About the Café
Although I have a Kaldi’s Coffee closer to my house, I decided to try the original café at the corner of DeMun and Northwood Avenues just west of Forest Park. Kaldi’s Coffee started here in 1994, making it one of the longer-lived coffee roasters of the third wave coffee movement in St. Louis. Since then, they have expanded to 13 locations in St. Louis and Columbia, Missouri, and Atlanta, Georgia, as well as a roastery on Gratiot Street in St. Louis.
The name “Kaldi” refers to the legendary 9th century Ethiopian goat herder who discovered the coffee plant. Kaldi noticed his goats acting strangely after consuming the berries of a coffee plant, frolicking and playing rather than their usual docile nature, or so the story goes. While this is all probably apocryphal and there are competing claims to coffee origins in the Arabian Peninsula, I digress. It’s a fun story for a local coffee roaster and fitting for the prancing goat on their logo.
The Cafe itself is located on a boulevard street across from a park and an elementary school. The inside is segmented into the counter/merchandise area and a small dining area with a handful of tables separated by a wall and a hallway. The sidewalk also had ample table space and seemed inviting in warmer weather, but not so much in February.
The Coffee
- Name of Roast: El Salvador La Cumbre Red Bourbon
- Bean Origin: Santa Ana, El Salvador
- Elevation: 1,525 MASL
- Drank at: Kaldis De Mun
- Preparation: Pour Over
- Roast Color: 3/6
- Price: $$ (2/4)
- Aroma Notes: Fruity, Light, Floral
- Flavor Notes: Citrus, Slight acidity, hint of caramel, some berry
- Notes from the bag: Honeycrisp Apple, Almond, Fruit Cake, Butterscotch
The El Salvador La Cumbre Red Bourbon is part of Kaldi’s relationship series which builds productive partnerships with coffee farmers in a similar vein to Fair Trade coffees. These relationships allow Kaldis to work with farmers year after year to help cultivate premium quality coffee and provide the farmers with predictability and financial assurance. If this brew is any indication, those relationships have paid dividends.
I don’t have much to say about this coffee other than wow. It is a bright, satisfying, and balanced brew with a medium bodied texture that keeps inviting sip after sip to linger on more complex notes. It is as much an invigorating coffee to start the day as it is an afternoon break. Overall, a solid effort by Kaldi’s Coffee that I hope foreshadows the quality of the rest of their single origin selections.
Rating: 9/10
Coffee By The Mile 