Boom Chain #6
Price range: $25.00 through $114.00
If Corduroy is our attempt to combine coffees we think play well together as espresso, Boom Chain is our new(ish) pursuit of tasty, loud, mostly fruit-forward coffees and combinations of coffees for filter brewing.
Some folks will tell you that blending—whether you’re talking coffee, or whisky, or wine, or another beverage—is an art form. And while it sounds a bit snooty to say it out loud, we get it. All of the blends in our lineup serve a particular purpose, with a general flavor profile that we try to keep consistent by blending different coffees over the course of the year. Taking this approach is a necessity, as green coffee is seasonal, with varying degrees of perishability. If you buy a years’ worth of beans for your blend in the hopes of keeping it perfectly consistent, come month 8, or 5, or sometimes even 3, the blend ends up dropping off in quality. Coffees age out, becoming woody or dirty in flavor, or sometimes just loses their pizzazz. And so we cup through coffee samples throughout the year in order to find fresh, sweet stock that serve the purposes we need them to.
Again, while our blending to this point has been purpose driven, with particular outcomes in mind, Boom Chain is the opposite. We see it as an exercise in experimental bombast and awesomeness, combining mostly fruit-forward, sometimes uniquely processed, coffees with volume knobs that go to 11. Like Corduroy, Boom Chain iterations come and go, but they will always offer a big, flavorful cup.
Boom Chain #6 is an equal parts combination a natural process coffee from the Banko Chelchele station in Gedeb, Yirgacheffe, Ethiopia, an anaerobic natural from Papua New Guinea, and a coffee fermented with Lychee juice from Colombia. It’s freightening just to write out that description! But the flavors work: the Yirg provides darker fruit tones and a tea-like structure, the PNG adds deep chocolate notes and a range of tropical fruit flavors, and the lychee co-ferment adds–you guessed it–lychee accents. (It can also sometimes present as a dank, cannabis kind of thing as well, but the sample we had on the cupping table was very lychee-forward.) Put them together and you’ve got a cup full of tastiness.
—–
note on the series: in the days of long logging in Maine, loggers would use snowmelt and Maine’s extensive river system to float logs from the depths of the woods to civilizations and sawmills. At various stages of the river drive, as it was called, logs would need to be counted and sorted, as the property of numerous logging outfits mixed and mingled as the drive made its way south. This sorting was done at catch-alls called booms, which were themselves floating barriers comprised of logs, wood and chains extending across a water body. Boom Chain is our own seasonal “catch-all.”
- Location: Papua New Guinea, Ethiopia, Colombia
- Elevation: 1700-2200 MASL
- Varietal: heirloom, kent, castillo
- Process: natural, anaerobic natural and washed co-ferment
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
If Corduroy is our attempt to combine coffees we think play well together as espresso, Boom Chain is our new(ish) pursuit of tasty, loud, mostly fruit-forward coffees and combinations of coffees for filter brewing.
Some folks will tell you that blending—whether you’re talking coffee, or whisky, or wine, or another beverage—is an art form. And while it sounds a bit snooty to say it out loud, we get it. All of the blends in our lineup serve a particular purpose, with a general flavor profile that we try to keep consistent by blending different coffees over the course of the year. Taking this approach is a necessity, as green coffee is seasonal, with varying degrees of perishability. If you buy a years’ worth of beans for your blend in the hopes of keeping it perfectly consistent, come month 8, or 5, or sometimes even 3, the blend ends up dropping off in quality. Coffees age out, becoming woody or dirty in flavor, or sometimes just loses their pizzazz. And so we cup through coffee samples throughout the year in order to find fresh, sweet stock that serve the purposes we need them to.
Again, while our blending to this point has been purpose driven, with particular outcomes in mind, Boom Chain is the opposite. We see it as an exercise in experimental bombast and awesomeness, combining mostly fruit-forward, sometimes uniquely processed, coffees with volume knobs that go to 11. Like Corduroy, Boom Chain iterations come and go, but they will always offer a big, flavorful cup.
Boom Chain #6 is an equal parts combination a natural process coffee from the Banko Chelchele station in Gedeb, Yirgacheffe, Ethiopia, an anaerobic natural from Papua New Guinea, and a coffee fermented with Lychee juice from Colombia. It’s freightening just to write out that description! But the flavors work: the Yirg provides darker fruit tones and a tea-like structure, the PNG adds deep chocolate notes and a range of tropical fruit flavors, and the lychee co-ferment adds–you guessed it–lychee accents. (It can also sometimes present as a dank, cannabis kind of thing as well, but the sample we had on the cupping table was very lychee-forward.) Put them together and you’ve got a cup full of tastiness.
—–
note on the series: in the days of long logging in Maine, loggers would use snowmelt and Maine’s extensive river system to float logs from the depths of the woods to civilizations and sawmills. At various stages of the river drive, as it was called, logs would need to be counted and sorted, as the property of numerous logging outfits mixed and mingled as the drive made its way south. This sorting was done at catch-alls called booms, which were themselves floating barriers comprised of logs, wood and chains extending across a water body. Boom Chain is our own seasonal “catch-all.”
- Location: Papua New Guinea, Ethiopia, Colombia
- Elevation: 1700-2200 MASL
- Varietal: heirloom, kent, castillo
- Process: natural, anaerobic natural and washed co-ferment