This week I’m diving into the first bag of coffee from a roaster I’ve wanted to try for a while, Huckleberry Roasters out of Denver, CO.  Colombia Resguardo is a washed coffee from the Gaitania subregion of Tolima, Colombia, with Catura, Castillo, and Typica varietals roasted to a light-medium level that looks and smells delicious.  Huckleberry describes this coffee as tasting like red fruit with syrupy sweetness, with flavors of red plum, black cherry, cashew, and cola.  The roaster’s description hails this as being interestingly bright with enough body and sweetness to stand up to milk or work great as a single origin espresso.  These are my favorite types of coffee to work with so you can really see the different flavors the various brewing methods bring out. 

As filter coffee through the V60, I preferred brew times in the low 2 minutes, and found it needed a substantially finer grind than normal to even stretch brewing to 2:30.  The coffee is definitely smooth and sweet no matter how you brew it, with the cashew note prominently presented.  The red fruit sweetness emerges a little more clearly as the coffee cools, and the cola sweetness lingers on the palette.  The longer the brew time the more the cashew and slightly more bitter fruit came out, so I tended to keep this on the faster side like it naturally wanted to run.  My parameters through the 02 size V60 were:

• 1:16 or 16.5 ratio usually 20 grams in to 325 grams or so out.
• 30 second bloom, and this coffee blooms up really nicely.
• Slow concentric circle pour to 200 grams, stir 5 good times.
• Two more circling pours with the final pour washing the stray grounds down the sides of the fiter.
• 2:15 total brew time.

This produced a really versatile crowd pleasing coffee.  Its smooth sweetness and lack of acidity make it very approachable, yet it’s still bright and complex enough to keep the enthusiast engaged.

As espresso, this coffee had a bit more acidity, a bit more fruit, but still had that creamy cashew-nutty body.  It had a pleasant cola like acidity with a great lingering sweetness.  I started and stuck with the 18 gram VST basket and was pulling shots at:

• 18.2 grams in :  40-42 grams out
• 28-30 second brew time
• 200*F brew temp

As a cappuccino the creamy cashew flavor was taken up another notch.  It made for a nutty sweet creamy cappuccino, I would fully endorse this coffee as being milk friendly.  It was kind of like if cashew butter had been sweetened like Reese's does to their peanut butter cups.  

Overall, I’m really pleased with this coffee, and it just makes me that much more excited to dive into the others I ordered from Huckleberry.  Ordering was fast and simple, orders over $45 ship free, and the packaging is fantastic with plenty of information cleanly laid out.  $16/12 ounce bag here.