Crown Jewel Nicaragua Organic Jinotega Juan de Dios Castillo Raised Screen Honey

Taste

Taste Analysis by Chris Kornman 

This is a smooth and balanced offering from Nicaragua with plenty of sweetness, lots of body, and relatively low acidity. You’ll note some flavors of lime and lemon (but without the citric zip) at lighter roasts. Moderately developed roasts should showcase lots of chocolatey notes, syrupy body, hints of nuttiness like sweet almonds, and mild berry and cantaloupe flavors. It’s easy to enjoy without challenging expectations, but there’s complexity there for those who seek it. Overall, it’s a crowd-pleasing coffee with lots of potential and we’re thrilled to feature it as a pour-over at The Crown. 

Source

Source Analysis by Mayra Orellana-Powell 

What’s the best way to support coffee producers? 

This is exactly the question Juan de Dios Castillo (the family’s agronomist) and his 4 siblings were looking to answer when they created J&M Family Coffee, a privately owned export company named after their parents Juan and Miriam (J&M). 

Their first goal was to sell their parents’ coffee directly to international buyers. It was a way to honor their parents who started cultivating coffee during their childhood with the income from the first family tailoring business in the town of Jinotega.  With this first goal completed, Juan de Dios Castillo decided to take the next step and start his own farm called El Pastoral, which has 150 acres of coffee production. 

Cherries from Finca Pastoral are selected for more specialized processing rather than the more common washed processing.  This honey processed lot is a stunning example of the skill and commitment Juan de Dios has invested in the family business. 

During the harvest, the coffee cherries are carefully harvested, sorted, and depulped.  Then the remaining seed covered in mucilage is transported to the dry-mill where the weather conditions are more stable for evenly drying coffee.  After drying is completed, the coffee is stored and later prepared for export at the same dry-mill.  This is a truly integrated model, in which J&M Family Coffee ensures quality control and traceability from farm to export. 

Royal has the distinguished honor of being the first importer to buy from J&M Family Coffee when they started operations in 2014. 

Green

Green Analysis by Chris Kornman 

An overall larger coffee than average for Central America, perhaps partly attributable to the Parainema (Sarchimor) genetics. The coffee is of high density and excellent looking moisture specs should make this a fairly straightforward coffee to work with in the roaster and well-suited for extended shelf life under good storage conditions.

Diedrich IR-5

Diedrich IR-5 Analysis by Chris Kornman 

This was a fun coffee to work with, and while it does require a decent push of heat, it behaves predictably in the roaster. 

I put the coffee through a standard 6lb pour-over profile on our Diedrich roaster. Noting the high density and large bean size I kicked the gas to about 70% right out of the gates and kept it there until first crack. I’ve been in the habit of opening the airflow baffle in anticipation of phase changes rather than as a reaction to them recently, and you can see in the chart the slight uptick in environmental temperature at 4:30 in response to opening up at 50%. Opening the air to 100% just prior to the first few cracks and dropping the gas dramatically gave the coffee a bit of slope as it developed and I dropped the coffee as environmental and bean probe temperatures converged, with roughly 1:20 of development at 14% of the total roast time. 

The 52.5 internal Colortrack score is on the lighter side, but the cup showed off some nice melon and stone fruit flavors with plenty of sweetness. This is not an especially acidic coffee, so in my opinion the best profiles will work to develop decent sweetness, either during Maillard or post-crack development. You should have an easy time with either, so long as you set yourself up with enough energy in the early stages. Happy roasting! 

Quest M3s

Quest M3s Analysis by Evan Gilman 

 Unless otherwise noted, I follow a set standard of operations for all my Quest roasts. Generally, I’ll allow the machine to warm up for 15 minutes until my environmental temperature reading is at least 250F, weigh out 200g batch size, and begin roasting when I’ve reached my desired charge temperature.  Read my initial post here and my updated post here. 

This very dense, very large, and very tasty coffee from Nicaragua is one for the books. There aren’t too many Nicaraguan coffees that have held my attention in the past few years, but this coffee was in heavy rotation at my house for the last week. 

After noticing the large bean size, high density, and slightly wide screen size distribution, I knew that this coffee would need a good amount of heat in the beginning of roast and would likely keep chugging through first crack without much help. I decided to start with a higher charge temperature (391F) to get this coffee moving right off the bat and used full fan speed until just before turning point. Next, I made two rapid adjustments: 3 fan at 265F / 3:00 and 7.5A at 275F / 3:15, as this coffee had found its peak delta/rate of rise. This adjustment didn’t have much effect after 30 seconds, so I added full fan at 300F / 3:50, and dropped heat application to 5A at 330F / 4:45 – this did the trick, and my delta began to drop. At 375F / 6:45 this coffee needed a bit more push, so I raised heat application to 7.5A until crack – which came very late at 390F / 8:24. I then cut heat application entirely and allowed this coffee to ride out its post-crack development. Watch out for the late crack on this coffee, dear roaster, and adjust accordingly!  

In order to get 15% development time, I allowed this coffee to reach 400F, which may have been a bit too high. Some roast notes did present themselves in the cup when the coffee was very fresh, but 3 days off roast, this coffee really opened up! What at first was a simple combination of chocolate covered raisin and lime acidity became floral and tropical. I see that Nate got some of the same notes I did; honeysuckle in particular always reminds me of a warm summer evening. Give this coffee some time off roast to really offgas and open up, and I think you’ll find all the tropical fruit you’re looking for. Juicy and floral mangosteen, tart guava, and deep black cherry. Yum. Dessert coffee! 

Ikawa Pro V3

Ikawa Pro V3 Analysis by Nate Lumpkin 

It’s been such a pleasure tasting through some of our summer arrivals, and tasting this coffee is no different. While I wasn’t sure what to expect from this coffee, I was happy to find a complex and balanced cup from our Ikawa roasts, with heavy dark chocolate notes as well as bright and lively tropical fruits.  

Our standard hot and fast profile produced a cup that when hot had heavy notes of dark chocolate and kiwi, with lemon acidity and a nutty finish. As it cooled though its tropical fruit notes started to stand out: I tasted passionfruit, guava, and more distinct kiwi notes, and a strong dark chocolate finish. I found this cup balanced and sweet, with a nice berry-like quality to it. Highly recommend! 

The longer Maillard profile had a strong cocoa aroma, with some interesting floral notes of honeysuckle and juniper, as well as lime, honey, and dark chocolate. It had a denser, more syrupy body than the previous profile, like a cooked down passionfruit or blueberry syrup, but was still bright, sweet, and clean, and lightly cooling note on the finish, like mint.  

Unfortunately, the longer, cooler, low air-flow profile didn’t quite compare to the previous two. While I tasted some blood orange and lime acids and a cocoa powder finish, I found the sweetness quickly faded as the cup cooled, leaving the acids somewhat out of balance with its flavors. I recommend either of the previous two profiles over this one. 

You can download the profile to your Ikawa Pro app here: 

Roast 1: Crown Standard SR 1.0            

Roast 2: Crown Maillard +30 SR 1.0             

Roast 3: Crown 7m SR LowAF 2      

Brew

Brew Analysis by Colin Cahill 

I get super excited to play around with honey-processed coffees, as they can be a bit of a wild card with their layers of fruit, sugar, and funk. They are fun to have on bar when you’ve got customers who are curious about the ranges of flavors possible in coffee, and some of my favorite regular customers come in asking us if we have anything “funky” on bar. To brew this up I wanted to play with that complexity and see what kinds of variation would come out using both flatbed and conical brewing devices, and playing with the contrast that can come from using Saint Anthony Industries’ thick Perfect Paper Filters (on the C70) and Kalita’s classic 185 filter (on the Wave). 

I like to go from softer to louder brews, so I began on the C70 with a recipe that we often use as our starting point. The brew came out quickly (relative to most of my recent brews with the same recipe), and was super clean with pronounced berry flavors. We tasted syrupy blackberry and raspberry notes, a lemon-lime acidity, and a lingering aftertaste with hints of milk chocolate, graham cracker, and malt. A gentle clove note flowed through the whole experience, and we were happy to sit and sip on this brew. 

Moving over to the Kalita Wave, I wanted to avoid overextraction, so I shortened the bloom time. The brew time was still 17 seconds longer than on the C70, but it yielded a brighter brew that really highlighted a range of citrus flavors. We tasted ruby red grapefruit, satsuma, tangerine, lemon, and lime. This coffee is packed with bright fruity flavors, and is super clean, with very little ferment-y, funky notes coming through. It yields a joyful brew perfect for starting the day!