This is only the second time we've had a Natural Sundried Nicaraguan for sale, and this one is much better than the first. It comes from Finca Cerro de Jesus which sits on the third highest mountain in Nicaragua and has won Cup of Excellence awards in previous years. It's in the Dipilto mountain range, close to the Honduras border.
The coffee is best as a medium roast. I'm roasting this to around 412 degrees bean temperature, which is darker than you would expect to roast a natural coffee, and is almost to the 2nd cracks. But roasts that are lighter then this have a tart pink lemonade/hibiscus flavor that make it somewhat exhausting to my mouth. You might like it, but I was looking for sweet. So at a medium roast, you get a great balance of smoothness, sweetness, and flavor notes that you wouldn't expect from roasting a natural this dark.
The official tasting notes were "blueberry and chocolate" and those are both present, but not strong. The blueberry is what you might first smell and catch a quick taste of, and the chocolate is at the finish. In between, we are tasting caramel and cinnamon. The cinnamon lingers after you swallow and makes the coffee interesting -- it's not like other coffees that we currently have in stock.
There’s no biting acidity, earthiness, fermented tastes; and at a medium roast, there's not really any tartness. The coffee is hard to describe excitedly, because at first take, it does seem a bit boring. But we do really enjoy it, and we polished off an airpot of it without any problem the first day it was here.
US Arrival September 2016
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