An April Pour-Over I Forgot I Had Already Ordered

6 min read · Updated August 2, 2026

I finally drank coffee from April in Copenhagen. Then a photo from July 2023 showed I had already had one, at a plant shop in Ballard that is gone now.

My coffee has drifted lighter over the past year, far enough that a lot of what I brew now would have tasted like tea to me a few years ago. That road leads to Copenhagen sooner or later, and it led me to April, which had been sitting on my list for a long time. I finally drank one recently and logged it as a first.

Then I went looking through Google Photos for something unrelated and found a picture of a menu board from July 2023 with april printed on two of the cards.

The photo that corrected me

The board is a slab of oak with five letterpress cards pinned to it, at Root in Ballard. One card says HANDBREW COFFEE and, underneath, no handbrew on Sunday. The other four are the pour-over list.

Two of them are April. Zewde, Ethiopia Guji, natural, tropical and jasmine and raspberry, nine dollars. El Morito, Guatemala yellow Gesha, washed, yellow kiwi and candied lemon and white grape, twenty-two dollars, with cup of excellence 2022 and april exclusive printed under the name. The remaining two are Carlos Diaz from Flowerchild at 8.50 and Nestor Lasso from Manhattan at 9.50.

I ordered the twenty-two dollar one.

Two April cards on the board at Root. July 2023.

A plant shop with a coffee bar in the back

The first visit was almost a year earlier, in August 2022. My wife and I walked into Root on 20th Ave NW because it looked like a plant shop. It was a plant shop. It also sold home goods and natural wine. At the back was a coffee counter, worked by one of the owners, Dale, who knew every lot on the board without looking.

The board that day had a card for Letty Bermudez: colombia Geisha, haribo peach and milky oolong and mango, double fermentation with thermal shock, roasted by Manhattan Coffee Roasters in Rotterdam, twelve dollars. Directly above it, a Sey at seven.

Twelve dollars was more than I had ever paid for a cup of filter coffee. It was worth it. That cup is the reason I was willing to order a twenty-two dollar one a year later.

Letty Bermudez turns out to be the name of the lot rather than the farmer. The producer is Diego Samuel Bermúdez at Finca El Paraíso in Piendamó, Cauca, and Manhattan asked him to name the lot after someone who mattered to him. He chose his youngest daughter.

August 2022, the cup that started it.

The twenty-two dollar cup during SeafoodFest

The July 2023 visit was Ballard SeafoodFest weekend. The festival ran the fourteenth through the sixteenth that year, and I had a friend in from out of town. We ended up at Root because I wanted him to see the counter in the back of the plant shop.

I got the El Morito. He got the Zewde, and told me afterward it was one of the best cups of coffee he had ever had. Mine came out with Gesha written on the side of the paper cup in marker. That is a funny thing to put on twenty-two dollars of coffee, and about the right amount of ceremony.

What El Morito is

Finca El Morito sits in Mataquescuintla, in the Guatemalan department of Jalapa, and is run by José Roberto Monterroso Pineda. In 2022 its washed Gesha took first place in the Guatemala Cup of Excellence with 91.75 points, one of three washed Geshas over 90 that year. Gesha and Pacamara are planted at the top of the farm, well above where the Bourbon and Caturra grow.

The card said cup of excellence 2022, and what that line means is that the farm placed. The winning lots went to other buyers at the auction, and April bought its own lot from the farm that season. A competition result on a cafe card is a signal about the producer, and the coffee in your cup is usually a different lot from the same hands.

April is younger than I assumed. Patrik Rolf started it in 2016 and roasts outside Copenhagen. There is a store on Pilestræde, and a second place at the 2019 World Brewers Cup on his record. The style itself is about a decade older. Tim Wendelboe opened in Oslo in 2007, Koppi started in Helsingborg the same year, and Coffee Collective opened its first Copenhagen cafe in 2008. April belongs to what came after them, which is most of what Nordic-style coffee sounds like today.

The room is still there

Root closed in October 2024. Hannah and Dale sold the business.

The address, 5000 20th Ave NW, is Homage Coffee now. New owners took the space after running Homage as a pop-up. It is still multi-roaster, with handmade ceramics on the shelves. It is my favorite coffee in Seattle, and it is where I bought the Ilse Coffee Banko Gotiti I wrote up a few weeks ago.

So the room where I first paid twelve dollars for filter coffee is the room where I now buy beans, under a different name and different owners. I got deep enough into ultra-light roasts to go looking for April, and the search pointed back at a counter I had already been standing at.

Track it in BeanBench

The only reason I can tell you any of this is that I happened to photograph a menu board. Nothing else survived. I could not have named the roaster, the farm, or the year without that picture, and I have lost plenty of good cups that I did not think to point a camera at.

In BeanBench you can log a cafe visit with the shop, the coffee, the roaster, what it cost, and whether you would order it again, then find it years later next to everything you have brewed at home. From here, read the Nordic-style coffee guide for what the style is and how to brew it, the Banko Gotiti pick for the bag from that same room, or the Nordic coffee tour if you would rather go to Copenhagen and drink April at the source.