Metropolis Coffee Company (Chicago) - Kenya Thiriku

This morning, I opened up the final bag of coffee I had picked up in Chicago back in OCTOBER.  Yes, I know it's January and this bag of whole bean goodness has been waiting since October 11th to finally see the light of day again, so here we are.

You may ask yourself, how long can a person store a sealed bag of coffee beans?  Let's ask!

While I was in Chicago, working on recordings for the next album and getting some gigs done as well, I picked up bags of coffee from several roasters and all of them have been outstanding!  Fortunately / unfortunately, I started this blog well after I had drank through all of them except for this final bag from the Metropolis Coffee Company.

Metropolis is not a coffee shop, per se.  It's a roaster that sells a wide range of coffee to large and small shops around the Chicago region (and beyond in select cities). Their storefront is small and they offer regular consumer bags of coffee (and complementary cups of coffee to try) for people wanting to grab a bag and go.

My AirBnB was about a block away from their office and on the way to the recording studio (Electrical Audio) - so I picked up a few interesting bags to try out.

I'm a fan of East African beans and medium roasting styles, so I naturally gravitated towards Kenya Thiriku.  The description says that it's "wildly aromatic, tangy, and complex like passionfruit, guava, late summer tomatoes, ginger, and lemongrass."  

Right off the top, I agree that this coffee is super fragrant and has a pleasant, ripe, fruity aromatic character.  It's so fragrant that my downstairs neighbor sent me text this morning commenting that my coffee smelled good.  That's a major endorsement!

As I'm sipping - I'm tasting sweet, dark fruit notes with a  clean, almost cleansing finish.  And yeah, I'm tasting the guava-like notes both in the front and within the finish.

In the front, it certainly has that ripe, fruity essence that's pleasant and not too sweet.  Medium roast is the way to go with this bean as a light roast would be TOO sweet and a darker roast might accidently squash some of those delicate notes found mid sip.

I didn't know anything about Thiriku bean production, so I looked around and found this fantastic site that explains the area and the process it goes through to get into your cup!

I can't help but think about the Fritz Lang film "Metropolis" (as well as the Motorhead song of the same name) when I look at this bag in the morning.  Imma dork, I know it! 

TLDR: This coffee is highly recommended.