Split from Vivace Espresso thread

TomC wrote:One of Schomer's main roasters from years past, and a veteran roaster in her own right who's trained several notable modern popular roasters is Jen St Hilaire, who's opening up a larger cafe featuring her coffee soon in the bay area. She roasts darker than most 3rd wave roasters, but I'm still excited to see how it all turns out.

I pulled the trigger on Scarlet City Roaster's Warp Drive espresso blend and their organic Ethiopia Amaro Natural, they should be arriving in a day or two. I'm interested to try out these coffees.

I read Jen St Hilaire's bio on their site and she also was involved in Andrew Barnett's Ecco Caffe, and since I've really enjoyed Ecco Caffe's coffee (and by extension Linea Caffe's coffee) I'm pretty sure I'll like the Scarlet City roasts.

Its pretty good stuff, last time I had her espresso blend it was a few years ago. I would rate much closer to Vivace than anything else.

I ordered the coffee on the fifth, it was roasted and shipped priority mail on the seventh, and it was on my doorstep today, the eighth. The shipping charges were $6.50. The coffee smells good, too bad I had so many cups of coffee already today, the Yemen red cherry Haraaz that I picked up in Feb and roasted this week was just tasting too good today. I want to put a few days on the Warp Drive anyway before pulling it on the Factory.

I broke into the Scarlet City Roaster's organic Ethiopia Amaro Natural this morning at breakfast, deciding to break out my Vac Pot and brew up a pot for a change. Here's a shot of the coffee before grinding, it smells good and it's roasted on the darker side, you can see some oils on the surface.



I should have adjusted my grinder a bit coarser and also given the ground coffee more time to sit out and outgass as I had a hard time keeping the bloom inside the pot. I brewed 8 cups in my Yama for two minutes before pulling it from the heat.



Nothing wrong with the coffee, though. Once I'd given it a chance to cool so that I could properly taste it (vac pot coffee comes out very hot), it was sweet with round blueberry notes and a nice, silky mouthfeel. I enjoyed this coffee very much with some sourdough waffles.

Last night I pulled two shots for myself of the Scarlet City Warp Drive espresso roast on my Gaggia Factory. I also fixed Americanos for other members of my family, since I was firing up the machine and warming it up.



The roast is fairly dark, with visible oils, but it produces a very nice, thick crema, stone fruit sweetness, and a pleasant edge. It also had a long, satisfying aftertaste. I think if you like more traditional espresso with darker roasts such as Vivace or Linea Caffe you'll enjoy this coffee.



I'll need to pull some more shots of this to really see if I nailed it.

I see from Scarlet City's Instagram Feed that they're opening their new espresso bar August 23rd, 2014 in Emeryville. From the pictures, it looks pretty nice, even though Emeryville's not in my back yard I'm tempted to make a trip up there or stop by if and when work takes me to the general vicinity.

Oh, and I'm about to grind up some of their Ethiopia Amaro right now on the Lido 2 to brew in my Impress mug so I can stay awake at my afternoon meeting.