On the edge of Yokohama’s Chinatown is Tsukikoya Coffee Roaster. They have a wide variety of beans available to buy, plus you can buy a cup of any of them too.
As we spent a while sniffing the beans and considering our options, the owner popped his head out and gave us little paper cups. There’s a thermos sat next to each bean, and it turns out you can also sample some filter coffee from each of the beans as well.
This was actually a big selling point for me - I haven’t seen that in store that sells coffee beans before. Confusingly though, it seems to be a bit contingent on whether you get handed the paper cups, as a couple that came in after us weren’t offered them.
The beans are all single origin, and range from about 2000 yen for 200g on the cheaper side, to about 3500 yen on the more expensive side. We ended up picking up 100g each of two varieties of a bean from Columbia (Pink Bourbon and TABI) that are processed using the “thermal shock” method. It’s on the pricey end, but the samples we tried tasted really good so we had to. It’s hard to describe, but they’re a light roast yet not at all sour or acidic. It just has a really distinctive taste.
If you buy 200g, you get a free cup of coffee too! For some reason though the cup we got didn’t taste as good as the sample from the thermos. But when we made a cup at home the next day it tasted pretty darn good (grinder at 15 clicks, 93°C).
The Pink Bourbon variety we bought was also our favourite bean when we went to Glitch Coffee - although theirs is “honey processed” instead. The Glitch one had a strong whiff of mandarin oranges, while the thermal shock one was distinctly peachy. Does that difference come from the method used to process the bean I wonder, or is it coming from the actual bean itself (if they’re farmed in different places, maybe)?
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