intense focus on what terroir contributes to the flavor of a coffee! For a light-roasted Ethiopian coffee, I found the body to be well-balanced; the acidity was bright without being too powerful. The flavor in that acidity was sort of like a dried pineapple - a bit acidic, a bit astringent, but still with a notable concentration of sweetness on the palate. After the initial hit, there's a suggestion of stone fruit, peach or apricot, and then some tea-like tannic dryness. On the whole I rated this an 8, Very Good. I tend to prefer a juicier coffee to a drier one, but the flavor profile here was solid. If this sounds good you'd better run over to the Tinker website, because I can't imagine it's going to be there too long, and the way this was produced you won't be able to get again!
I was slightly annoyed to return to the Tinker website after my coffee had arrived to find that they were now offering a coffee from Malawi, which both sounded good in the tasting description and is an origin I have not yet managed to collect. When I put in my order, I opted to go back to the Western Hemisphere for my second coffee, since I've really been neglecting it of late. Although I did have a Nicaragua-grown coffee as recently as July as part of Paradise's Rare Coffees subscription, I hadn't specifically ordered one in well over a year, so it was definitely time for another visit. This specific coffee also benefited an educational non-profit in Nicaragua, which was a bonus. Interestingly, I liked this coffee more when making it in the Mr. Coffee machine on a regular weekday morning than in the V60 pourover on a weekend. My initial encounter with it produced a surprisingly robust cherry acidity, then a kind of light but indistinct sweetness that was cut with a heavy bitterness that put me in mind of a tobacco-like flavor - something I don't find altogether pleasant. I was teetering on the edge of how to rate the coffee, with the tobacco note ranging it toward just a 5. However, when brewed in the Mr. Coffee, I found this back-end bitterness to be milder and a little more like a dark chocolate than like the earthy tobacco flavor. As a result, the coffee became much more drinkable to me. I'm not entirely sure how to account for this - the general consensus is that coffee on drip is not as good as a controlled pourover, though I generally find the difference between the two to be fairly subtle. (Ultimately, if the coffee is the same, there's only so much you can do not to get pretty similar flavors.) The particular aspect of the coffee that generated the tobacco notes, whatever exactly it was, may have been dissipated a bit by the flat basket as opposed to the conical shape of the V60; ordinarily I guess you'd argue that this is a bad thing because it mutes the flavors a bit, but this particular flavor wanted muting in my opinion. At any rate, this experience ultimately led me to keep the rating at a 6, Above Average.
The combined score of 14 puts Tinker in the middle tier through fifteen roasters. It's worth stressing that I have not had a BAD experience from any roaster yet and don't really anticipate doing so - the rating system is a little skewed inasmuch as any specialty Arabica coffee is likely to be at least passable. I'm not sure what you'd have to do for that not to be the case - burn the beans, I guess, but I tend to stick to roasters with professional-looking websites who appear to know what they're doing, so the likelihood of that goes down a lot. Maybe in states like North Dakota or Wyoming where the options are severely limited? I guess we'll see, but that's a ways off yet. Next up is Iowa - which, per my intro, is another state without a huge selection, but enough of one that I'm not worried.
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