Taste: Creamy with Hazelnut Butter, Cherry Jam + Apple Turnover
Region: Santo Domingo, Huehuetenango
Farm: El Coyolar
Variety: Castillo
Imported by Sally at Cafe Imports
Notes from Quietly Coffee
Allie & Lennie is an homage to my Grandmothers and is roast profiled to evoke all my early coffee experiences. Visiting them in small-town Saskatchewan, I can still remember the smell of their coffee mugs on the table. With generous portions of milk and sugar in the cups and served with an ever-changing bounty of baked goods like saskatoon pie, vanilla shortbread, or plum dumplings, this espresso roast is designed to embody the perfect combination of all these warm sensory memories.
Allie & Lennie rotates with fresh harvests from our producer network but will always tell stories of my grandmother’s kitchens. It showcases those crops that taste like the pies, cookies, and treats that I will forever associate with a cup of coffee.
For the majority of the year, Allie & Lennie comes by way of the Yuki Minami and her producer group Aequitas in Brazil. And while we soon return with fresh crop from them, we are in the short window of fun variations on our nostalgic and dessert flavour focused espresso! The first comes from Antulio Castillo and his El Coyolar farm. He has been involved in coffee farming for nearly 30 years, starting as a teenager at his family farm and now growing a number of separated varietal lots across his 3.4 hectare farm. He also runs a plant nursery and mills onsite, using a 12-24 hour wet ferment, followed by milling and drying for a week on long patios.
I think Allie & Lennie would both love this beautiful crop. It opens with a creamy sweet nuttiness that lands somewhere between hazelnut butter and candied pecans . There is a wave of chocolate that helps balance out the intricate but light cherry acidity. The sweetness is the star with a syrupy cooked apple profile. The finish is long and full of caramel and toffee notes. True to Allie and Lennie, it is like a tray of baked goods jammed into the cup!
