Brewing the Funky Chicken

Sometimes I find myself purchasing a product purely because the packaging is cool.  That said, I make my living as a graphic artist - so you can understand why I might scrutinize package design a bit more than the average joe....and a package of joe is the subject at hand.

As a self-proclaimed coffee snob, I like to buy locally roasted coffees.  There's an organic food market not far from my home called Mom's (My Organic Market), and they have a nice variety of coffees roasted in Maryland and Virginia.  I frequently buy Equal Exchange coffee by the pound there - which is a fair trade coffee they sell by the pound.  It's a small batch roast coffee, and at 10 or 11 bucks a pound - it's hard to beat.

However - yesterday while picking up some beans I spotted a coffee I'd not noticed before.  The roaster was Red Rooster Coffee Roasters out of Floyd, VA - which is in far-out nowhere Southwest Virginia.  Aside from being a local small batch roaster, it was the packaging that roped me in. "Funky Chicken" is the name of the blend, under which it reads "For Medicinal Use Only"...which conjured up an involuntary chortle from me in the store.  Then I noticed they'd stamped a roast date on the bag and it was roasted just a few weeks ago...so I grabbed the bag and headed toward the register.

Upon opening the bag, I immediately noticed the beans showing a variety of different brown tones.  Small variations can sometimes just be the result of small batch roasting; it's hard to get a perfectly even roast with small batch.  However - this variation was more pronounced, indicating this was not the type of blend where a variety of beans are roasted together - but rather the type of blend where after the specific origin roasts are done, the roaster takes a scoop of this and a scoop of that, and mixes it all together.  Please note: I've never seen the inner workings of a small batch roaster - so this is purely a guess.  The smell was intoxicating - so into the grinder it went.  This was to be my morning coffee - which I normally do in a automatic drip coffee maker...and today was no different.

Back of the bag reads, "Intense flavor with plenty of body and a fruit finish."  I've had some intense coffees in my day, and I don't think that would be the word I use.  I did detect the fruity tones - Ethiopian or Tanzanian is possibly responsible for those.  Even though it's not intense, it's a really nice, mellow morning coffee with a sufficient caffeine punch.  I was not blown away, and am not rethinking the pecking order of my favorites...but it's surely nice enough to gift and I'll likely buy it again.  I'll give it a try in a pour over and pull a shot or two of espresso with it and report back if something miraculous happens.