This week’s coffee comes from Blendin Coffee Club in Texas. Weihong Zhang, who started the Blendin Coffee Club, has a Ph.D. in biochemistry. He is the kind of hard-working, smart, ambitious young man who makes America great, not again, but right now.

Finca La Mula was a coffee in his Premium Series that has sold out and the product page has unfortunately disappeared. I paid $46 for a 100 gram bag, which is enough for four cups of coffee, so the beans alone cost $11.50 per cup. Finca La Moola, indeed!

This is a Geisha coffee from Panama. The Geisha variety is all the rage because it’s very special stuff, and in my opinion it definitely deserves the hype. Of course there are so-so Geishas, but this ain’t one of them. The best Geisha I’ve had to date came from Finca Nuguo, but this Finca La Moola, er, Mula, was as good if not better.

Geisha is special because it is very “light” and clean … it tastes more like tea than coffee on the tongue, but the aftertaste is a strong, rich coffee flavor. It’s a neat thing to experience even though I don’t particularly like the taste of coffee.

These beans were roasted on January 22 so they have been “resting” around two weeks, which is perfect.

The whole beans are dark and dense and have a lovely fruity smell on the nose. I don’t know what fruit … Mr. Zhang says the final flavor notes for the brewed cup are: “Orange Blossom, White Peach, Lemon Curd,” but I don’t have that fine a nose. The beans themselves smell good though.

They are very hard to grind which is a very good sign because I remember with Finca Nuguo I had a hard time even grinding them.

Wow, the smell of the freshly ground coffee is super fruity, just a lovely aroma. I grind 28 grams of beans and sift out around eight grams of fines so that I have 20 grams of perfectly consistent grind in the end. I don’t throw out the fines of course, I just set them aside to give to the less fortunate.

Since the product page was deleted, I didn’t have Mr. Zhang’s recommended brewing recipe, so I just stuck with my tried and true: 200-degree Fahrenheit water, initial “bloom” pour of 50 ml to 30 seconds. Of course I use a hand-blown Chemex because it costs three times as much, which means it’s three times as good. It’s also important that you pronounce Chemex, “sha-may.”

Second pour to 150 ml which drains to around the 1:30 mark.

Final pour to 300 ml which drains between 2:30 and 3:00.

Look at that incredible color! Fruity, fruity on the nose, I know this is going to be good. But I’m not going to be pretentious and tell you I can taste “Orange Blossom, White Peach, Lemon Curd.”

Here’s the final 10 ounce cup. Fruity nose, super clean and light on the tongue, I instantly know it’s not only a Geisha, but a high-end Geisha, just spectacular. There is a hint of sourness, yeah yeah, “acidity,” but it’s so subtle, so faint, that it’s pleasant. And it’s a complex sour, not a bad sour (this is a running, inside joke). It’s a special coffee and a steal at $11.50 a cup (beans only), too bad it’s gone now.

I’ll have another cup tomorrow and then give away the rest of the bag since I’m not really into coffee.

There’s some more coffee on the way, so I’ll have a different cup next week to write about. But I’m not really looking forward to it since I don’t enjoy the taste of coffee. :-)