Superba Coffee: Colombia San Agustin

Greetings, coffee lovers. Welcome back to my table here in the corner of this cafe. Feel free to pull up a chair.

You’ll have to forgive me for the lack of action here at the table—it has been a crazy past couple of weeks, filled with packing and moving and work and work opportunities. So, as you can imagine, I am very relieved to be sitting here now, enjoying a mug of coffee and tasting notes journal with The Tallest Man On Earth providing a perfect blogging soundtrack in my headphones.

This week, we’re taking another look at Los Angeles, California’s Superba Coffee and tasting their Colombia San Agustin (the right bag, pictured on the left side of the screen). As you may recall, the last time I sampled coffee, it was Superba’s Costa Rica Santa Laura—a wonderful Costa Rican coffee that I put on the same level as Peet’s Coffee and Tea’s Alta de Dota. This was the first of two roasts they sent me to try out. Now that I’ve had some time to really get to know the second roast they sent me, once again, Superba Coffee has surpassed my expectations.

I’ll start off with this: I don’t like Colombian coffees. Until recently, I have never had a Colombian coffee that I even thought was drinkable. This is a tremendous shame and irony, because Colombian coffee, the world over, (with much thanks to really clever advertising campaigns) has become synonymous with “good coffee.” It’s highly marketable and is one of Colombia’s chief exports, if not the chief export.

Why is it so popular and marketable?

Probably because it’s considerably cheaper than coffees from other regions. This, of course, leads huge American coffee and food service corporations (like Folger’s, Hills Brothers, McDonald’s, Dunkin Donuts, et al) to buy a lot of it, then put a pretty low price tag on it while still making a healthy profit. And, because this coffee is so mass-market, it’s obviously not made very well; and, since it’s not made very well, it also doesn’t taste so great. The Colombian coffee that the typical consumer purchases from supermarket shelves is bland and tasteless, having little to no character or personality. At best, these coffees will provide a drinkable cup (providing, of course, that it is fresh roasted—which it most likely isn’t).

But—let’s be honest—with the charm, irresistible personality, and just the right amount of authentic ethnicity to make everyday middle-class American consumers feel comfortable, who wouldn’t want Juan Valdez and his mule, Conchita, personally and conveniently delivering fresh 100% Colombian Coffee to their kitchen pantry?

However, all of that being said, there are some Colombian coffees that taste good, that have personality, that have character, that are worth drinking. It just takes a lot of hard work to find it, and a lot of care and precision roasting to bring out the coffee’s best flavor. One such example of a really fine Colombian coffee comes from Superba Coffee.

Unfairly, I took a lot of my prejudices toward Colombian coffee into my cupping the first time I tried it—I went in with the preconceived notion that I wasn’t going to enjoy the coffee. I was expecting to encounter the aforementioned flavor profile (or lack thereof), but was shocked to find that the coffee wasn’t bland, wasn’t flavorless, wasn’t clean; that it was actually quite the opposite of all those adjectives. It was surprising—pleasantly so.

Before we get into how the coffee tasted, let’s first take a look at its story…

The folks over at Superba Coffee know as well as I do (even more so) that great-quality Colombian coffee is notoriously hard to find, which is probably why their method to source their beans is so rigorous. Not only are they concerned with the climate the coffee is grown in (they have very strict guidelines relating to the purity of the spring water supply, volcanic soil, altitudes surpassing 1600 meters, sunshine, shade, and rainfall), they also put the coffee to the test at four different stages of its life before it even hits the roaster: it’s cupped at the farm, at the mill, at the mill, and before its export. This process helps to ensure that the coffee is of the highest quality possible.

And it shows.

The first thing I noticed about the San Agustin that set it apart from its Colombian counterparts was its rich, warm, sweet aroma. It smelt of toffee and hazelnut with a faint floral subtlety. This sweetness translated well into the coffee’s flavor as it cooled down. Now, I will admit, at first the coffee did have that infamously mild flavor to it—a very tame taste immediately post brew. However, as it cooled down, my morning cuppa got a lot more interesting.

The coffee, a medium to full body, started to showcase a really powerful bittersweet chocolate—like dark chocolate—with hints of caramel and toffee (which I detected initially in the coffee’s aroma). With the fullness of its body, that chocolaty flavor actually tasted a bit more of fudge, giving the coffee a rich, full mouth-feel as it coated my tongue and palate. It was actually quite reminiscent of the earthi- or even muddiness one can find in an African or Indo-Pacific coffee. The aftertaste, again unlike most other Colombian coffees, was formidable as it left a long-lingering taste in my mouth, partly due to its low-medium acidity.

The Bottom Line

Superba Coffee’s Colombia San Agustin really did its part to change my mind about Colombian coffee. While I still maintain my position that most Colombian coffees that can easily be found on the shelves of any supermarket across the country at a really low price are awful, I have to concede that there are roasters out there who are doing wonderful things with Colombian coffee. Superba Coffee certainly is.

Category: Coffee Reviews