I’ve been drinking the beans from Variety Coffee Roasters for about a week now.  It is unexpectedly packaged in this bright red box that I wouldn’t have thought it would contain coffee despite the labeling.

Initially opening the bag rewarded me with a whiff of fresh roasted coffee beans as a sweet addictive smell.  Maybe I’m just addictive to the smell of coffee?

Making the latte, I was initially disappointed with the first sip.  It doesn’t have as much nuttiness like Peixoto and is fairly mild yet smooth.  But I’m very impressed at the aftertaste.  After each sip, there is a vanilla aftertaste that grows that makes me want to drink more.  And then my cup is empty.

Angel’s Cup delivered a new bag about two weeks ago.  This one is from Familia Peixoto.  From the website, they’re a multi-generational family owned coffee farmer in Brazil.

The first thing that I smelled a strong nutty aroma followed by dark chocolate and then an earthy aroma.  The bag says it tastes like berries and at times I get this wisp of blueberries/cherries as well.

Making my morning latte this morning, the aroma of nuts in the ground coffee is overpowering.  It hits me first followed by the subtle coffee aroma then the cherries.  After adding milk and taking a sip,  the nutty flavor is still there but the cherry undertones has melded with the creaminess of the milk.  The chocolate flavor lingers in the aftertaste.

You might be asking yourself, how do I make my latte?  It should be stated as a fact that variance in process can ruin the taste of a latte.  So if I try to minimize this variance, then the taste of the beans should be standardized and comparable regardless of the coffee roaster.  So in the past 5 years, I’ve come up with a standard approach.

• Grind approximately 30g of coffee beans.
• Add approximately 120g of hot water at 98C (or 4x the weight of ground beans) in an Aeropress.
• Stir and brew the hot coffee slurry for no more than 5 minutes.
• Use the Aeropress to extract the coffee extract out into a cup.
• Weigh the total recovered espresso liquid.
• Add approximately 180g of Horizon 2% Organic cold milk into the espresso liquid (or 3x the weight of recovered espresso liquid).

It should be obvious that the strength of the espresso liquid is dependent on the amount of milk used.  For Cafe con Leche, I find a 1x the weight of the recovered espresso liquid to yield a good strong coffee.

After being gifted with Ritual Coffee subscription, I looked and join a coffee subscription service called Angel’s Cup.  From an old reddit post I stumbled upon via Google (now turned into wiki guide), Angel’s Cup seemed to have the best variety (different roasters) for the price (~20/bag) and frequency (once per month) that I was looking for.

Coffee roasters like Blue Bottle, Intelligentsia, Stumptown, and even Starbucks all roast their coffee beans differently resulting in unique flavor profiles in the lattes that I drink.  After being with Ritual Coffee for so long, I really wanted to try different roasters in order to taste the different profiles.  And Angel’s Cup seems to fit that bill.

So for March I received this…