NorthStar Beans

Out of all the coffee bean stores I’ve visited in Tokyo, NorthStar Beans in Kita-Shinagawa stocks the biggest variety I have seen yet. They purportedly have over 150 beans on offer, and could be a mecca for coffee bean lovers in Japan.

It also still seems to be a bit of a hidden gem. Usually I try and find coffee bean stores by searching for コーヒー豆 (“coffee bean”) on Google Maps whenever I head out somewhere new, but this place didn’t pop up at all. It was only by chance as we were coincidentally walking towards Shinagawa station that this sign caught our eye.

From the outside it doesn’t really look like much, so we were only 50/50 on whether we should pop our heads in, but I’m really glad we did!

Inside the store is an overwhelming number of beans on display. You can choose to buy a cup of coffee made from the beans here, or buy a bag in 100g increments to take home.

It was quite hard to choose a bean, but the first thing that caught my eye as I was browsing was how many of the beans we had tried from other stores - Puer Peach and Seventh Heaven from Matsue Roasting Place, the Mocha Guji from Honey Beans, our favourite Pink Bourbon from Glitch, the Ethopian Yirgacheffe we had purchased only a couple days before from Yanaka Coffee. They even stocked wild kopi luwak beans as well.

There were a couple of other customers being served, so once they finished and we caught the staff’s attention, he was able to smoothly guide to us to a couple of his bean recommendations. He first tried to recommend us a Columbian raspberry bean - 6000 yen for 200g, which I immediately shot down and told him to give me something closer to the 2000 to 3000 yen range (well, he can’t be faulted for trying, and it did smell really good).

We settled on two 100g packs of:

• Ethopia’s G1 Maji Geisha, light roast (“medium roast” in store)
• Costa Rica’s Lactic Anaerobic Honey, light roast (“high roast” roast in store)

I put the roasts in quotations in Japanese they label it “medium roast” but what that means is actually a light roast. Confusing!

The G1 Maji Geisha had a really distinct floral scent that made us want to buy it immediately. The staff explained to us that it was fermented, which makes for quite a unique taste (the label mentions its made via “carbonic maceration”, which apparently was a technique originally used for wine).

The fanciness of this bean actually made it hard to get a nice-tasting cup of it. By no means was it bad - I quite liked the distinctive taste - but it was hard to get it to taste just straight “good” and without it being quite sour/acidic. Reading up on this fermentation process as I write this post, a thread on Reddit seems to suggest going for lower temps - which is too bad, since I only tried between 93 - 96. I had assumed that if it’s sour and a lighter roast you should try increasing the temperature, if anything.

After a couple of attempts, we ended up settling on 96°C with 12 clicks on my grinder. Even with 12 clicks, it still drained in 2mins 40s (on the fast side), but I didn’t want to go any finer than that.

As a side note, I am quite confused by how grind sizes work because my grinder (Timemore C2) is supposed to have pourovers done at 18 - 24 clicks, while I always go at 12 - 15 to try and make the pourover time to take 3 minutes. These two Reddit threads seems to suggest I should rinse my filter with a larger amount of water to get the filter paper to better stick to my V60, so I’ll have to give that a go next time and report back.

As we finished off the Geisha bean, we started on the Costa Rica bean. We did a taste test against the Geisha and the Costa Rica and I’ll say off the bat the Geisha tasted more interesting - the Costa Rica one tasted a bit more “normal” in comparison. We also did this one with 96°C with 12 clicks. But I have found Costa Rica beans to be a tad too acidic for my taste in the past, so this one in comparison made for quite a smooth cup so it’s a win in that sense as well.