Onyx / Colombia / Tolimo - Edward Sandoval / Washed Chiroso (Shinola Cafe)

This cup of coffee shifted my beliefs around what washed coffees should taste like. I do not remember much of it (in reality, this post was written nearly two months late), but I do remember being dazzled by how clean it was, how pleasant and sweet, and how badly I wanted to drink it all down. I do not recall all the feelings I had, except that I would gladly drink this again.

Onyx advertises "pear, oolong tea, raw sugar, minerality." These are accurate, but the most intriguing was minerality. I would ascribe that to the clean feeling that you get from water. This was coffee, not watery coffee, but clean coffee. It was sweet and delicious. I bet it would be great in AeroPress.

The big-bearded barista at Shinola is very intelligent, kind, and surprisingly soft-spoken. He opened my eyes to two things - first, that multi-roaster cafes can make good coffee. "Locally roasted" is not always better - some roasters are actually very good and that is why they are popular. Second, washed coffee is not inherently worse. In fact, after this cup, I have been less impressed by natural process coffee. This coming comparison is not fair, but it is true if exaggerated. Natural process is like the hot Cheeto dust of the coffee world – it tastes good and is interesting, but it is not necessarily more impressive and certainly not more refined. 

This is not a knock against natural process coffee, I enjoy it greatly, but all coffee is beautiful. Carter from SK Coffee told me that once you get into coffee, you naturally gravitate towards the more interesting processes. He was right, but there is something special about some truly impressive creation of Allah. 

Prodigal / Colombia / Tolima / Washed Gesha (The Coffee Movement)

I do get a little frustrated whenever a coffee is labeled as "floral." What do flowers taste like? I personally have no clue. I will say that this particular coffee was approaching zero espresso harshness, to a very weird extent. As a pourover, it was light and papery, perhaps this is florality. One of these days, I'll lock in and figure out floral. It was very fruity, although apricot-y, which is not the most desirable fruitiness. This was good coffee, amazing as espresso, uninteresting under milk. 

Sightglass / Mexico / Finca Santa Cruz / Washed

You should not judge a book by its cover, nor a cafe by its vibe, and you probably should not judge a coffee by its barista. All of those things are correlated to each other, though. I do not understand why so many of the baristas in San Francisco were so sad. Maybe it was the bad weather or maybe they were all just waiting for that February paycheck to fill the rent-shaped hole in their wallets. 

I guess you should also not judge a coffee by its origin. I have this perception that Mexican coffee will taste lemony. I think I am wrong, and that it is not lemony by default. I also had never had Chiapas-an coffee, with this one being grown in La Concordia, Chiapas. 

I thought it was a warm, smooth coffee, with a good amount of body, some acidity, and really nice, well developed flavor. I thought it was pleasantly fruity. I tried to squint as hard as I could to get the promised "sierra fig," which was probably there. Anyways, it was too long ago for me to properly review this coffee. I liked it, I would have it again, and the "medium roast" label is tremendously made up. 

RoosRoast / A-A Cowboy

I had this coffee as filter coffee from the Liberty cafe. It was good. I tasted blueberries, they report caramel. Perhaps I just don't know what caramel is. I prefer Lobster Butter Love. This wasn't a super light roast either, so the fruitiness was not so distinct and rather the concept of fruitiness was present. It was not sour or offensive, it was very palatable. But offensiveness is sometimes what I am searching for.