sweet maria’s roasted

Honey or “Miel” refers to pulp natural coffees which tend to have more body and less acidity than their wet process equivalents, and can have a cleaner, more uniform quality than full natural dry-process coffees. First we roasted Costa Rica Tarrazu – Montes de Oro to Full City with final thermoprobe temperatures of 433 degrees and roast time of 15:30. Next we roasted Costa Rica “Café Sin Limites” to a City+ level with final thermoprobe temperature of 428 degrees and roast time of 15 minutes. Both of these coffees excel at a wide range of roast levels but I tried to keep them as close as possible for comparison’s sake. In the cup the Montes de Oro has a wonderful buttery sweetness compared with a more complicated brightness in the “Café Sin Limites”. In this instance I think the Oro is a milder version of “Miel” than the Sin Limites, both reveal the effects of this processing technique and how certain flavors can be intensified.

We are revisiting this pairing idea since it is such a fundamental issue in coffee: how much the varietal character of the plant influences the cup flavor. First up we have El Salvador Siberia Estate Pacamara. We roasted this batch to a City+ level to highlight the cultivar flavor profile; this is tricky to do with this type of bean because I needed to stop the roast while 1^st crack was still audibly ocurring. This meant final thermoprobe temperature of 420 degrees and roast times of 15 minutes using slightly smaller batch sizes than we normally do. Next we roasted Guatemala Finca San Jose Ocana which was roasted more in the Full City range and is a mighty dense little bean. So final thermoprobe temps were 434 degrees with roast times approaching 16 minutes. As for the cup comparison, the Pacamara has a floral sweetness, while the Bourbon has a maltier sweetness. These two are ideal examples of the variances in flavor due to cultivar.