Revisiting Velton’s Bonsai Blend

 

 

 

 

• Posted by Wakeknot
• Thu, 04/05/2012 - 12:03

Revisiting Velton’s Bonsai Blend

I have blogged in the past about Velton’s Bonsai Blend.  It is no secret that I really like it.  Somehow, however, with all the new coffees on Roaste.com I have ordered more coffee from Velton’s, but have not reordered the Bonsai Blend until now.   Each time I ordered I decided to try something I had never had before.  I finally decided the time had come and placed my order for more.

When it came I learned some lessons from the last time.  Since it really hit its stride around day 7 and stayed at peak that whole second week I did not even open the bag until day 6.  I am glad I did, because even from day 6 to day 7 the coffee improved quite a bit.  

I also had found that it was amazing on my Pavoni lever last time and I finished a shot of it on the lever just about an hour ago and I am still enjoying it – that is one of my signs of a great coffee – when it stays with you and you do not want to eat or drink anything else for a while for fear of washing away the last vestiges of the taste.  It is just luscious on the lever.

I had taken that last time to push me to try lower doses and found I liked it best at 14.5 grams or so on my pump machine, too, but that is where things have changed this time.  I like it at that low dose, but I like it even better at a more middle of the road/slightly high dose of 18.5 grams.  It gets a little more body and is a little more syrupy at the higher dose, but it maintains the clarity that lets you enjoy the subtlety of the coffee.  I wonder now if the reason my favorite last time was the lower doses was the fact that I started out at the higher doses and with time went to the lower doses, which were better, but perhaps I should have tried going back to the higher doses at that point.  I wonder if I was comparing 14.5 gram doses at day 8 with 18.5 gram doses at day 5.  Since the coffee changes over those days it could be that the beans were better not that the dose was better.

It also, is, of course, true that coffee is a crop.  No blend stays exactly the same throughout the year so even though a blend has name X that does not mean it will always be exactly the same.  This is something many of the 3rd wave roasters are really trying to get across.  So it is possible that at that time the coffee did shine at its best at the lower dose and this time the higher one fits better.

Either way it is a very enjoyable coffee then and now and one I am not going to wait quite so long to order again next time.