When you’re drinking coffee named after a mesh wire size, you’ve reached that level of serious entanglement that some might call obsession. Stumptown’s Panama Duncan Estate Mesh 15 ($23) embraces its intimate small-batch story in the way that really serious (and expensive) products should. Richardo Koyner, a fourth-generation coffee grower on the Kotowa farm in northern Panama, selected this estate coffee from the slopes of Volcán Barú in Boquete de Chiriqui. Mesh 15 is the wire size he used when sorting the batch, of which 90% is a smaller bean called a peaberry — a rare mutation that is only a single seed (rather than the normal double seed) and is therefore more round. These beans roast better due to their shape, resulting in a more uniform, intense cup of coffee. The beans were then conditioned three months in a temperature- and humidity-controlled warehouse to ward against early aging.
So what the hell does it taste like? We haven’t had the honor yet, to be honest, but Stumptown tells us it’s crisp and citric, with flavors of “butterscotch, lime and toasted filbert”. That’s a damn interesting cup of coffee, and one that we’ll take over something shat by a wild cat any day.
